Train

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.