AncienTrails

Beltane Full Dyan Moon

South Passenger Lounge, Union Station, Chicago, Ill. 4:00 pm 6/13/09

Kate and I left home at 10 till 7 this morning. After an on-time arrival we are here near South tracks Gate D. We board the Cardinal around 5:30 for Indianapolis.

So far Kate does not seem too worn down by the ride, although her hip has begun to bother her a bit. We met a

Interrupted in Union Station by travel demands.

Now pulling out of Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue) at 9 pm on the Cardinal. Or, is it 10:00 pm? In Indiana you can never be sure what time it is. I have a life long case of chrononemesia, never quite knowing what time it is in other parts of the world.

The trackage here, as on much of Amtrak’s routes, causes the train to sway and buckle, then settles down for a time only to bounce up again. I hope the stimulus money goes in part to better laid track and more trains.

The Cardinal is full as was the Empire Builder. It’s summer of course, always a busier time, but this is a route that usually has a lot of room. Not today.

We met a lawyer pair at dinner, a prosecutor and a law clerk for a family court judge. We talked dogs, writing and jurisprudence. I also learned that Jerry West is not considered a good guy in his home state of West Virginia. He doesn’t take care of his momma apparently. Or, should I say, allegedly.

At lunch we met Dominic, a soft spoken man from Spokane, Washington on his way to NYC. He said he sleeps in his roomette and when he wakes up he goes to eat whatever meal is availalble.

Over breakfast we met a woman from Anoka who had just completed her master’s degree in nursing. She will be a nurse practitioner, a very skilled job. Kate struck up a medical conversation which left me happily watching the Mississippi River glide by with its unglaciated ridges and valleys.

I finished a James Patterson summer read, the name of which I can’t recall right now only moments after finishing it. I’m still working my way down the list of first books I bought when I got the Kindle three weeks or so ago. It’s traveled with me to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Now to Indiana.

Now we roll along in the dark, past the corn and bean fields. Being here always draws down the misty days of youth, so real, yet so long ago, so well remembered yet so changed in memory. Can we ever know who we were, let alone who we are?

That boy, the one who saved his paper route money and bought a transistor radio, rides a train from his faraway home back home. The boy who fished in Pipe Creek, who played poker on school nights through high school brings another worlds memories back with him. The boy who shot out the insurance salesman’s window with his slingshot slides back into the strange world we all leave one day on the ancient trail of adulthood. It is not a two way trail, there is no going back, save in fragments.

Those fragments we recall often carry the scent of shame, a burden of grief or those too brief flashes of ectsasy. There was the time Diane Bailey pulled my pants down in front of my friends. My mother picks up the heavy phone set, listens and tears well up in her eyes. Grandpa died. There was, too, that afternoon when I sat in my room, my 33 rpm record player sending out to me for the first time the leitmotifs of the Ring. All these things and so many more, some mundane but most soaked in the incendiary flame of hot emotion float into my heart as this train, this Cardinal dives further toward Indianapolis, further into the world left long ago.