There was an eclectic collection of people sharing the train that Labor Day morning, the sort of assortment that made Maria and me joke that if the train suddenly stopped on a tropical island, we already had the cast. We weren't lost. We knew exactly where we were going. But looking around the car, Lost seemed like a pretty good description of the company.
Oddly enough, the tropical-island part of the joke wasn't far from my mind either.
Labor Day began with humidity.
The remnants of Hurricane Marie had brought Southern California plenty of moisture. It had rained much of Sunday, but by Monday the rain was mostly gone, leaving behind heavy, damp air that Southern California usually doesn't know what to do with. The moment we stepped out of the car at the San Dimas Metro station, I felt it.
For a moment, I wasn't in San Dimas anymore.
I was back in Saint Kitts.
I spent about two years living in the Caribbean, including roughly a year in Saint Kitts, and there is something about tropical humidity that the body remembers before the mind does. It is not merely heat. Southern California knows heat. This was moisture hanging in the air, settling against your skin and making even an ordinary walk feel vaguely tropical.
At the time, I didn't realize that Saint Kitts was going to follow me through much of our Labor Day excursion.
We had no particularly ambitious plan. We got to the station around 10 in the morning and decided to take the train to South Pasadena, walk around, find someplace for lunch and see where the day went. That is one of the pleasures I have discovered about taking Metro: not every trip needs to be about getting somewhere important.
Sometimes the ride itself is the point.
Labor Day also meant weekend rules, including free parking at the station. Then there was the fare. With our senior status—and I still find the phrase senior citizen slightly ridiculous when applied to me—the trip cost 35 cents.
Thirty-five cents from San Dimas to South Pasadena.
It is difficult to complain about that.
I've become increasingly comfortable using the train to get around Los Angeles. In fact, while sitting aboard the train in San Dimas, I pulled out my phone, opened SeatGeek and bought tickets for the Dodgers game that evening. So I already knew that South Pasadena wasn't going to be the end of my rail travels for the day. By the time Labor Day was over, I would make four separate train trips.
People sometimes tell me they are afraid of riding Metro. I understand that perception, but I also think that if you believe riding a train from San Dimas into Los Angeles constitutes genuine danger, you probably haven't spent much time around actual danger.
Metro can certainly be interesting.
You share the train with everybody. Occasionally that means knowing when not to make eye contact, when to move to another part of the car and when simply to mind your own business. Riding public transportation exposes you to a cross section of humanity that you don't encounter sealed inside your own automobile.
Our particular cross section that morning was what had prompted the Lost comparison in the first place.
Then the doors opened in South Pasadena, and we stepped back into the humidity.
South Pasadena was quiet. It was Labor Day, after all, and many of the businesses were closed. We walked several blocks from the station, eventually reaching Fremont Avenue near the post office, where we found a place called Piccadilly Grace.
There was that word again: Piccadilly.
And suddenly Saint Kitts came rushing back for the second time that morning.
In Basseterre, the capital of Saint Kitts, there is a famous meeting place called the Circus. At its center stands the Berkeley Memorial clock, surrounded by the traffic of downtown. When I lived there, if I needed to meet a client or arrange to connect with a contractor coming onto the island, the Circus was the kind of landmark everyone understood.
We'll meet at the Circus.
No elaborate directions necessary.
One of my favorite places nearby was an upstairs, open-air restaurant overlooking the activity below. The restaurants occupying those spaces may change, but I remember the experience: sitting on a veranda in the Caribbean heat, ceiling fans moving the humid air, having breakfast with a client at nine in the morning with an omelet and a cup of hot coffee.
Yes, hot coffee.
I have never understood why hot weather should prevent anyone from drinking hot coffee.
Now, decades and thousands of miles away, I was sitting outside Piccadilly Grace in South Pasadena on a humid morning, drinking another cup of hot black coffee.
Travel sometimes produces connections that would be impossible to plan.
Piccadilly Grace has a Mediterranean influence, and our lunch turned out to be excellent. Maria had a breakfast croissant sandwich, which she thoroughly enjoyed. I had a cup of turkey chili and black coffee, and we shared the hummus plate.
The hummus itself had an interesting orange color, apparently from carrot blended into it, along with seasoning that gave it a little more character than the standard version. It came with warm flatbread—somewhere between pita and naan—along with marinated olives, cucumber and tomatoes. Everything was fresh, simple and very good.
The service matched the food. You order inside and they bring everything to your table, and our meal arrived quickly. Everyone was friendly and attentive without making a production of it.
We sat outside, where there was just enough breeze to make the humidity pleasant.
And again, I thought about the Caribbean.
There are meals that are memorable because they are spectacular, and there are meals that become memorable because of where your mind travels while you're eating them. This was the latter. A little café in South Pasadena had somehow connected itself to breakfasts in Basseterre and coffee in the Caribbean.
Eventually we walked back to the Metro station and paid another 35 cents for the trip home.
As we reached the platform, the train was already there. We hurried toward the last car just as the doors were closing. The operator saw us standing outside and reopened them long enough for us to climb aboard.
A small kindness, but one I appreciated.
The air-conditioned train felt especially good after walking through the humidity. The return trip supplied another assortment of Metro characters, including a gentleman whose behavior suggested he was struggling with mental illness and who, for reasons known only to him, was traveling with a watermelon. He briefly tried to engage me.
There are moments on public transportation when the wisest response is simply to look elsewhere and continue with your day.
So I did.
Nothing happened. The train rolled east. The watermelon continued on its mysterious journey. We eventually arrived back in San Dimas.
And that was our Labor Day afternoon.
No airport. No hotel reservation. No rental car. No carefully constructed itinerary. We drove a few minutes to the Metro station, paid 35 cents, rode to another town, walked through neighborhoods we don't normally walk through, found a restaurant we'd never visited and had a very good lunch.
Yet somehow, for part of the day, I also traveled back to Saint Kitts.
That may be what I increasingly enjoy about these little excursions. A day trip doesn't have to be grand to qualify as travel. You don't have to cross an ocean. Sometimes you merely need to leave the car behind and give yourself permission not to know exactly what comes next.
Get on the train. Pick a stop. Walk around.
Have lunch somewhere you've never eaten before.
And pay attention to what the humidity reminds you of.
For 35 cents, you never know how far you might travel.
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