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On the very day I'm gone
I like trains. Admittedly my formative ideas of train travel are fifteen years out of date, so it continually surprises me that I can check my e-mail from the Amtrak Regional (and that we may experience random identity checks along the way, as the driver just announced along with the station stops1), but the Northeast Corridor still looks the same from a right-hand window seat in the quiet car. Snowcapped and sunlit, everything looks curiously miniaturized, like decoration for a model railway: a parking lot, a baseball field, a cemetery, a cut-out of low-lying water among snow-spiked reeds and flattened branches, reflecting a matte gunsteel blue duller than the cirrus sky. Graffiti on the retaining wall and the sidetracked freight cars snaps out in greens and blues and rust-backed reds. The tracks curve weathered black through the small drifts, choppy with twigs and bent grasses. I walked down the middle of the street to catch the 85 this morning because the sidewalks were all hard-tracked ice. It wasn't Boston's April Fool's Day Blizzard, Part Two: Fooled Again, but it'll do until the next time, I guess.
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derspatchel is sitting next to me, having made a highly popular and sadly relevant tweet. We got to South Station by the same train—the same car, even—but the Red Line was such sardine standing room only that we couldn't be sure until we disembarked. We looked for each other through the crowd and saw only strangers' winter hats and backpacks. The bus was also a sardine tin. I seem to have slightly pulled the tendon that runs to my right thumb, trying to get my backpack out of the way of a fellow commuter. It diminishes my ability to text, but not type. We just left Providence, ghost signs sliding away past us on industrial red brick. I like old warehouse buildings, too, whose bricks are the right color; they crumble into desert roses, not crayon tips.
I have not been to New York City since 2014, when everything started to fall apart. I don't expect this trip to perform some kind of miraculous reversal, but I would enjoy no further catastrophes. This time we're staying with one of my mother's cousins in Brooklyn, which always feels like a family story. Both of my grandparents were born there. My great-grandfather's pharmacy was on Coney Island Avenue, where there were fountain sodas and my grandmother played as a child with drops of mercury, magical and shivering; my grandfather was born at the corner of Broadway and Hooper, where his parents ran a general store—"5¢, 10¢, 19¢ and Up"—by the Hewes Street BMT Station. I do not think any traces of either remain except in books, memories, old address listings on the internet. After they left for graduate school, they never lived in New York again, although they retained it for the rest of their lives in their voices and their stories. My grandmother died in Portland, my grandfather in Boston. Every time we visit Coney Island, somehow I expect to find them there in the crowds. They would be separate—they didn't meet until Iowa—but I would recognize them.
I lost time looking at maps of Brooklyn. We are into the salt marshes now, tawny as fall. The open water is a richer blue than the sky, wind-corrugated; the snow is a thin subsiding skim at the edges of rocks and the lee sides of trees and the dry stone walls that run beside the tracks have no webbing of ice between them. An enormous white swan is preening on a half-submerged boulder, watched by a quizzical shorebird. We seem to have reached Connecticut. If I see Richmond City, I'll give a call.
1. Passengers were also reminded to wear their shoes when entering the restrooms, which good God who wouldn't.
derspatchel is sitting next to me, having made a highly popular and sadly relevant tweet. We got to South Station by the same train—the same car, even—but the Red Line was such sardine standing room only that we couldn't be sure until we disembarked. We looked for each other through the crowd and saw only strangers' winter hats and backpacks. The bus was also a sardine tin. I seem to have slightly pulled the tendon that runs to my right thumb, trying to get my backpack out of the way of a fellow commuter. It diminishes my ability to text, but not type. We just left Providence, ghost signs sliding away past us on industrial red brick. I like old warehouse buildings, too, whose bricks are the right color; they crumble into desert roses, not crayon tips.I have not been to New York City since 2014, when everything started to fall apart. I don't expect this trip to perform some kind of miraculous reversal, but I would enjoy no further catastrophes. This time we're staying with one of my mother's cousins in Brooklyn, which always feels like a family story. Both of my grandparents were born there. My great-grandfather's pharmacy was on Coney Island Avenue, where there were fountain sodas and my grandmother played as a child with drops of mercury, magical and shivering; my grandfather was born at the corner of Broadway and Hooper, where his parents ran a general store—"5¢, 10¢, 19¢ and Up"—by the Hewes Street BMT Station. I do not think any traces of either remain except in books, memories, old address listings on the internet. After they left for graduate school, they never lived in New York again, although they retained it for the rest of their lives in their voices and their stories. My grandmother died in Portland, my grandfather in Boston. Every time we visit Coney Island, somehow I expect to find them there in the crowds. They would be separate—they didn't meet until Iowa—but I would recognize them.
I lost time looking at maps of Brooklyn. We are into the salt marshes now, tawny as fall. The open water is a richer blue than the sky, wind-corrugated; the snow is a thin subsiding skim at the edges of rocks and the lee sides of trees and the dry stone walls that run beside the tracks have no webbing of ice between them. An enormous white swan is preening on a half-submerged boulder, watched by a quizzical shorebird. We seem to have reached Connecticut. If I see Richmond City, I'll give a call.
1. Passengers were also reminded to wear their shoes when entering the restrooms, which good God who wouldn't.
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The guard on my train up to Darlington from Kings Cross on Thursday launched into some long, rambling story over the PA, which I think was about not putting your shoes on the seats, but it took him so long to get to his point I'd literally jammed my fingers in my ears long before he had finished. He had another one later that seemed to be about not drinking the tapwater in the restrooms, which good God, who would ;)
(Common feature of both stories seemed to be treating us like 5yos who needed scary stories not to do stuff, which didn't really impress).
ETA: And I hope you have a nice, catastrophe free visit to NYC!
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Aaaaaaaaugh.
And I hope you have a nice, catastrophe free visit to NYC!
Thank you! It was not only catastrophe-free (except for maybe our hats—
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Beautifully observed. I usually sit by the left-hand window, for the Sound. I hope this sojourn in New York lifts your spirits immeasurably.
Nine
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I like your trains too.
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Also, I like the idea of you running into your young grandparents on Coney Island. And drops of mercury--I remember a thermometer breaking and my mother showing me what the drops did: wonderful to touch them and bring them into union with one another (worth the danger).
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"If Custer's horse can take it, why can't you?"
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Moral of the story: Tamiflu works! I was wiped out on Monday, but I ran around Brooklyn (and a little of Manhattan) on Tuesday and Wednesday on the usual amount of sleep and I was not dead today. I was so glad it all worked out.
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Thank you. It was a wonderful time.
I don't get enough salt marsh generally.
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It was a pretty shattering thing to hear in the middle of an otherwise routine rundown of railway security.
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Thank you.
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I'm answering all of these comments days after the fact! Letters are always a form of time travel.
The scene of the salt marsh and the swan! Thank you so much for describing that. I have a beautiful image in my head now.
You're very welcome. It's a landscape I miss.
Also, I like the idea of you running into your young grandparents on Coney Island.
I might try to do something with it. Right now I don't seem to think in poetry or prose. Also I am still looking for a home for the poem about my grandparents and World War II.
And drops of mercury--I remember a thermometer breaking and my mother showing me what the drops did: wonderful to touch them and bring them into union with one another (worth the danger).
I can just remember seeing a mercury thermometer break when I was very small: I don't think I was allowed to touch them. I just remember the silver trembling on the pink sand-colored tiles of the bathroom floor.
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