Train Diaries, Day 3.

 

I am yet again marveling at how willing, even eager, people are to tell their stories.  There’s a sense of occasion on a train.  Everyone here chose the slow way, crawling across the vast landscape in this anachronistic vehicle, through a country that's forested and mountainous on the edges, full of corn and wheat and canola in the flat middle, experiencing the barricades that stop traffic from the side that clangs and lists as it slows down.

 I had breakfast today with a woman bringing her grandchildren back to their home in Manhattan after spending time with her in Cali.  The conversations always start out with the basics – where are you headed, where did you get on the train, how do you like it, blah blah blah.  But within a few minutes, if you show a morsel of interest, you get the downlow.  You learn about the estranged, drug-addicted brother, the twenty years of caring for a vain mother, the son’s weird in-laws.  The $700 Lego set that you bought for your grandson on your fixed income, because, “it’s grandma’s job to encourage passions, and if he wants to build the titanic out of plastic blocks, that’s not for me to judge.”  

She told me that her son’s in-laws redecorate their giant Connecticut house every two years, and recently spent $60K on a patio remodel, but never spend time with the grandchildren. “No offense,” she said, “but they’re REALLY white.”

 We talked about dusting.  (Me:  I dust every two years and call it redecorating.  Her, laughing: In the Hispanic culture, we have a saying, “Only dust where your mother-in-law will see.  But I have no mother-in-law! And no boyfriend! I’m free at last!," she exclaimed.  "I can finally do exactly what I want.  I run around the house naked when I feel like it!”

She told me about capturing a photo of a hawk swooping down to snatch a kitten from the neighbor’s backyard.  “Cycle of life,” she remarked.

I talked with a mother, travelling to return her 10 year old son to his dad’s house for the school year.  “This isn’t how I thought it would be,” she said, tearing up.

It’s like the train casts a magic spell.   It’s a pretty easy way to fall in love with the humans.

In other news, today I changed my shirt and braided my hair.  Lost my glasses and then found them.  (That’s not a metaphor.  It really happened.)