As I sit in solitude stirring my coffee in a train car waiting to depart soon, several young men approach me and ask “Is this going to North Station?”
“Yes.”, I replied, “It’ll be the last stop.”
The group of men were wearing Patriots apparel, most obviously celebrating the Patriots’ win at the Super Bowl two days before.
Ten minutes later, my car is filled with young people, seemingly from a high school, all dressed in Patriots gear. One guy was passing a whiskey flask around. It was 7:10am. I asked two guys if they’re from the same school and if this was some sort of field trip.
“Nope. We’re skippin’.”, replied one of them. They are all headed to downtown Boston to watch the Patriots’ Parade. It would be forty minutes of excited chatter.
I was on my way to work, while some of these people were given a day off, I gathered from eavesdropping. However, a few colleagues of mine will take their lunch break (somewhere around 11am) and go to Boylston Street and watch the parade. I was invited. I’m also not a sports fan.
I was finally done with meetings around 11:30am. A colleague in my team decided to go out for lunch, so I decided to join him. Outside was a mess: it was raining and there was slushy, dirty snow everywhere; slippery sidewalks, and then…The Crowd. I started snapping photos. Some where calculated, others where taken with the camera held up over my head. Accuracy wasn’t the goal. I couldn’t even begin to tell you who’s in these photos, as my interest was not in the celebrities, but the event.
It seems interesting that something so trivial can bring people together. The look like they are unaware of the political issues that plague social media and water fountain talk. Their focus on the victory is overwhelming to me. Unfathomable almost. I guess this is something that’s ingrained into our sociological psyche. I must have missed the day they were passing it out.
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