Saturday, September 13, 2008

One eleven

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

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:54 PM

    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.

    Take care of yourself.

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  2. 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.

    Thanks for your kind words.

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  3. Don't know if you've seen this, but here is the list of those who perished in the accident:

    http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/09/names_of_victims_in_chats.php

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  4. 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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