Day 399 of 1000
Shortly before I made the previous post about my train trip from Raleigh to Charlotte on Friday, the train stopped. Later, I found that we were only about fifteen minutes from our final stop at the Charlotte Amtrak station. We sat there for about a half an hour then one of the conductors came into our car to explain what was going on. He said there had been a rules violation and that they were sending a whole new crew to man the train during the rest of the trip. Since it was only fifteen minutes to Charlotte, the crew that started the tripped asked if they could man the train long enough to get us to the Charlotte station. The answer was no. He said we were a half an hour away from the new crew arriving.
Well, we were all pretty frustrated, but what could we do? We were out in the middle of some woods. We sat there for about fifteen minutes. Then, out of the blue, the lady sitting in the seat behind me began to quietly sing. My first thought was, Oh, no. This is going to be a long and agonizing wait. Then it dawned on me that the woman could really sing. She was an attractive African-American woman in her mid thirties with a beautiful contralto voice. I had heard her talking with her seatmate about church so it was not surprising that she sang gospel music. She never did sing too loud, but pretty soon everyone else in the car clued in to the fact that she was an amazing singer. Everyone but our singer got quiet. The next twenty minutes were pretty amazing and made for a VERY nice wait.
I am ABSOLUTELY going to take the train again. I doubt I will be fortunate to get such a wonderful serenade a second time, but I can always hope. I worked for a day and went to our church convention this weekend. We never know when we are being entertained by angels.