Commuting should not be dangerous. Sky-diving is dangerous. Wrestling alligators is dangerous. Coming home from work should not be life-threatening.
Yesterday is still a blur in my mind. I travel to downtown LA on Fridays and always take the train, always. This Friday morning my train seemed light; must be summer vacations are just a distant memory.
I was hoping for an early day so I could be home to cook dinner. My darling companion always insists we eat out but I wanted something a bit healthier for tonight. If I could get the 111 train back to Simi Valley life would be great. I missed the 111 and caught the 113, a short fifty minutes later, and for me life is still, well, life. Not so for a number of my fellow commuters that did make the 111. At 4:23 it hit, head on, a fast moving freight less than ten minutes from my stop.
Every news site has photos and I've searched the photos for people I recognized. Not knowing their names doesn't mean I don't know them. Was the lady who rides her bike to the station then takes the bike with her to Chatsworth and rides to work OK? I just spoke with her before we boarded the train in the morning. We laughed about the dangers of riding with crazy drivers. What about the young girl training to be a makeup artist or the many others I've seen and talked with?
I won't even go into why I wasn't on that train. I may never understand that.
Update: Though it deeply saddens me, here is a list of the fatalities from Friday's accident, especially when the latest news is the engineer might have been texting right before the crash.
Passenger fatalities on train 111
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Wow, that would have me tearing my hair out just thinking about that. Even if I don't really know you (well, I guess I know you in the way you know those other riders you see) I'm still glad to hear you're okay.
ReplyDeleteTake care of yourself.
el chavo, you are so right. That's how I feel about those other riders, like the blogs I read; just little bits of info into their lives.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind words.
Don't know if you've seen this, but here is the list of those who perished in the accident:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/09/names_of_victims_in_chats.php
So glad you didn't ride that train. Just wish no one had ridden it that day. So many, many lives changed forever. Just breaks my heart.
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