train talk

[redbird]

I went out to Moshe's this afternoon, where I did the usual mix of talking to people and pulling weeds, with Chinese food for 14 afterwards. (One of the people was Julian Warner, the current DUFF delegate.)

On the way there, I was on the #7 train, and a family got on. The parents and two small children sat across from me, and the parents tried to convince the middle-sized child to sit with them. He insisted that he wanted to sit on this side, so he could look out at the tracks. After a moment, having heard them speaking Spanish, I smiled and said "Puede sentar aqui" ["He can sit here"], they gave up, and he sat on the bench next to me, facing out the window and looking at the tracks. From time to time he said "Mira!" to his parents, who ignored him, while I looked down and saw nothing special. A little after that, he started talking, mostly to himself, in English: what he was excited about was the tracks. (It took me a moment to figure out that he was using "train" to mean both "track" and "train".) He particularly wanted to know about the express track, and why there were no trains there, and then what was on the far side of the express track. So I spent the trip to Flushing explaining that the third track is the train back into Manhattan, and there's no express train on Sunday, and why there are extra tracks near Shea Stadium, and (as we disembarked at Main Street) that our train was going to turn around and go back to Manhattan.

I mentioned this to Moshe later in the afternoon, and he said "That was good of you." I hadn't thought of it in those terms--I told Moshe about it because he's a rail buff and I thought he'd think it was neat. I suppose it counts as a mitzvah, but there are few things more fun than a child who's interested in something I'm interested in and know something about. (Of course, it helps that I'm a person who enjoys explaining things.) I suspect the boy's parents also thought I was doing a favor; they told him to say goodbye, so he did, so I did. I probably did make their afternoon a little easier, but I did it for me as much as for their son, and not at all for them.

Comments

train spotters

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Ah! Yes, I can see this - the train talk sounds like a lot of fun, and once children reach the age of being interested and asking questions, they can be just as much fun to talk to as anyone else. But there are people, particularly adult women, who would just talk to the child, probably patronizingly, as a kind of `favour' to the parents. So I can see that a range of possible interpretations of what you did.



I'm uninformed about what is mitsvah, but it must be good, if you and the child had fun, and his parents were also pleased?

Re: train spotters

[redbird]

A mitzvah is a good deed.

[mneme]

I kept saying "Dinner for 14" too, but it was 15, no? Two groups of 7, plus Andrew? Or was the other group 6, not seven?

Sitting around talking to the kid about trains sounds like fun, really.

[redbird]

The other group was six, yes.