Catching the Acela

              

     As I get older, I sometimes treat myself to an upgrade when I travel— a slightly better (though far from luxurious) hotel than the motel I usually go to; or business rather than coach class on the train to Chicago.  It was a bit more of a leap than that when, for the Washington-New York leg of a trip east to see what was in the museums and warm my roots a bit, I bought myself an (expensive) ticket on the Acela.

               I had first seen this marvel of a train one summer when I was boarding the Lakeshore Limited in Boston’s South Station, on my way home to Detroit.  The first leg of that trip involves a slow haul over the Berkshires at maybe twenty miles an hour, huffing and puffing all the way up like the Little Engine that Could.  But there, right on the other side of our boarding platform, sat an engine crafted out of gleaming steel, its long streamlined nose regarding us lesser passengers haughtily.  It was reputed, I remembered, to accomplish what in France they term  TGV—“très grande vitesse”—a speed of 120 miles an hour.

                             

           Now, I’m going to take that someday,” I promised myself; and so I did.

           There is nothing so heart-warming as talking for hours with a friend who (swears she) met you when you were still in your baby carriage.  She has settled at last in a home of her own, a pleasant house in Richmond cozily furnished with pieces I recognize from our Connecticut childhood summers. Her living room is done in  beige tones, the dining room painted dark red, with family portraits impressively arrayed on the walls.  

We sit in her breakfast nook to talk…and talk…and talk, about our youthful shenanigans and our grown up daughters, about what is going on in Washington politics these days and what is going on with our grandchildren,  all interlarded with “organ recitals,” recounting our illnesses and recoveries and exclaiming how lucky we are to still be here—laughing and gossiping and philosophizing while I revel in expressions I had thought disappeared forever: 

“What a lark,” she exclaims.

 “Hell's bells,” I find myself saying.

                “Long story short,” we demur frequently as on and on we go, weaving our web of memories with a warmth that only a long, long friendship can engender.                                               
         
            As my visit drew to an end I began to worry about the next leg of my journey, which involved getting back to Washington to catch the Acela for New York.  All tired out from so much fun, I hauled my bag onto a regional train that runs between Newport News and DC.  It seemed pleasant enough, and I found  an empty seat and settled down next to the window, gazing at reeds blowing in the wind and the vista of a broad, misty marshland. As the conductor approached I got out my ticket, and noticed that the train continued on to New York.  Ever nervous about my travel arrangements, I said

               “I see that we go all the way to New York City. Can I stay on if I miss my  connection to the Acela?

               No problem, if we have a seat for you. Worst case scenario, we put you off in DC and you catch the Acela when it comes through.”

               I sat there doing mental arithmetic, which I was never good at.

              1. They put me off in DC.

               2. The Acela, much faster than this regional, comes whistling ‘through.’

                3. If both get to New York City at 5:45, won’t the Acela accelerate itself past where I am put off before we get there?

               4. This depends on how late the regional is.

Recalling puzzlers like “Train A goes at 60 miles per hour and train B goes at 120 miles per hour. If a little old lady is put off of one to catch the other, how many minutes can train A be late to allow her to catch train B,” but  answer comes there none.

               At Fredericksburg, I acquire a seat mate.

               At Quantico, there is an announcement that the train is now full.  I resume my calculations on time/motion train  A vs train B problem, but still to no avail.

               At Woodbridge, I climb over the knees of my seatmate, only to discover that the toilet is out of paper.

               “We are sorry,” comes the announcement,” but all of the toilets on this train are out of paper.”

               My favorite meal on Amtrak is a Hebrew National Hot Dog so full of sodium that I wonder what would happen to me if it raised my blood pressure and triggered a stroke?  Nevertheless, I would really enjoy one just about now.

               Announcement resounds though the car that the café is out of 1. Sprite and 2. hot dogs.

               I would like to take out my knitting, but the seats are so close together that I might find myself elbowing the nice but rather capacious lady sitting next to me.  There is a lot more talking now, some of it quite loud, and children are skittering up and down the aisle. The car is beginning to feel close packed and stuffy; and what is that smell?

               At Alexandria, I look at my watch and discover that it is an hour before my confirmed ticket on the Acela, so  I decide it will be well worth the effort to make the switch and enjoy my treat after all.

               I haul my suitcase into Union Station with plenty of time to lug it to the bookstore where I buy a Wilson Quarterly,  a journal so full of wonky articles and well reasoned book reviews that it is always good for a train journey.

            I am sitting in the waiting area absently scanning the announcement board when time/motion problem is solved by my discovery that there is an Acela every hour. It must have been the next one I was supposed to “hop on” to, though how to achieve that without a reservation is not entirely clear. Perhaps these luxury trains never fill up entirely?

               I love walking down the platform alongside a train, refreshed by air so much cooler than inside.  This time, there is the gratification of glancing up at the gleaming, streamlined engine I had so envied in Boston.  As we get underway through the rail yards and begin to pick up speed in Maryland, we  move along the tracks, in contrast to the regional’s bumps and grinds, like a knife through butter.  Soon everything is going by so fast that I don’t have my usual chance to identify the duck on a particular pond or what crops are at what stage—the landscape seen from an Acela is more prototypical than particular, affording the general idea of meadow or forest, like a kind of Platonic ideal.

 The seats are capacious and comfortable, with a surfeit of leg room and plenty of space between, though I am without a seat mate at the moment.  Perfect, I  realize, for knitting! I am working on a little yellow baby sweater for a friend’s first grandchild and need to get on with it as I am hosting her granny shower right after I get home, so I take to  knitting and purling in blissful comfort.

          That is, until I notice rows of finely tailored trousers relaxed between seats and foot rests in all the seats around me. Good heavens! My car is occupied by men in elegant, well fitting (bespoke?) suits, who must be  Very Important People.   I recall that the Acela is much frequented by Senators and Congressmen—Joe Biden and all that—and isn’t that Brent Scowcroft sitting across the aisle, glancing at me with mild surprise before politely averting his eyes?  It must be unusual among this dapper crowd to spy a lady in red blazer, pink blouse, and pearls carrying on with her knitting.  I don’t feel “unimportant” to myself—Full Professor, Feminist Founder,  Academic Author and all that—but I must look unimportant to them. I wonder if there is a car full of well-dressed, powerful women somewhere on this train, or can they afford it?   

Never mind—there are those lovely pastures streaming by and the intimate windows of cities to glance (fleetingly) into, so I turn my sweater to a purl row, though I am beginning to get awfully hungry.

               Walking through the cars to find something to eat, I pass an enclosure with armchairs and little tables and a sign affixed to the glass that identifies it as a “Quiet Room—no Cellphones or Children.”  There are elegantly suited women working busily at their laptops, and a dapper executive’s legs stretching out from his Wall Street Journal.  I am surprised to find that the dining arrangements are the same as on the regional, just a café with no Hebrew National Hot Dogs on offer but adequate if plain sandwiches and good strong coffee.

Returning to my seat, I notice right at the beginning of my car that a tiny  lady, probably in her sixties, is perched on a  stool provided for a laptop table, busily tapping away while urgently telling someone at the other end of her cell phone how to prepare the room for  a speech she is going to make at the Hilton.  Then I settle down with my Wilson Quarterly noticing that, as always on a moving train, I am suddenly capable of grasping concepts that otherwise elude me.  Soon, however, I need to visit the bathroom   (Toilet Paper! Clean Sink! Scented Hand Soap!) and on the way back walk slowly enough to read over the urgently busy lady’s shoulder.  The masthead of her stationary reads

                           REPAIRING THE WORLD!

 Good for her, I say to myself, thinking of Tikum Olam, that marvelous creation story where God sent his light into the world with such power and glory that it broke all the jars he had set out to contain it, their shards scattering all over the universe so that we human beings are left to repair the world by collecting the thousand thousand things and refashioning their containers. Good for the tiny  lady repairing the world on her laptop and cell phone and good for the women working away in the quiet room and for all of these busy, dapper men, too, if they are of honest intent, and good for me and my friends renewing the light of our friendship, I revel, as we streak through the wetlands of New Jersey at more miles per hour than I have ever experienced on a train before, until the towers of the city where I was born  rise in all their splendor out of the marshes.

                   

LAUNDRY!

                                     

          When I was a little girl growing up in New York City, I was fascinated by flip flapping of sheets, blouses, shirts, towels, overalls and underwear taking sail on the wind between buildings. Sometimes I happened on the scene at the very moment that a satisfied-looking woman leaned out of her kitchen window, reeling out her line on a winch.  There would be another winch attached to the building across the way, and a peculiarly melodic sound would resonate as the ropes passed through them, like a jazzy riff on a creaky clarinet.

            I always considered those long lines of sheets and shirts a miracle of hominess expressing something going on in those apartments that I had always yearned for. My own mother, poor soul, hadn’t a clue about how to do laundry. She had been raised with maids and cooks and, undoubtedly, laundresses, but found herself downwardly mobile, raising two children in a tiny apartment on one of those narrow New York Streets, wondering where all the maids had disappeared to. She did the best she could with a bar of fels naptha in the bathroom sink, but I sensed in those triumphantly flapping lines of radiantly clean laundry something permanently beyond my reach.

A couple of years ago my brother and I compared notes about this, remembering how stiff our underwear had always been and how we had itched all over because the soap was never rinsed out entirely.  Besides, our little underpants were dried on top of the radiators and always turned out stiff as boards.

            He had been married to a wonderful young woman for a while when I first went to visit them in their new home.  We were drinking coffee in their kitchen as my sister-in-law took the laundry out of a washing machine that stood within easy reach of the sink and stove.

            “Can I help you,” I asked, awed by the orderliness of her arrangements. As we stood side by side, folding each piece just so, I couldn’t believe how soft their towels and sheets felt in my hands. Was this some kind of miracle!

            “How did they get this way?”

              My brother laughed sympathetically.

            “Isn’t it wonderful! She uses something called softener!”

They have been a devoted couple, head over heels in love with each other for more than fifty years now. At that time in my (itchy) life, nonetheless, I would have married her myself for the way she did the laundry.

My father’s horror when he offered me a baby gift and I asked for a washing machine suggests that our childhood laundry sufferings derived as much from class haughtiness as mother’s ineptitude. Reluctantly, he paid for a gleaming white object from Sears and had it delivered to our first home, a little stone cottage on a college campus.  It had a fenced in laundry yard where I set up an umbrella-style contraption with four layers of lines to pull my laundry towards me and push it away again.  They hadn’t invented disposables yet, but I bought a bottle of softener and had lovely times hanging row after row of fragrant cloth diapers, receiving blankets, little shirts and sweaters out to dry in the New England sunshine.

            You don’t see washing flapping between buildings in New York any more, and I am aware that my childhood fascination with it was naïve given the endless drudgery of tenement life in those days. In my wanderings around museums and galleries, however, I have discovered that there are any number of artists inspired by laundry.    

Martin Lewis’s print of an emaciated housewife weakly clasping her clothes line, having reeled it right  into a glowering dusk, expresses the toil and exhaustion from all that heavy washing. Every time I happen upon his depictions of New York in the twenties and thirties I gasp with recognition. In my memory, my childhood seems to have taken place in black and white rather than in color, and his New York noir is  dappled with light and shadow just like mine.

But then there is Egon Schiele’s  cityscape of a European city from much earlier in the century, “Houses With Colorful Laundry”

              Though the houses are bleak and the sky looming over them ominous, someone has  strung up their washing with orderly devotion, like Tibetan prayer flags.

            When we moved into our present home in a Detroit suburb, I noticed that there was a hook for a laundry line on the maple tree and that I could run a laundry line  to a pole discreetly concealed behind some lilacs.  As a writer who sets her own schedule, I have always found it helpful to allot chores to their traditional days of the week — yard chores and household repairs on Saturdays, for example, and laundry on Mondays (I observe the Sabbath by turning off my computer).  I hoped that my neighbors, who were evidently upwardly mobile, would not feel demeaned if I hung out my washing; keeping it to Mondays seemed to insure their toleration.

            When I would arrive home with my brain fried and my nerves frazzled after a semester of teaching, I loved those first warm days of June when I could hang out my wash in my yard. I would lovingly fasten each corner to my line with wooden clothes pins, bury my nose in the fragrance of sun warmed sheets and pillowcases, and discreetly arrange my softened and now capacious underpants among the lilacs,  blissfully reciting Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” to myself:

                        “Oh let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

                          Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

                          And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

                             

                       

OBITUARY HEADLINES

                                       (Warning! There will be homework!)                      

           

            I never looked at obituaries until my husband lay dying, when, railing that older people had lived longer than he would while feeling immense gratitude for our forty years together— so much longer than the younger of the newly dead had with their loved ones—I began scanning obituary headlines, wondering what to put for his. When the sad day came I didn’t get to make the decision after all, and the reporter got it backwards—“Author was also Professor”  (Professors become Authors to get their salaries raised).

            In the months after he died I felt as if my nose was pressed to an invisible window that he had fallen out of but which unaccountably held me back from the same abyss. Shaken by timor mortis— abject terror at the realization of mortality—I kept reading obituary headlines, which deftly compress a life in three to six words.

I have always liked set forms— the seventeen syllable Haiku and the fourteen line sonnet —and those obituary headlines, rounding out a whole life in a tidy phrase, displayed a terse and even elegant economy.                                                   

(names changed)

James Woods, 40; Studied Structure of the Universe.

                                                         Now that would be a hard act to follow.

Louise Brooks, Birdsong Dialects Expert.

                                                                                    Specialized, but so compact!

Jeffrey Moore: Rode with Camel Troops 

Annie Kung, Lived in Leper Colony; Was 94

                                                                Fascinating: but rather exotic?

Andrew Eastwood, Credited for Heart Clinic's Strength

Lloyd Sarkoski, 64, dies; Crafted Cozy Restaurants

                                                                           Nice, solid  accomplishments!

Alfred Bearens, Detroit Accountant Put Family First

Ellis Marks, Obstetrician Loved Time with Family.

                                                    Did they? Is someone protesting too much here?

Bud French, 76, Mail Carrier Loved His Family, Cards and Music.

                                                                        Now this shows more balance!

Micah Washnoski: Music he made, Friends he Kept.          

                                                                           My favorite.

And, finally:              

Norbert Tilsley, War Taught Him Its Inhumanity

                 This has to be true -no fluff in it - and suggests an ethical legacy.

            You know where I am going, gentle reader, so throw this down if you don’t want to go there with me—Can you sum up your whole life in three to five words?    

I’ll go first, just to show I’m not (help!) chicken:

Annis Pratt: Commuting Professor Comes to Earth.

           

                        Or, how about

Annis Pratt: Quit Teaching, Went Kayaking?

           

Sad, isn’t it? Or is it? There is an exercise like this they do at self-search workshops— write your own obituary; it will help you find out what you want to live for.

So get out your pencil and paper: just your name, then three to five words:

...........   ...........            .................. ................... .............. ............... .................

Try a Professional One:               

                                     ........... .............   .................   ................   .....................

Or a Funny One:                                

                                    .......... .................   .................... ..............   ..................

Show what life has taught you:           

                                    .............   .............    .................      ..............  ………..

            After all, once we figure out what our legacies will have been, we might relish our existence with even more exuberance, since we are still alive and kicking!

INSATIABLE CURIOSITY

              There was a video shown on television the other day of a family in a boat who were cutting the net in which a very large whale was entangled.  It drifted out of their reach again and again and, each time, they eased their boat skillfully up to it and went carefully to work with their cutters on the tough plastic tangle. When it was finally free, it swam about a quarter of a mile off, and then threw itself into a tremendous display of breeching, tail flipping, rolling, and monumental merriment.                

                                                         

            “Look at that! Look at that,” the television newsman exclaimed, “it’s thanking them!” 

            That last bit is what we call anthropomorphism, which is when we attribute human characteristics to beings that are not human.  Of course, the whale could have been trying to communicate gratitude, but all that we really know is that it was expressing some kind of emotion, its cavorting most likely a self-referential exuberance at being free at last.

            There is one emotion, however, that we do share with animals – curiosity. In his Just So Stories, written for children curious about “How the Leopard Got Its Spots” and other animal mysteries, Rudyard Kipling chose “the Elephant’s Child” as an exemplar of “insatiable curiosity.”  In “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” a young elephant, spanked all the time by his relatives for asking too many questions, is determined to travel down to the “great, greasy banks of the Limpopo River, all hung about with fever trees” because he just has to know what the crocodile eats for dinner.

            I should point out that, at this point in elephant evolution (according to Kipling) elephants have only short stubs for noses, which is what the crocodile grabs after answering the little elephant’s question with “Today, I think I will begin with Elephant’s Child.”

   

   “This is the Elephant's Child having his nose pulled by the Crocodile. He is much surprised and astonished and hurt, and he is talking through his nose and saying. 'Led go! You are hurtig be!' He is pulling very hard, and so is the Crocodile” (Kipling’s caption)

           That roil in the foreground is the bicoloured python rock snake, which comes to the Elephant's Child's aid by grabbing his tail and pulling.  As a child filled to the tips of my ears with insatiable curiosity (and perpetually in trouble for it) I adored it when the Elephant’s Child went home and used his new trunk to punish his all his scornful relatives.

            Animals, especially brainy mammals like whales and elephants (not to mention dogs and cats) are exquisitely curious; which is how, as Kipling seems to be suggesting,  they evolved so highly in the first place.

            Late one August when I was ten years old  I was sitting on a beach in Maine wrapped in a towel to warm up from my swim in the icy Atlantic Ocean, when I noticed a whiskery old codger bobbing around in the surf right next to my brother.

            “Who was that?” I asked, when he came ashore.

            “I don’t know—a little old man with a beard?  He kept looking at me!”

            Then my father came down with my brother’s towel, and remarked:

            “Did you see that seal? It’s an old one—it’s almost September. At this time of year, they swim onto the beach to die.”        

              Even with his last gasp upon him, the elderly seal was indulging his curiosity.

              Sixty years later, I had an experience on Cape Cod that confirmed for me, once and for all, how curious animals are:

                                                    SEAL WATCHING

                                                We went out to watch the seals

                                                 outboard motor roaring, bow up,

                                                waves cleft by our wash,  then down,           

                                                as we slowed abreast of the pod.

                                                 Black heads shaped like hammers

                                                 swiveled to watch us, nostrils flared

                                                 as a constant snaffle gasping

                                                 filled the air. There were grey ones

                                                  with oval heads:  females

                                                  and young. There were couples

                                                  and half grown friends, and a gang

                                                  of bachelors rolling their necks

                                                   around each other.  Rubbing noses,

                                                   playing tag, playing “let’s splash,”

                                                   their liquid eyes swung around to us,

                                                   time and again.

                                               

                                                   The next day, I walked by the ocean,

                                                    my bare feet cooled by the sand

                                                    where tumbling pebbles turned and gleamed

                                                    and sand pipers skittered and mewed.

                                                   Two boys were leaping about.

                                                   They played tag and splashed

                                                    each trying to jump higher than the other in the air

                                                    while two young seals swam along

                                                 

                                                    beside them.  Sleek  heads

                                                    raised above the waves at every shout,

                                                    eyes gleamed to follow the play,

                                                    They gazed and gazed. 

                                               

                                                    The Dalai Lama says we should regard

                                                    all sentient beings as equals.

                                               

                                                    We go out seal watching,

                                                    Seals swim as close as they dare

                                                    bestowing  curious stares—

                                                         It seems to go both ways.