Trains - Deep into August
I was sitting here this morning, no one else awake in the house. My wife went to her first day of the school year. This has become her routine. We danced. It was sweet.
Deeper into August.
Sitting here, looking at bills, or some costs of estate tax and escrow payments, incoming money and outgoing cash flows, thinking about wealth, at present, into the future with retirement hopes and plans. I thought about a couple of old foster siblings, Joey and Sophia. Sophia passed away, maybe ten years ago. I can ping Joey; that is a blessing. I will message him and Jason now. The latter, from my middle school and high school years. And even more recently. Romanian connection.
Indiana, all connected. Hoosiers, we are.
That brings me to trains. In my childhood I would hear the train pass through town. Not always. Maybe if it was windy, or if I was sufficiently distracted, or father east or out of town, we would not hear it. But it was something to hear in the summer time, when we awoke early for swimming lessons. My parents were off to their jobs. They had work. We had the summer mornings with the the olympic-sized pool, at the park across the street, before later vacations. Summer time.
August would herald the end of summer, and here we are now. Here am I.
I was typing, looking, responding to emails, preparing for the next job, thinking a little about the part-time job, where that could lead. Or not.
The second full week of August. Or the third?
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Now, the 14th. Thursday.
What, of these trains?
They cross our paths in the recesses of our memories; they cross the ways and byways of our nation. For me, I remember hearing the whistle of the train across the park and past the streets heading towards the center of town, over toward the hospital and the downtown not far from there. All of it abutting the campus, the great intellectual engine of my home town. More or less a mile away. To the north. The train to the west.
Home. There were the trains, the somewhat haunting sound of the horn or sirens blaring from a mile plus away, from that chugging steam or coal engine. To the west, where the sun would set over the city park. Bucolic, with the pool and lots and the fields and the stream, small creek, running down the middle.
For years now I have not heard the trains pass where I live in suburbia. The suburbs of the greater metropolis. We live here, we grow here, we raise our children here. Like me, and my siblings and neighbors, back in the day in the 1970s. But we heard trains and their noises, and would be affected by the blockage of the train and the east west car and truck traffic, us getting across town as we needed, for jobs, chores, and appointments, or games or food or get togethers. East and west, home is best.
The train tracks came right through it.
Either deep into August, or throughout the rest of the year.
I lived right by a train track in South America for a few months. The regular train cars and engines would shake our little railroad side house and force us to cease from speaking. The papito worked for the railroad company.
In this world, we have trains, planes, and automobiles. And more. Ships, bikes. Our feet and carts. Space rockets and missiles. Drones.
Do trains still play a large part? I say so, yes. Not to mention the city metro rails that we use to navigate our large metropolises. Trains are here to stay, like the noisy behemoths that plow through Harper's Ferry, West Virginia (a place that my wife can plan not to live by), a lot to do with the trains.
We went there at the end of July. Not quite August.
No whistles here. Only in distant places and my memory.
