I Wish I Had

I can’t stop thinking about something I saw on the metro last week. First, though, a short description might help. A metro train has many cars, and each car has multiple sets of doors, each set being on both sides of the cars (for use depending on which side the platform is at various stops). Lengthwise, there are 3-5 rows of seats between sets of doors with a center aisle. Got all that?

On the metro

 Now picture this: I was seated next to the window with my back to a set of doors, so there were four rows of seats in front of me, a set of doors, and five more rows of seats until the next set of doors.

At the Amstel Station, all doors open automatically, and because it is also a train station, the metro waits for a longer time before all doors close. That’s where it happened.

The metro was not completely full of people, but I did have a seatmate, which, as you will see, probably denied me the displeasure of an embarrassing memory. We all sat patiently for the minute or so the metro waited at the Amstel Station. (One minute is a virtual eternity at a metro stop. The usual time a door remains open is about 12 seconds.) If you’ve ever ridden public transportation, you’ve seen the same faces—loads looking at their smart phones, a few nodding off or in rhythm to their iPods, some thumbing through newspapers, and the rest staring blankly. Me? I was watching them.

The view from a window seat

That’s when two boys about 13 years old burst through the second set of open doors in front of me, one chasing the other. I got the immediate impression that the lead boy had done something the one chasing him didn’t like. It seemed harmless enough. It was loud. I t was conspicuous. It was very un-Dutch. One caught the other at the set of doors nearest me and slammed to the floor. If it hadn’t already gone too far, it did then. It wasn’t particularly violent by American standards, but in Dutch culture it was truly outrageous.

Here’s the thing: no one moved. Everyone watched in stunned amazement, but no one—not a single soul—moved a muscle to help or stop them or intervene in any way. Oh man, as the kids used to say: that aine how I roll.

I weighed my options, and if not for the extreme effort needed to remove my large presence from the window seat on a Dutch metro train after asking my seatmate to move, I might have made things a whole lot different. I couldn’t get at them fast enough to make myself look foolish. I wanted to though…oh, I wanted to…

Typical metro platform

“Here!” I would say, grabbing the boy on top by his puffy coat as I yanked his hiney skyward. “What’s wrong with you? Have you no sense of civility? Have you no self-control? Have you any manners?”

“And, you!” I’d say to the one left on the floor. “”I don’t know what you did to him, but take a lesson—whatever it was, he didn’t like it. Now set your bottoms in a seat and behave!”

Instead, I watched them like everybody else. Puffy coat let the other one go long enough for him to run out of the car. I watched Puffy follow him onto the southbound train on the next track, where, I suspect, an encore performance was about to begin.

That’s how it is—here. I cannot help but think that in Wake Forest or almost anywhere in North Carolina, that someone would have done something. I’m not saying they should have (OK yes I am), but I am saying they would have.

Shoot, I wish I had.