a spaceman on the subway on a sunday

this evening, i found a tiny LEGO spaceman on the subway. and it instantly brightened my mood by a few hundred lumens...

i was on my way home from my parents’ house. i finished the room over the course of the morning and early afternoon today, putting stuff back where it belonged, sorting through boxes of my things and throwing out plenty of magazines. then i spent a couple of hours scrubbing sinks and toilets, laundering towels, mopping the kitchen floor and straightening up because i wanted to make sure the first thing my mother has to do when she gets home isn’t housework.

when i was through, and when my back began to call out for an end to the manual labour, and when i had reached my paternal-tolerance limit, i packed up my things and headed home. i was exhausted and feeling rather cranky, my body was aching all over, and i thus started to whip up a nice, frothy, bitter internal dialogue peppered with plenty of expletives and sighs.

sunday nights in november are quite quiet and beautiful, though. so, even though i had to tote two bags and my big knapsack a couple of blocks, then wait at the deserted bus stop by the junior-high school for nearly 15 minutes, i was able to very slowly unwind and unclench amid the colourful carpet of leaves and patches of dark, smoky clouds as i watched the sun set over the local library.

there were only two other people, plus the driver, on my bus as it headed to the subway. not unusual, really, given that i was heading downtown when most of the world would have been going in the opposite direction. and i was grateful for the near-solitude. i was so irritated internally that i knew i’d have no patience if anything remotely stressful or annoying or frustrating or stupid went down. “just let me get home in peace so i can eat my leftover pasta, put on my pyjamas and sit on the couch,” i thought.

the subway station was just as pleasantly vacant as the bus had been. i got on, and there was only one other person on my car – a lanky, geeky-looking young guy, maybe 18, with glasses and an mp3 player that was fully occupying his attention. one stop later, a young woman in her 20s got on, sat down about a third of the car away from me, and opened a tupperware container to take out a big sandwich. she checked between the slices of bread – perhaps someone else had packed it and she was looking for poison cloves? – then began eating.

we three remained the only people on that car for the duration of my ride.

well, we three... and one tiny, white LEGO spaceman.

i was in the middle of some imagined argument in my head – you know the kind, where you’re thinking about what you’re going to say to so-and-so about that thing he or she did that ticked you off, and then what they’ll have the nerve to say back, and how you’ll shoot back about this AND that AND the other thing... to the point that the entire maelstrom plays itself out in your imagination, complete with physiological effects like an increased heart rate and elevated blood pressure, as though it’s actually happening – when i took a breath and looked to my left.

i don’t know why i looked to my left, but i did. and i don’t know why i hadn’t noticed the little abandoned spaceman before – lying on his back on the floor of the car, arms outstretched as if to say “pick me up!” – but i would imagine it might have something to do with that rage haze i’d been carefully cultivating.

when i spotted the little spaceman, i looked to see if mp3 guy or sandwich girl had seen him, but both were way too far away. i paused for a moment – i’m not really one to pick up random items off the subway floor (unless it’s a penny) – and then moved my bag off my lap, got up, reached down and plucked the spaceman from his plight.

as a child, i LOVED playing with LEGO. back in the 1970s and ‘80s, LEGO was pretty much just a big box of different-coloured blocks of assorted sizes, along with an instruction book that had blueprints for how to make stuff. there were LEGO men, to be sure, but they were basically all identical save for the colours of their pants or shirts. i would spend hours building houses, forts, castles and spaceships, and one of my best christmases was the year i received the LEGO police station – with tiny LEGO officers! – which i carefully built over the course of boxing day.

all this to say: LEGO and me? oh, yeah, we go way back.

when i returned to my seat, checking to see if my car-mates had noticed my reconnaissance mission (they hadn’t), i examined my new little friend. he seemed surprisingly clean, as though maybe he’d only just fallen out of someone’s pocket or bag and hadn’t yet been subjected to excess transit grime. he was wearing a white uniform with black gloves (read: the pinchers that pass for hands in LEGOland) and a bulky, sci-fi looking helmet. (note: i would come to discover later, after i got home and after much googling, that what i had found was, in fact, a LEGO Clone Trooper.)

suddenly, the hurricane in my brain stopped cold and all of my attention was on this thumb-sized little character – how did he get on the subway? how long had he been lying there? why hadn’t anybody picked him up? was some child somewhere realizing right that second that he’d gone missing? what kind of spaceman was he? and from what kind of fancy-ass LEGO set had he come?

as i dreamed up his back story, i played with his little arms and legs, moving them into different positions and rotating his vice-like little hands. for a few minutes, i was nine again.

then i thought: i need to pose him.

the subway car was almost empty, mp3 guy and sandwich girl would probably think what i was doing was cute and funny and not weird, so why not?

first, i tried standing him on the ledge behind the adjacent seats, but the subway’s rocking movement sent the spaceman tumbling almost immediately. i tried leaning him up against the wall of the car, but encountered the same balance problem.

what to do?

bingo.

i moved his legs so that he was in a seated position, then sat him right in the middle of the seat next to me. as though he were my traveling companion. there he was, this wee, sprightly white spaceman sitting in the middle of a comparatively enormous, red subway seat. riding along, just like he would on any other day.

it was perfect.

and i couldn’t have been more delighted with myself.

as we neared the end of the line, where i would have to get off, i imagined what it would be like for the person who’d eventually discover this contented, subway-riding spaceman. i actually started to laugh at myself, both for pondering the spaceman’s future and for leaving him that way. then i laughed when i thought about what people’s reactions might be when they saw him. i briefly imagined someone accidentally sitting on him, and wondered if perhaps i should move him to safer ground, but the seat was just so right.

and it was too cute not to do.

so, as the train pulled into the station, i picked up my bags and hoisted my knapsack over my shoulders, then took one last look at my little spaceman amigo and silently bid him safe and happy travels.

with any luck, he later brought as much levity and whimsy into the life of someone else, who trudged onto that car in dire need of a smile, as he had mine.