Union Station, waiting for the University-Spadina train, Queen’s Park station bound. Saturday, around 5.

A reasonably fashionable elderly woman walks up to me, clutching her purse. “Excuse me, which way does the train come from?”

I take off my headphones, point to our right, “that way.”

“And it goes North?”

I point to our left, “yes, that way.”

She breathes a sigh of relief and pulls the rest of her composure together. “You know,” she says, “I haven’t been on the subway since…” she scrunches her face, looks upwards, searching for the date, “1965!”

My eyebrows raise, my eyes widen, I nod with a “wow! That’s crazy!”

She tells me a story of how she is going to the museum.

I can’t believe she isn’t completely flabbergasted by what our transit system is now compared to what it used to be. How can she remain so calm and composed? Isn’t everything so shocking? If I was in her position, I would be ogling everything around me with extreme confusion.

She sits next to me on the subway, but has stopped chatting, so my headphones went back on. I wish I could ask her how she’s so calm, but I somehow can’t even get myself to do that. When I get off at Queen’s Park, I say goodbye to the strong woman, but she seems to stir in confusion at that. I don’t look back.

I emerge into a crowd of mostly pretty goofy looking high schoolers who have come to the area for the Marijuana March.

//jessica