Le Monde

Wednesday I worked late--an occurrence that's becoming more and more frequent--and when I hopped on the El at my usual stop, instead of the usual pulsing throng of rush-hour commuters, there were only two other people on the back car with me: A short, thick-set hispanic man in a Bears cap and a honey blonde with a cell phone bolted to her ear. They paid me no mind. No reason why they should--I was slumped in my seat, eyes slightly glazed, the beginnings of a headache stirring in my frontal lobe.

As the train accelerated out of the Merchandise Mart station, I saw out of the corner of my eye something moving on the brown rubberized floor. It looked like a small blue ball--or, perhaps, specifically a stress ball--rolling from one end of the car to the other. I turned to watch it roll down the aisle. the hispanic man watched it roll by as well, but made no move to pick it up; the honey blonde didn't look at it at all and continued chatting away on her cell (something she would do for the entirety of her trip).

I stood, turned and watched the ball roll all the way to the back of the car. It was, in fact, a stress ball, but it was not solidly blue--there were patches of green on it as well. The train was approaching the Chicago Avenue stop and, since there were only two people on the car and both were behind me, I decided to leave my backpack on my seat and go chase down the ball.

There was no need to chase down anything. As the train slowed on its approach to the station, the stress ball slowed, stopped and reversed course--and rolled straight back to me. I bent over, scooped it up as it rolled into my hand and sat back down to take a good look at it.

It wasn't just a blue stress ball. It was a globe--the blue was the oceans, the green the land masses.

And for that brief moment on a northbound El train, I held the whole world in my hand.