I was already home in bed on Tuesday night when the train from Washington D.C. to New York Penn Station derailed outside Philadelphia. I’d spent the day in Washington, being interviewed by Jeff Brown for PBS NewsHour, in a library, and then talking with Kojo Naamdi, who has a show on WAMU radio studio. A linguist named Cynthia Gordon was also on the show, and I was so relieved that she did not attack me as a benighted prescriptionist. A woman named Christina, who had a nice wide smile, chauffeured me around, past gardens and landmarks, stopping at the Martin Luther King Memorial so that I could have a look around before she dropped me off at Union Station.

I had a ticket for Train No. 2172, leaving at 4 PM. I headed for the quiet car and scored a window seat, in a sneaky kind of way. A man had stopped at that seat, but then continued up toward the front of the car, so I slung my bag onto it. The man in the seat behind me said, “I think that seat is taken.” I said, “I don’t see anyone.” You have to leave something on the seat to stake your claim to it, right? I did not look up as the man came back to claim his seat, and he took the aisle seat behind me, next to his defender. I suppose they exchanged looks, shrugs. Maybe someone’s lips formed the word “bitch.” Oh, well. Can I help it if I like a window seat?

The train slowed down somewhere along the way, and there was an announcement about signal problems. That was when I looked out the window and thought, Trains sometimes derail. I always have thoughts of doom when an airplane takes off—lately, I’ve thought, Well, if the plane crashes, my book sales will soar—but it’s rare that I experience anything but joy when I board a train. We sped up again, and after a while I lurched through the quiet car and the not-so-quiet car behind it to the cafe for a beer. I was struck by the sight of the rows and rows of businessmen, with only an occasional well-dressed woman. I asked the man running the cafe, “Is this a good job?” I thought it looked like a great job: a galley kitchen on a moving train? Give me that job! He said yes: “It’s a government job—good pension.” I asked if he’d had to work his way up to the cafe. “Ten years,” he said.

The train arrived in Penn Station at about seven o’clock, and the conductor announced that there would be a change of crew, so passengers remaining on the train should keep their tickets out. I detrained, maneuvered my suitcase onto the escalator, and wheeled it home. I always feel lucky that I live within walking distance of Penn Station—I can go anywhere. The next morning, seeing the news, I felt even luckier. We were all lucky—passengers, conductors, engineers, with or without window seats and government pensions. We made it home.