Saturday, 04 October 2003 | Trains

I love traveling by train. Getting dropped off directly at the platform, throwing my bags in a seat, and watching as the town and the people shrink and disappear, hands in the air. We slice through hearts of small communities, spying on the people who walk down sidewalks, play soccer in fields, and wait at stoplights. We see the backs of buildings, dilapidated relics and newer, flat cinderblock sheetcakes. We cut through forests and industrial parks, and we sail over water.

There are no seating assignments or metal detectors or check-in gates. Just old paper tickets which get decorated with a puzzling pattern of star-shaped hole punches that litter the train floor like confetti. Conductors wear round flat-topped hats; they call out names of unheard of towns and (really) yell AllAboard, singing it as one word. It feels like visiting the past, minus the reminders: cell phones, SUVs, fashion, Wal-Marts.

My grandmother is 90 years old today. It's impossible for me to know what that means, really; it's like trying to fathom the size of Saturn, or the amount of money spent on the war on Iraq. When she was born—my uncle read to a room full of relatives earlier today—her family had no electricity, and radio had not yet been invented.

In the corner of the room was a collection of pictures of a younger woman with features I recognized. She was absent in one of them; it was of her immediate family and had been taken before she'd been born. Faded and yellow, it was the kind of picture in which no one smiles and the subjects stare ominously back at you from the unfathomable past. I'd brought a couple pictures of her as well, but I accidentally left them, kissing each other, in my bag.

I knew (or had known) most of the people in the room, though few very well; my favorites are still my favorites. We spent three hours (plus) catching up, before returning to our various corners of the country.

...

A man just walked through my car yelling, "Bruce Springsteen tickets! Goin' cheap!"