11.17.16 Meals in the dining car work like so: if you’re in a sleeper car, an attendant comes around mid-morning and takes reservations in half-hour increments for parties of one to four people, and you’re handed a little slip of paper with the time & number of your party. At the appointed hour, an announcement is made over the intercom inviting those holding reservations to appear at the threshold of the dining car. If you’re a party smaller than four, you will be seated at the next open table, leading to unexpected social adjacencies. Those adjacencies seem antithetical to our culturally and ideologically silo’d digital lives; I begin to wonder, perhaps quixotically, if the train might be a salve for our national wound, bringing us into unmediated conversations where we can once again see each other’s humanity. #8980bookoftravelers