How good is Rules of Civility? Thanks for asking! Here’s a story!

I was tearing through Amor Towles’ first novel Rules of Civility: A Novel, on the Amtrak train back from New York. I bought it the day before on the recommendation of my friend Ted – whom I saw for the first time in two years!! – and was already halfway through it. I was so engrossed I missed the announcement for my stop. They announced it twice, apparently. No conductor came around to tell me personally that it was my stop. How dare they. So I looked up from the book – it was literally like walking from one world into another – or like emerging from a very very engrossing fantasy into reality. I had to remember where I was – and that was when I realized I missed my stop. My car was in the parking lot of the stop we had just zoomed away from. I was now headed to the next stop, where I had no car. It was almost midnight.

I was in a pickle. My mind raced. I had things to do the next day. It was already literally four hours past my bedtime – but I had to take that particular train because my day was so jam-packed, a screening in the morning, a full day of day-job work after, which I did sitting in the new Penn Station. So … already a not-fun situation. I had to work at 10 a.m. the following morning. Having missed my stop, I was now 40 minutes away from where I needed to be, and it was the middle of the night. I finally made the decision to get a hotel room for the night, wake up first thing, and get the train BACK to where I needed to be early in the morning, as early as possible. (Thank God for said day-job. Every hotel in a 5 mile radius was outrageously expensive – and so I picked one that was under $100 – which meant that it was a HIKE to get to from the station. And … well, I was going to say, in New York you can just hail a cab – but that is no longer TRUE.) The city I emerged into isn’t like New York, a “city that never sleeps”. The city I was now in definitely DOES sleep. I walked out into a deserted quiet world.

Glory be, there was a lone cab standing across the street. He drove me to the hotel, the only one I found that wasn’t insanely expensive. It was kind of a hike, and the drive there cost me $35. The motel was falling apart and rather bleak, actually. A port in a storm though! I was on the ground-floor and made sure the windows were locked because I felt unsafe. The sheets were clean. It was now one o’clock in the morning. I was irritated, upset, exhausted, and angry at myself for getting into this predicament. I took a shower. I looked up train times the following morning and reserved a spot on the 8:55 back to where I needed to be. From the original train station to my new abode is half an hour drive. All of this would get me back home by 10 a.m. on the dot, which is when I had to sign on and get to work (my job is remote). I’ve been go go go go go go for over a month now, and I’ve had it.

I sat on the bed in this shitty motel in the middle of nowhere and brushed my newly washed hair. I moisturized. I wasn’t even in the STATE where I needed to be. I was over the border in another STATE. Nobody knew where I was, and nobody knew what was happening, and there was no one I could call to come pick me up. Not at that hour of the night anyway. Oh well. I popped some Melatonin and fell asleep. I got a solid 5.5 hours.

I woke up, inhaled some coffee, and then began the grim adventure of trying to call a cab. I went through every company listed. I’d get an answering machine. Or the dispatcher would say they couldn’t get a cab to me for an hour, even more. I needed to get to the train station. I could NOT miss that train. The hotel was so far away from …. anything … I needed to leave 20, 25 minutes to get from here to there. I was starting to panic. I didn’t realize LYFT was in operation in that area until the woman behind the desk – so helpful! – told me maybe my best bet was a Lyft. So I booked a Lyft driver who was there in 4 minutes. Bless him. But it had taken me so much time to go through all the other cab companies that now I had exactly 25 minutes to get to the train station. If we ran into traffic, if anything happened, I’d miss the train.

We did run into a tiny bit of traffic, but it was just before we took the exit off the freeway so it didn’t hold us up. When we got to the train station, I had two minutes until the train departure. I got out of the car, ran inside, hurried down to the platform, and just then, the train pulled into the station.

I was on it. It only took 20 minutes to get back to the stop where I needed to be all along, the stop where my car was parked, waiting patiently. I walked to my car through the frosty morning air – foliage alert! – thinking, “Okay, well, THAT was an irritating adventure”. First up, I had to get gas immediately (the yellow light was blinking as I pulled into the Amtrak parking lot 5 days before) – so that took a tiny bit of time. Then I drove the half hour to my new apartment. I walked in the door, sat down, opened my laptop, signed on and wasn’t even late for work. I then worked non-stop for the next eight hours.

So. That’s what happened to me in the last 24 hours.

All because of Rules of Civility.

I slept in a scary motel in another STATE because of Rules of Civility. That night cost me almost $200, what with the hotel, the expensive rides to and from the hotel, plus the train ticket back to where I needed to be in the first place – all because Rules of Civility was so mesmerizing I missed my stop, even though they announced it twice.

That’s how good it is.