I wanna hold your ... hand?

For various reasons we had to take our kidlets on the subway last week. Going to Manhattan presented little problem since they (SubHub and kids, I was at work) were going against the traffic. We naively thought that going back shouldn’t be a problem either, but we were dead wrong. Apparently there are almost as many people on the train at 8 p.m. as there are at 6 p.m. So when we boarded Q train, there were no seats available. Surprise, surprise, no one offered a seat either. We had no choice but to tough it out.

SubHub was holding DD and our bags; I ended up with DS. I was holding him tight, but the little fella got a big scared on one of the steep turns and started looking for something to grab on in addition to my hand. Due to his height limitation, he couldn’t find anything suitable, except for some woman’s jeans-clad calf. I asked him to stop, but to no avail; he was grabbing on for his dear life. Both SubHub and I got beet red and couldn’t wait for this ride to be over. The woman half turned, gave us one annoying look, but then submitted to her fate. After all, being molested by a handsome cute 2-yr old is not the worst thing that can happen to one on the subway.

The steep turn was over in about a minute and things returned to normal, except that both SubHub and I were still beet red. In a few stops one of the seats in front of that woman became available. So seeing a family with two little children, this young woman did the most natural to any decent human being thing - she offered the seat to us, NOT. She grabbed it just as fast as DS grabbed her calf three minutes earlier. The woman still kept on throwing annoyed glares in our direction, but she looked a bit relieved at the same time. Finally she was in relative safety, rescued from unwanted advances of our son. That’s when my deep feeling of embarrassment was replaced by an even deeper feeling of regret. Why didn’t DS pinch her while he was at it?