I like to ride the train facing backwards. Those seats are less popular so they’re more likely available. The ride is realistically mysterious.

I learned thirty years ago that the ancient Greeks viewed themselves as moving backwards through life. Their very language choreographed the metaphor; existence was a journey one made into the unknown, ever seeing one’s past, as if one were backing up into the future. Our English is the opposite. We walk into the future. We speak as if we see ourselves facing tomorrow with the past at our backs. This seems an inaccurate perspective…

I sat backwards this morning, with the immediate past before me. It just happened I took a seat opposite a young couple who had been at the city council meeting last night. I recognized them at once, with their dusty rope-hair under kerchiefs, their silver rings and worn cloth shoes, but they hardly noticed me. I’m middle-aged and looked asleep behind my dark glasses; I was just a barrier to their use of my seat as a footrest.

I couldn’t tell last night or this morning if they were a couple. They seemed straight, and intimate like they lived in the same house or something, but I couldn’t read whether they were lovers. They sat angled toward each other, knees touching, but they used their hands to gesture and they didn’t seem to look in each other’s eyes.

They conversed with some enthusiasm. His voice was deeper than hers but she wasn’t squeaky, and his cracked a little with passion as he got going. She was quieter, but then she was the one who last night dedicated one hundred sixty seconds of her three free-speech minutes to silence, in honor of a dead couch.

“She’s a fuckin’ witch,” the young man said to his companion, and it took me a few moments to figure out he was referring to the mayor. “She’s like: ‘I understand: I too marched for free speech. But you should coordinate with the police?’ What’s that about?” He shook his head and his dark hair flopped about his shoulders. It grew in curls contained by a black-and-white scarf. He had a beard too, full eyebrows and hairy forearms, but he was slim and not more than five foot ten.

“I know. I know.” The young woman murmured agreement. Like her mothers before her she smiled reassuringly. Made it a little better. Made herself a little place. “It was fucked,” came her low contralto. She patted his knee, squirmed back in her seat, tossed her head till the rings moved in her eyebrow and her lobes. Her ash-blonde hair wormed beneath a faded purple bandanna, burst like bent organ pipes over her nape. She moved her hand back to pick at the white threads edging the knee-hole in her jeans. “And what about the balding bitch in the polyester?” she referred unkindly to the councilwoman from District 3. “‘I respect your right to protest,’” she mimicked in a singsong kindergarten chant, “‘but when you set those fires, then you kids went too far.’ Like a street bonfire is the same as destruction of personal property! As if we did anything really wrong!”

Their dialogue was entertaining, but it wouldn’t have made any sense to me if I hadn’t seen them at the council meeting last night. I was there with my nonprofit group, lobbying for money and variances to build affordable housing. This time we were all about teachers. It seems finally to be recognized that our system doesn’t pay them enough. Sure they’re annoying whiners. True, most of them are uninspired instructors; we all went through the US public education system, some twelve to thirteen years of it, but none of us had more than three spectacular teachers. And no matter how much time they tell the rest of us they spend grading papers, their’s is not a full-time job, compared to ours…

Still, they aren’t paid much. Not enough to afford most rents around here. And that’s not right. We all agree teachers do a better job if they live and move around in the community where they work.