Train

We lent our old car to our son while he was waiting for the insurance company and buying a new car this week. I have been taking Bob to the train in the morning and this disel pushes the three huge cars east to Dallas from Hurst-Bell (Helicopter) just six or so miles north of us. It is a back-roads drive down "Greenbelt" to the station through some bottom land and the Trinity River. Most mornings are foggy, and the land there is swampy. I can't imagine anyone ever having a farm down there, but we pass an old hay field, and have lost count of the critters. Coyote, raccoon, possom... on an old two lane road.

At 6:10am it is still dark, and with headlights we creep down the road way too fast for my comfort...and once I drop Bob off, I get back on the Trinity Boulevard road that parallels the tracks for a space. With no leaves on the trees, the train speeds east next to bare trees that shadow it with flashes and once the train disappears under the overpass, it is like the train has entered a portal into another diminsion. My husband is gone from me...disappearing into another time and space of concrete and tall buildings and traffic, meetings and co-workers and computer challenges, for the next ten to twelve hours.

The sun is bright when I go to pick him up. So bright and low that I have to use the sun visor. I get to see the bottomland in the light, and notice they are actually going to build something? stakes and flags and trenches with a guard hut and heavy machinery seen in the light of day. What can they be thinking? When it rains and floods, all these roads are not passable. We have to take other routes. This is a flood plain. Who in their right mind??

But, I want to remember these mornings of warm lips and smeared glasses and the ghostly train that winks out into another diminsion...as my husband enters another world where he works so hard and spends his energy and life, spilt out for us. Yes, he enjoys his job, thankfully. But, his mind is such that he would prefer no interuptions, no distractions. Walls and a door would be nice, but no, the company puts them in cubicle farms like chickens to lay more eggs. While I get to lay about the house and play on this computer, and write of warm kisses and smeared glasses and the lights of a train speeding east to the mean old streets of Dallas.