Ride brought youthful feeling

It was a Saturday night, and we were in Boston visiting two out of three daughters over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The family evening gathering was over. Grandchildren were headed for bed, and it was time for the grandparents to find their way back to their hotel.
We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves.
For small town folks, we’d been doing a good job of navigating our way through metropolitan Boston’s public transportation system.
To make it easier for the kids, we told them not to bother meeting our flight.
Instead, we found our way to the Silver Line, a bus/trolleycar that takes arriving visitors — free of charge — from Logan Airport into the center of downtown.
I say bus/trolleycar because it is both. For part of the ride, it’s powered by diesel fuel. For the other part of the ride, it’s hooked up to electrical lines.
By making it free and easy, Boston steers visitors into the system that’s known locally as “the T.” And by doing so, the city reduces the traffic on its already overloaded highway system.
So, upon arriving, we’d taken the Silver Line to South Station, then taken the Red Line up to our hotel. We’d also purchased a couple of $20 “Charlie tickets,” which would automatically subtract the amount we’d used every time we rode a bus or train in metropolitan Boston.
Older fans of the Kingston Trio will recognize the origin of the “Charlie ticket” from a song about a commuter who got permanently lost on what was then called the “MTA.”
“Will he ever return? No he’ll never return. And his fate is still unlearned. He is gone forever ’neath the streets of Boston. He’s the man who never returned,” was how the chorus went.
That’s a little discouraging if you’re heading to Beantown from the cornfields of Indiana. But for the most part we didn’t have much trouble navigating the system.
We’d made it out to daughter Emily and her husband Mike’s place in Allston just fine on Thanksgiving Day. We’d made it out to daughter Maggie and her husband Josh’s place in Watertown the day after.
And now, after a Saturday with Emily, Mike and grandson Julian, we were headed back to our hotel on Saturday night.
And that’s when things started to get a little different.
We noticed it at first when we got on the train in Allston. While waiting for the train to arrive, we were surrounded by college students.
And when the train arrived, it was full of other college students.
At every stop, all the way to Park Street, then back on the Red Line to Kendall Square, college students got off the train and more college students got on the train.
And since it was Saturday night and there had been a round of partying, the social bees were buzzing.
Feathers were preened. Plumage was displayed. Flirtation was the order of the day.
Hormones were pumping, and pheromones were in the air.
And there we sat, a couple in our 60s.
At first, I amused myself by recognizing younger versions of people we’d known.
Then I amused myself by finding younger versions of ourselves.
But finally, it hit me: We were the train’s chaperones.
They might be lost forever ’neath the streets of Boston, but we would always be their chaperones.
At a minimum, we had three decades on every other passenger I could see.
But if the kids thought we were out of place, they didn’t show it.
Just the same, when we climbed the stairs up from our final stop on “the T,” I couldn’t help but feel old.
That is, until my wife reminded me that simply by being on the train with all those adventurous, amorous, romantic kids, we were beating the odds. After all, the rest of the old codgers our age were home in bed, not carousing with a trainload of kids.
And suddenly I felt young again.

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