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Small world
Jan. 20th, 2010 12:19 pmAbout ten years ago I caught the train home from Melbourne. It was summer and the train was crowded with jolly - oh, so jolly - men in green and gold shirts leaving a one-day cricket match. A young woman about my age walked down the train and asked if the seat next to me was empty. I said it was and she sat down quickly and we grinned at each other, relieved that we wouldn't have to spend a three hour trip next to a group of the jolly, singing cricket fans.
I'm not very chatty with strangers but my seat-mate was and I soon knew all about her. Her name was Annie and she was a Chinese student doing a post-graduate degree in Melbourne. It was Chinese New Year a couple of days earlier and she was feeling guilty because she bought her special new year cake instead of making it the way her grandmother taught her. Annie had lived in Melbourne for two years and had been to Sydney, but never anywhere rural, and she kept looking out the window asking if we were in the country yet and when we would start to see rice fields. I said there was no rice but she'd see lots of cows and a few sheep. She was on her way to Warrnambool to spend the weekend with her friend, Ana, short for Svetlana, who had moved here a few months earlier.
That got us an hour into the journey, so then she told me about Ana. Ana was Russian and she and Annie had met at university in Melbourne. Ana had met an Australian studying in Russia and had moved to Australia to be with him, only to find he already had a girlfriend here. The cheating boyfriend and his new girlfriend had sort of stalked her and she'd thought about moving back to Russia, but there were family problems that she didn't want to go back to, so she was very unhappy. Then she met a nice engineering student and decided to stay to be with him, so she'd dropped out of university and moved to Warrnambool and got a job in Target and wanted to open a sculpture studio.
The train eventually reached Warrnambool and there was no sign of Ana on the platform. I didn't feel comfortable leaving Annie alone on a train platform in a strange town at ten-thirty at night, so I waited with her until we saw Ana and her boyfriend running into the station. Then I left, and never saw Annie again. But Warrnambool is a small town and for a while I used to see Ana everywhere.
Yesterday my colleague Brian went to a funeral. He came back and said that some funerals are sadder than others and this one was very sad indeed. It was for the wife of his aircraft engineer, only a couple of years older than me. She was pregnant and had a brain aneurysm and died fitting on the beach. There was a two-year-old daughter and a distraught Russian mama wrapped in black and the deceased was named Svetlana, called Ana.
I feel a bit sad about that. It's an odd feeling, knowing so much about the life of someone I never actually met.
I'm not very chatty with strangers but my seat-mate was and I soon knew all about her. Her name was Annie and she was a Chinese student doing a post-graduate degree in Melbourne. It was Chinese New Year a couple of days earlier and she was feeling guilty because she bought her special new year cake instead of making it the way her grandmother taught her. Annie had lived in Melbourne for two years and had been to Sydney, but never anywhere rural, and she kept looking out the window asking if we were in the country yet and when we would start to see rice fields. I said there was no rice but she'd see lots of cows and a few sheep. She was on her way to Warrnambool to spend the weekend with her friend, Ana, short for Svetlana, who had moved here a few months earlier.
That got us an hour into the journey, so then she told me about Ana. Ana was Russian and she and Annie had met at university in Melbourne. Ana had met an Australian studying in Russia and had moved to Australia to be with him, only to find he already had a girlfriend here. The cheating boyfriend and his new girlfriend had sort of stalked her and she'd thought about moving back to Russia, but there were family problems that she didn't want to go back to, so she was very unhappy. Then she met a nice engineering student and decided to stay to be with him, so she'd dropped out of university and moved to Warrnambool and got a job in Target and wanted to open a sculpture studio.
The train eventually reached Warrnambool and there was no sign of Ana on the platform. I didn't feel comfortable leaving Annie alone on a train platform in a strange town at ten-thirty at night, so I waited with her until we saw Ana and her boyfriend running into the station. Then I left, and never saw Annie again. But Warrnambool is a small town and for a while I used to see Ana everywhere.
Yesterday my colleague Brian went to a funeral. He came back and said that some funerals are sadder than others and this one was very sad indeed. It was for the wife of his aircraft engineer, only a couple of years older than me. She was pregnant and had a brain aneurysm and died fitting on the beach. There was a two-year-old daughter and a distraught Russian mama wrapped in black and the deceased was named Svetlana, called Ana.
I feel a bit sad about that. It's an odd feeling, knowing so much about the life of someone I never actually met.