Drive to an Airport (March 16, 2010)

Driving forever

in silence

longing for chatter

or merely a touch

of kindness

from

a silent son

who frowns at secrets

...at me?

recall

of a younger life

when silence

did not exist

chatter   mirth   song

all parts of the black-haired

boy

with pumpkin-sized eyes

talking to me

just us in the world

Trains of Reality - Conclusion

(CONCLUSION)

Although vague, and threatened with tragedy by the laws of chance, the future can be anticipated without dread thanks to the past.  To some, life illustrates that only the past and present are certainties.  We know them so well, like sleeping in the same comfortable bed each night or tripping over the same wrinkle in the old living room rug.  Then after-all, the past and the present are what the future becomes; all that is real; all that must be accepted.

Trains of Reality - Part 4

(PART - 4)

Returning to Reno, I was now looking forward to graduation and to the new position of self-sufficiency.  For most people the thought of renting an apartment up a tilted flight of creaking wooden stairs in the middle of the slum section of town just wouldn't sound appealing at all.  For me it was the practical thing to do; low rent and starting at the bottom, like the old Third Ward eighteen years before.   

But reality doesn't end at the bottom.  Progress is also real.  So matching my wits against those that formulate college entrance exams, I succeeded in being accepted at Brigham Young University.  And once again another train, another awakening.

Arriving in January for the spring semester, I felt a splendid aura of newness in the phenomenon of majestic nature.  The sun was brilliant, but it could just as well have been cloudy.  The mountains were cleverly carved in ice, but could have been entirely void of snow.  The impact would have been the same.

Persons passed by at a pace slow enough to count, calm enough to be reassuring, and aimed with confident direction.  For once, I found a part of reality so good that to me it seemed UNreal!

Trains of reality - Part 3

Kris was my best friend and even more naive than myself - for awhile.  On the weekends, when we rode into the city and observed life in its most crowded and complex setting, our naivete quickly diminished.   More than a few times we lost each other boarding subway cars, as we attempted to climb in between the fat lady with the seven packages, and the white whiskered old Chinaman with the bottle of Jim Beam, or any other of several noticeable but nameless persons.

It seemed like the whole world was in New York City.  In Rockefeller Center we saw a man without legs moving speedily along the ground on a tiny flat board with four tiny wheels.  In Central Park we met a pervert lurking in some beautiful, if now tainted, rose bushes.   In Greenwich Village we intellectualized with the Bohemians of MacDougal's Alley.  The whole world, as least in New York City, was juggling awake my sense of understanding and preparing me to return home where I would soon assume a new role.

Trains of Reality - Part 2

The new house was so exciting!  It had paint on the outside instead of darkened blackened planking, and there was a basement and lawn and polished hard wood floors that never cricked nor squeaked with splintering.  There was a picture-window permitting a view of the lazy-moving Allegheny River against the rolling Allegheny foothills.   But looking in from the outside, this window permitted a view of the same home as 2 Halyday Street; several musty, saw dust filled, brown Mohair chairs heaped with colorful paraphernalia reminding one of Jemima styled cleaning ladies on their way to a laundry room.

Still another exciting difference in Reno was high school, although at first it was a near trauma, with its universally adamant prescription for an expensive wardrobe and a large allowance.  Since Mom and Dad could afford me no allowance at all, and since Mom's choice of wardrobe for me from the five & ten cent store was somewhat less than mediocre, I found myself walking to school in baggy cotton skirts and baggy hose, only to face the chagrin of having to borrow a quarter from a friend for the weekly school dance.

After a few months the whole thing became easier to face.  I recalled the Third Ward and found solace in realizing that we were all an integral part of a complex world, like it or not.  But the world was so small until at the age of fifteen, when I was really juggled awake by the clatter of another train, the Long Island Express, as it carried Kris and me to a new home in New York.

Trains of Reality - Part 1

(Part 1)

Morning at 2 Halyday Street, Oil City, Pennsylvania.   A small girl is being gently juggled awake by the trembling earth, as the train rumbles through the nearby tunnel.   Morning then meant greeting a huge moose head mounted above the headboard of the bed.  Then it meant pushing her way past the hairy sentry, and stepping over piles of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, as she randomly chose some unmatched articles of clothing.  Those days in the 'Third Ward' did not seem bad; they were all I knew; they were real.

Life always had a way of waking me to its realities, not harshly but gently, like the rumbling of the seven a.m. north-bound freight.

The Third Ward's most exciting element was the old gray railroad station by the tunnel which long since had been turned into a feed store, then stacked from floor to ceiling with aromatic sacks of seed.   Across the street of brick were several brown and gray brick buildings, all short, all weathered, all smelling of liquor and tobacco, much the same as the old men who used the buildings and sat in Cupola Park next door, there at the old rail depot.

None of the men had any pride nor vanity, in fact no one in the neighborhood did.  We were all alike; somewhat dirty, somewhat dull and very poor.   But in the Third Ward, poverty had no meaning for there was no contrast to it.  Contrast was a few years away in the tiny village of Reno where we would move, and unfortunately, take our part of the Third Ward with us.