Post: Mexico Today

Mark and our son loaded our bags. Joe Joe, the dog, watched eagerly, always alert when my steps quicken around the entry hall of our home. Treats would come, he knew, if I walked out the door.

“Mom, I picked up your little bag from the floor and put it on the table,” our son/driver/dog sitter said. My pulse raced. I had left the bag on the floor near my bags so I wouldn’t forget it. With the bags in the car and nothing left on the floor, I could have easily walked away without the small crossbody that holds my passport.

I have a method! I just don’t announce it and then the well meaning try to improve my ways. This is how butter and eggs, left out to come to room temperature, in preparation for baking, get returned to the fridge. This is how the umbrella, deliberately left in the door well of the car’s passenger side, ends up in the hall closet. This is how certain clothing items, draped on the edge of the laundry basket so they can be washed on delicate, end up being place helpfully into the basket so they tumble with everything else. “I should start to carry post-its at all times to write signs that say “intentional,” whenever I do something that might be seen as unconventional,” I thought.

We travelled down to the city on Amtrak, really a peaceful way to go. As we collected our bags to exit at Penn Station, I did the customary backward glance to make sure nothing was left behind. We easily navigated to the LIRR, activated the tickets, and were grateful to have a near empty car. I sank into a quad of seats so that I could slide my big suitcase beside me. Mark hoisted his duffle onto the rack above. “He’s still got it,” I thought. The overhead hoist is not my favorite traveling move anymore, truly it was always a little dicey, with my short frame. Mark did not sit with me, but behind so that he faced in the direction of train movement. “She has the tickets,” he told the conductor from out of my sight.

As we approached Jamaica station I stood up. “We should move toward the doors,” I said. Mark stood too, and I walked up the aisle so he could lift his duffle down. He let out a bark of laughter as the train lurched during the process. We moved on to the JFK Airtrain. The sharp smell of marijuana along with a cluster of souls seeking some warmth just inside that busy station gives that transition a lot to think about. All the ticket machines stand cordoned off now, as the New York Metro card has moved into history this year. Two quick contactless phone taps and we were waiting for the Airtrain.

The Airtrain was the third and last leg on our way to JFK’s TWA Hotel to spend the night before the early flight to Mexico City. “Everything’s been very smooth,” Mark remarked as we stood on this last train.

“Yes, for some reason I was a bundle of nerves leaving the house,” I said. Mark agreed.

“I think when John Roy told me my bag was on the table, I realized I could have walked out of the door without it. It has my passport in it, “I quietly added.

His face changed immediately. “My backpack,” he said. “I must have left it on the train.” It was the word “passport,” that reminded him because– and you saw this coming– that’s where his passport was.

So many thoughts rushed in. Which train? He quickly realized it must have been the LIRR, now on its way to Babylon. Not that far, but really as inaccessible as a Supermoon from a bedroom window. I quickly started searching the internet for lost & found on the LIRR.

Fill out a form, it said. All found items were brought to Penn Station. This seemed hopeful. We’d have to report the backpack lost, and then go pick it up at Penn. I started to fill in the form, and we stepped off the AirTrain to discuss for moment. We decided to proceed to the hotel, and leave our bags before any running around.

The TWA Hotel is really fun and when we stay there, I always feel cheerful. But not this time. We grimly checked in and found our room. I opened my laptop to do a deep dive. The information was bleak. The LIRR retrieves tens of thousands of items. They are brought to a station and then a courier drives around and collects them and brings them to Penn Station. It was Sunday night, and the lost and found office at Penn would not open until the morning, so there was no way the backpack would move through this process before our 7am Monday flight to Mexico City.

Mark called LIRR customer service and actually talked to a person who confirmed all this. She was sympathetic ,but even allowed that sometimes items take a week to be retrieved and sent to Penn Station. We called the MTA police in case the pack had been turned into them, but that didn’t get us anywhere.

“You should go without me,” Mark said as we tried to absorb this bleak information. Our trip is a study tour with Vassar alums, two professors, and some current students. We know some of the travelers already and of course had been looking forward to the trip. I would not be alone, but still. Mark explained that he’d head home and try to cancel the few days at a resort we’d tacked on to the end of the trip. And perhaps, figure out if there was anyway to get a passport and catch up to us in one of the cities we would be visiting.

I had not agreed to this new plan when Mark’s phone rang.

“Well, not so great. I lost my backpack,” he told the caller. “You’re a conductor and you found it? Yes, Danny, we can do that.” A pause, and Mark related back. We would return to Jamaica station in a couple of hours and meet the conductor when his train was headed back to Penn Station. “I think my wife is about to cry,” he told Danny, the conductor, before hanging up.

My legs wanted to run back to Jamaica immediately, but Mark helpfully did the math to realize that we had over two hours before Danny’s train would arrive. Eat a hamburger at the hotel’s Paris Café by Jean-Georges – that was Mark’s go to position. I was starving, but I also had that no appetite feeling that stressful situations bring about. We headed up and ordered some food, and we were joined by a member of the Vassar travel group who was staying overnight as well.

We wrote a thank you note for Conductor Danny, put it in a TWA Hotel evelope with a small gift and a couple of TWA pencils for good measure. We reversed our steps, arriving far too early to stand on the cold outdoor Jamica Station platform, so we paced in the warm boarding area for twenty minutes. We texted Conductor Danny a selfie so he would recognize us and know we’d arrived. I wondered if any security would judge us suspicious, but no one did. The rhythm of the crowd was predictable. Tired people emerged from the Airtrain, ready to transfer to the LIRR. Fewer, but more energetic ones headed onto the AirTrain, getting ready to start a journey. Mixed in were people without luggage, often in various uniforms and ID tags, heading to and from work at JFK.

Finally we judged it was time to head into the station, past the homeless, past the marijuana scented air, and out to the platform. Track #2. Danny had said to find him at the east end of the train– the back. “There’s the train!” Mark said, We raced down the stairs. The platform had two sides! Would Danny be coming out of the door between platform #1 and #2 or between #2 and #3? The train was in the station.

“I’ll go on the other side,” I said, and darted through the open train doors to the other side. I walked to the end of the train and found a conductor.

“Danny?” I said. The man did not have a backpack. “I’m looking for a conductor named Danny? He has my husband’s backpack.”

The Not-Danny conductor shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “There are so many Dannys.”

I ran back. Mark was on the phone.

“It’s ok. I just talked to him. This is not the 8:40pm; it’s the 8:34pm. He’s coming in next. And it doesn’t matter which side of the train we wait on,” he told me.

Sure enough, and boy those schedules run tight in such a large city, Conductor Danny’s train pulled in next. And there he was at the door, younger, perhaps, than our son, holding Mark’s backpack.

Thirty seconds of gushing thank you’s poured out of my mouth. “Tell your mother she raised a fine man,” I said, sounding like a really old lady. He didn’t want to take our envelope. “Please, take it. We wrote you a thank you note, I said.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” he said, which we took to mean, meeting the train. Little did he know, we would have gone to his house, picking up dinner on the way, if that’s what was needed to get the passport and pack back!

Then he was gone. I hadn’t thought to ask if we could take a photo together.

We made our way back through the sensory experience of Jamaica station to the AirTrain. One more adrenaline moment awaited. We knew Danny would return the pack as he found it, but had anyone else opened it, and was there any chance the passport had been removed?

We were fine. The passport was still in the bag, along with everything else that should be in Mark’s carry on. The trip was saved.

Epilogue: We found our own drugs of choice back at the hotel: shared chocolate cake for me and a martini mixed with Bombay Sapphire gin for Mark. We hoped that the receding adrenaline, which can so often leave one feeling a bit ragged, would allow some sleep before our alarms went off the the wee hours of the morning.

TSA was fiercely busy today, and for some reason my boarding pass was not stamped precheck. I had to go through the regular line while Mark sailed through the shorter TSA one. I did get through with plenty of time to make the flight, which is where I am writing this.

Philosophy: My travel life, since I was child, has been peppered with the kindness of strangers. Danny is the most recent, and I am misty eyed when I think about his thoughtfulness and common sense. If he’d put the bag through the lost and found procedure, it would have been missing for days and days. Gleaning that we were most likely heading on a trip and making the effort to get the bag back to us is a story worth sharing, and paying forward. We wish him a long and happy life and hope that it will be graced by the kindness of strangers, too.

Postscript: “You know,” I said to Mark as we sat in the Airtrain headed back to the hotel, “For the rest of our lives I’m going to be asking you if you have all your bags.” He smiled. “That’s the consequence. I”ll take it.”