5:16 Northeast Corridor Express

At first I couldn’t see them, at least only one of them, a 250-pound woman exhorting another onto the train. “Just lift your foot, you got it.” She said. One of the two guys in the 5-seat cluster gets up, offers, his seat, then the other one.

In comes another 250-pound white woman, blind, in a bright pink matching shirt and trousers. Then another big one, this one black, in day glo kelly green coordinates, with a cane. They smell of urine, and carry cuisinarts in blue bags and other parcels. They thank the very polite men profusely, and then keep talking loudly. Some commuters leave the car, their commuter silence, so precious yet so often violated by cellphone conversations, now thrown in the street and trampled.

And what do they talk about so loudly and incessantly on their way home?
Of their victimhood (“they should have hydraulics to lower the trains down like kneeling buses”, “That man should have told us these (round-trip excursion) tickets weren’t valid during rush hour! $78 to go to New York and back”).
About human nature: "Everybody talks about how people are rude but I see so much decency, so many truly kind people, those nice men..." which was answered by a round of profound "mmhmms"
About how rich people are brought low by death (“It don’t matter how many pairs of shoes you got when the time comes.. You could have one foot in a shoe, but when the time comes…”)