My father-in-law arrived in town Sunday night. It was my job to pick him up at Union Station in Toronto.
So I drove down, parked near the station, and went in to meet him.
He wasn’t there yet, which was a good thing, because it turned out I was waiting in the wrong place. I was upstairs in Union Station when I should have been downstairs. A friendly employee set me straight, and I headed downstairs to meet the man.
When I got there, I realized that the place I was required to meet my father-in-law was a fair distance from where he would get off the train. My father-in-law is seventy-nine years old, and while not decrepit by any stretch of the imagination, I thought it wouldn’t be particularly nice to require him to carry his baggage all that distance. Plus I had no idea how many bags he had or how big they were.
So I wandered into the inner sanctum of Union Station and inquired of another employee how close I could get to where my father-in-law would be getting off the train.
“Down by that escalator,” the fellow said. He didn’t seem to have any problem with me waiting there, so I high-tailed it off to the escalator.
When I got to the escalator, it occurred to me that there were two escalators, separated by walls, and if my father-in-law were to come down the wrong one, I would never see him. So even though the escalator stairs were going down, I ran up them to see where the passengers were getting off the train.
Sure enough they were getting off near the other escalator.
Instead of running back down the escalator, I thought I would just run over to where the passengers were getting off and meet them, thinking to reduce the distance my father-in-law would have to carry his bags to zero.
Well.
The employee who had directed me to wait by the escalator (the wrong escalator, mind you) greeted me with a decidedly snippy, “I thought I told you to wait downstairs!”
“I just want to help my father-in-law with his bags,” I told him. “He’s seventy-nine years old.”
The employee stepped away and muttered something to another employee who happened to have a walkie-talkie. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say something about “a trespasser.”
Huh, I thought. How ’bout that, a trespasser. And I looked around for some seedy looking character before realizing that he was talking about me, of all people.
‘Cause of course that’s exactly what I was doing, albeit with the best of intentions.
My father-in-law was getting off the train. He saw me. I saw him. I couldn’t leave. Somewhere nearby a security detachment had been deployed to rid the station of its trespasser. Me.
My father-in-law stepped off the train. We shook hands. I took his suitcase from him. It was enormous. It would have been a long walk to meet me.*
“Never mind,” I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say. “He’s leaving now.”
And leave we did.
I readily admit this story would have been a lot more interesting (and painful) if it had ended with me being tasered. I apologize for the lack of tasering. And I mean no disrespect for the poor fellow in the news these days whose name I’m not even going to attempt to spell at this late hour who was in fact tasered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But the incident has made me think about the difference between right and wrong, and the grey area in between. Clearly I violated at least Union Station laws by being where I wasn’t supposed to be. But would it have been right to leave my seventy-nine year old father-in-law with an enormous bag to carry a great distance? Should I have assumed that train staff would help him? Was I in the wrong attempting to do the right thing? Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?
I dunno.
Glad I wasn’t tasered though.
*(Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted the suitcase in question turned out to have wheels.)
(Joe: Shh!)
