To Trains

My grandfather’s: He was an engineer for Southern Pacific in Louisiana during World War II. Because he worked for the rail line, a vital job for national security, he wasn’t drafted to fight overseas. So, instead, he worked the rails, traveling between his home state of Texas, the state he tried to move my grandmother to. They went for a while, but she was so homesick, they moved back, right next door to her mother. From that house, they could hear the train, know he was back and would soon be walking through the door. Exhausted, ready to sleep. But home.

Eurail: Start in Germany and wake up in Paris. I’m meeting a friend at the station and we will spend the next 5 weeks sleeping in train cars crossing through eight countries. Some days we were lucky and had the seats to ourselves, could fold them out into a bed, but often we slept sitting up, heads resting on our backpacks. In Germany, the trains were spotless and always on time, but the conductors were gruff and never smiled. In Italy and Greece, the trains were crowded and we’d wait hours drinking coffee in station, trying to pass the time without spending money. But the conductors were happy for us, Americans in Italy. Now you can see for yourself. Finally you are here.

New York St.: In grad school, sick of the tiny apartment with walls so thin I could hear my neighbors argue and then snore, I found a roommate and rented a house. A whole house. The train ran right through the yard, so close that if we stood on the side of the porch and reached out, we could touch it. For the first month, the roar of the train and the bells at the train stop would violently wake me in the middle of the night. I wondered why I didn’t even notice this when I signed the lease. But any noise can be accommodated, can grow familiar, so familiar I didn’t hear it anymore. I could sleep through anything those nights.

Toys: My son is three and loves dinosaurs. He studies them in books and we play with them all afternoon in his room, then in the backyard. We take them to the grocery store. He doesn’t want to play with the trains we bought him for Christmas, so I set up the track in his room, a figure 8 with a little wooden bridge. He humors me for a bit and we run the train through the imaginary town, but he’d rather play with the T-Rex. I don’t know how to be a dinosaur and I get all the names wrong. For him, the train is limited, so fixed. Just these tracks? This is all it does? No, Mommy. This is not enough for me. These trains don’t go far enough.

To Going Home Again

You can’t. I can’t. No one can.

Thomas Wolfe says so.

Back home, little is like I remember. The house I grew up was sold years ago and has been remodeled. Though it looks similar on the outside, the inside would be unrecognizable to me. Mom, Dad and I drive by it just to see, and for a moment I wish I could go in, but then decide I’d rather not know.

The little shopping center we used to ride our bikes has been taken over by boutiques and restaurants and high end sporting goods and salons. Nice shops, but out of reach for a local teenager looking to spend a little babysitting money. I could go to Skillern’s or across the street to Country Club Pharmacy. They had a lunch counter and milkshakes. And glass shelves filled with White Shoulders perfume bottles and an assortment of powders. Even then, when I was 11 years old and wondering what it would be like to be a grown up, I knew this store wouldn’t be around. This would never last.

So it’s not a surprise, and though the new stuff seems out of place, I know that to the kids who are growing up riding past these houses and stores every day, this is what it’s supposed to look like. What I feel is not nostalgia, not a longing for the past. Not a wish to turn things back.

Going home again is not to see the world as it used to be or to hope that the people I know and love are just like I remember. Going home, I note all the changes. And when I leave, I take back with me, even more clear, a memory of home I never lived in.

To Somewhere Over the Rainbow

The house, lifted and tossed in the tornado, crashes, but Dorothy and Toto are unscathed. She gathers him under her arm, like any loving dog owner, and slowly opens the grey-scale door to reveal the technicolor landscape.

Shiny hollyhocks the size of pie plates with leaves as long as her arms. A tiny bright blue stream that winds and bubbles. A paved path and, because we have seen the movie a thousand times, we see the gold and we know. We are both anxious and happy for her. She is only, in this moment, awed.

“We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

And since that moment, Americans will always know what it means to not be in Kansas. Things are different now. We are stunned. Blue birds, ordinarily emotionless at best, are suddenly happy. Flying over rainbows when normally they just flit, from branch to branch. The blue in the skies calls to them and they cannot resist. Beauty like this appeals to all species.

We have only good hope here.

We sang this song to Rainer. I hadn’t thought about it, but Keith loves the song and had imagined bringing him home one day, holding him early in the morning when babies wake up too soon and have to be rocked back to sleep. Days went by and then weeks and still we couldn’t take him home and so it seemed best to start singing it now. The song is nothing if not comforting and though we could do nothing to help repair whatever cellular damage had been occurring since conception, we could sing.

Before, I always thought of the song as an alternate reality, a place you could, like Dorothy, travel to and back from. Before, somewhere over the rainbow was us at our best selves, our world minus indecision and loneliness and pain. 

But why would you come back? If the dreams, the ones you have to dare to dream, if those dreams come true, what could possibly pull you back? Wouldn’t you fall into Glenda’s arms and feel her holding you, finally? 

Of course, Auntie Em would have to grant that permission. At least say it’s ok. You can go. Don’t worry about us, little one. 

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow...