It became so hot that it was all I could do to breathe
For years, I have shied away from boarding trains. I didn’t even want to take short trips with my kids, on their field trips. I would suffer through the excursion, and pretend I liked it for their sake. Then one day, my mother asked me to go with her. She wanted to go into the city, and we had to take the train. All the memories of the trip my best friend and I took, came flooding back. I remembered how the first six hours were spent in air conditioning so cold that I was shivering. Mom had asked for a blanket and she sat there huddled beneath it, and still visibly shaken. I asked if something could be done with the air conditioning. I was told it wouldn’t quit running. I worried about my mom. She was almost ninety and if she got sick, someone was going to pay. After six hours, I saw mom throw off the blankets and tell me she was feeling warm. I thought it was getting warmer too, but I also thought maybe I was just going into shock before freezing to death. Everyone was throwing their blankets to the side. Two hours later, everyone was sweating. It became so hot that it was all I could do to breathe. I asked the same man who had answered about the air conditioning, why the heat was on? He told me that when the HVAC tech fixed the air conditioning, he wired something wrong. Instead of air conditioning, we now had heating, and nothing would change until we got to our next stop. That’s where we got off.
Leave a Reply