There are portals in the fabric of time that take us
momentarily back to some earlier place in our lives. About two blocks down the
street from me on Park Ave.
in Pennsauken, New Jersey where I live, a train track
crosses over. It is a remnant of an
earlier time when long passenger trains whisked people off from Philadelphia to
Atlantic City. Now it may delay cars heading down Park Ave. once a day, but it
is a freight train now and short, never
keeping drivers for more than ten or
fifteen seconds. At night, once in a
long while, it is still a passenger train.
The long, lonesome sound wakes me in the middle of the night and an I am
transported to a time many years ago.
I’ve just turned ten years old. Looking out of the window of
the train, I can see its tail as it curves around the side of a mountain in the
fading twilight. That’s all I can see. It is really the sound that has
transported me here. I don’t even see the rest of my family, but I know they
must be here. We are leaving our home and
headed for San Diego,
though at ten I don’t know why. The last thing that I remember is our dog
Trixie. She was a black and white spotted cross between a dachshund, a cocker
spaniel and something else, but in her low body the dachshund won out. All of us
loved the dog and we were sad to leave her. I think evryone cried. The night
before my dad had taken her over to some friends to take care of, but somehow,
the next morning when we arrived at the train station, Trixie was there waiting
for us. We were thrilled to see her, but sad at having to realize once more
that she could not come with us. I’m not
sure what became of her.
Drifting in and out of sleep on the train I have no idea
that out next home will be one half of a Quonset hut (that corrugated tin can
cut horizontally and plopped down in a sandbox) in National City, just outside
San Diego. The Quonset hut days will return
to memory later in life only as a few pieces of a shattered clay pot. There was the time when we were not allowed
to go to a promised trip to the zoo because my brother Steve refused to eat his
brussel sprouts. And roaches, of course. But what I remember most was impetigo
and how it was passed around from one of us to the other and the bright purple
medicine surrounding Steve’s mouth that advertised his condition. I Ed (still almost a baby) and I were the only ones who escaped that.
It was really Ed’s birth about nineteen months early that
unleashed the series of events that led to us being on the train. We had just moved to a new house in Concord, California. New, because it was a new construction, right
on a street corner with an address that I still remember - 2012 Ponderosa Drive,
one of the many post World War II suburban housing developments that were
beginning to pop up all over, but also new because it was the first place my
parents had ever owned. It was not an
apartment or naval housing or a rented, shared duplex. It was their own. I was a month into beginning fourth grade,
transferring from Berkeley to the fifth of the eleven schools I was to attend.
A few days after we arrived there, Mom went into
labor. She’d been through four previous
births, at times without Dad, who was in the Navy and often at sea. But this time was different. A blood clot
somewhere near her heart. At one or
several points, a priest came in to administer last rites. Dad was unable to watch the kids. Only Steve
and I were in school. Dave was sent to
live with Aunt Ardel and Judi with Aunt Lucille in southern California. Steve and I stayed with our neighbors, the
Gray’s, after school. They watched Ed as well.
It may have been for six months.
The time is still all a fog.
When Mom returned home, the next year was one of the
happiest times of our lives. We planted fruit trees and built a patio of
colored concrete. Steve and I got new
bikes for Christmas. Trixie had puppies that we pedaled from house to house to
give away. I hunted for pollywogs down in the canal near the house and brought
them back to watch them grow in a jar.
Halcyon days.
But something beneath the surface unraveled. It involved gambling, drinking, writing bad
checks. Whatever happened is beyond
recapture. All I have is a brief
picture, a cameo of sitting in the back of a courtroom at a naval base in San
Francisco, waiting for what seemed like forever. And then the train.
There is an old tale called “Stone Soup.” In the story, a man with no food puts a stone
into a pot of boiling water. One by one the
neighbors come and toss in a vegetable that they can spare until, in the end,
the man has a full pot of soup. I think
our lives like that. Over the years each
vegetable that is tossed into the pot of water brings us to where we are now,
makes us who we are. But the metaphor
breaks down because we are all still “a work in progress.” I think that is a more felicitous image. Progress implies that something good is
coming. Even that isn’t accurate, of course.
Linear time and self are both illusionary concepts that in the long run
won’t hold. Nevertheless, I’ll stick
with that: work in progress. This train
I’m on, the one that reverberates in my head from mid-night on Park Ave. to
somewhere in the past 63 years ago somewhere between Concord
and San Diego,
is headed somewhere. I don’t know just
where but I can only think that it must be somewhere good. I hope so.
