Sometimes lying in my bed in Brooklyn I think I hear a freight train horn. Half asleep, I picture the box cars clacking past out beyond street after street of brownstones, maybe as far as Prospect Expressway. But then I wake up enough to remember that no such train exists.
By then, I don’t know whether or not I merely dreamed that moan of the horn. I’ve heard people say that it comes from tug boats on the Gowanus Canal down the hill.
When I was little in Jackson, Mississippi, we heard the evening train from the north as it crawled toward New Orleans. Way back in my memories where the flow of experience becomes only fragments, where moments in this reality first started sticking to my brain, my parents would sometimes tell us to all get in the back of my father’s red pickup to go watch the train pass along North State Street a few blocks away.
Hurry! Hurry!
I was worried we wouldn’t get there in time.
We tumbled around in the truck bed imagining that my father was speeding down Keele Street when he was probably only going 15 mph.
We parked at the gas station on the corner of Culley and North State. I see a round orange “Gulf” sign in my mind, but I could be wrong.
It was sunset. Just past sunset. The train was rumbling by, almost a silhouette against an orange sky.
We cheered and shouted “Choo! Choo!” For an extended moment, I was incandescent with joy over the simple fact that a train was there. We had rushed there to see the train. Here it was! And it was always so very much like a train. Obviously more detailed than the wooden abstractions with wheels, rolling geometric shapes, in the pre-school classroom. Heavier and more angular than the trains in my “The Little Engine Who Could” book, not to mention lacking faces. But very much like big versions of the cars from the abandoned train set in the back of my brother’s closet.
But seeing the train was the only event, so the thrill subsided pretty quickly. We kids began looking at our parents for cues. We’ve seen the train. Now what?
But my mother and father were lost in a dreamy twilight peace. I think my sister was still small enough to be held. We stared in silence as endless box cars rattled past followed by tankers that clearly looked like bottles. What sort of liquid was inside? Then more box cars.
As a parent now, and a parent many years past the age my mother and father were in that Gulf parking lot, I know that quiet bubble they were in so well. It’s not just any quiet moment when the kids are occupied and you can take a breath. It’s a moment when the angel flies by. Someone might paint a picture of a young family standing by a red pickup, watching a slow train pass, the blood orange of evening painting the whole scene at a sharp angle. Or over by the pump, maybe William Eggleston wedges his perpetual cigarette in his fingers and snaps us with his Leica. It’s a moment when you’re in your own picture and you know it or, on some level, something in you knows “I’m standing in the picture of my life.”
Lately I’ve been thinking about how strange it is to see where everyone in that picture is now. My parents have both passed. The four of us kids are scattered around the eastern half of the country. Yet, in some way or another, we see ourselves as those people in that Gulf parking lot.
Each of us has a different bubble, of course. But we all share some snapshot of four children in a little house in North Jackson.
Scientists describe how the Big Bang started with some tiny point … (When? Where? There was no “time” or “space” yet!) … a tiny point where the entire universe was pressed together. The whole unimaginably vast universe traces back to that pinpoint in nothing.
And family can feel that way, flung by some explosion out into the world from a compressed little snapshot of people shouting “Choo! Choo!” at a freight train.
As I’ve aged, I’ve discovered that I am literally incapable of not saying “It’s goes so fast!” to parents with young children. Because it does. But part of me wants to say to them, “This part will also seem like forever when you look back on it. As though time slowed down almost to the frozen speed of eternity. A version of you will spend eternity on that carousel as your daughter laughs. A version of you, 20 years from now, 40 years, will see the exact moment of securing one of the ponies that goes up and down as the picture of your life. That film clip will play on a loop on some spiritual plane.”
Sitting on the edge of that pickup bed as the train rolled by, I could feel how my parents were in their film strip, and they were looking at something beyond the train. And even though I know very well now that the Presto factory that made deep fryers was just on the other side of the tracks, my heart tells me that beyond the train was some undiscovered country like Narnia, full of golden light.
Instead of taking me back to any one day with my own kids, this rumination takes me to a memory ten years before I became a father.
My wife and I are sitting in a hamburger grill at the far end of a row of shops on the ocean promenade in Cape May, New Jersey. The back opens onto the beach, and a breeze blows through the restaurant.
It is late in the afternoon on a sun-slanting cloudless day, and we have absolutely nothing we have to do. We’re eating crinkle-cut fries and drinking chocolate shakes.
We couldn’t have been freer from the worries of parenthood.
My wife had taken a summer acting job at a dinner theater. Our rent on our East Village apartment back in the city was ridiculously cheap. I was making more than enough money working two days a week on a graveyard shift that paid double time. Every week of the summer I took a bus that wound through every little town south of Atlantic City to get to Cape May where I hung out with Justine, going to the beach and sipping a stinky Scotch while watching her corny plays at the dinner theater, like an absurd Western narrated by an actor in a white wig playing Mark Twain with cowboys and “gals” in low cut dresses who burst into pop songs with karaoke accompaniment.
Cape May is a resort town at the southernmost tip of New Jersey full of gingerbread Victorian houses. There are two arcades, two mini-golf courses and two Fudge Kitchens where there’s always someone out front offering dice-sized samples and the promise that anyone who buys two pounds of their creamy fudge would also get some of their salt water taffy as a bonus.
Later when we had kids, we started bringing them down every year, staying in the same hotel with its postage stamp-sized pool, across the street from the promenade. At the opposite end of the shops where the now long-gone grill used to be, there was a candy and trinket shop called Morrow’s Nut House. We always tried to book the balcony room where we could see the ocean just beyond Morrow’s.
Year after year we’ve gone, from when my daughter rode a fiberglass zebra round and round on a mini carousel in front of the arcade until her little brother was a sulky teenager hiding out up on the roof of the hotel all night. It’s looking like this year, both kids, now in their twenties, can’t go.
But back in that hamburger grill, back in our film clip, Justine and I are sitting young and child-free, eating our fries and drinking our shakes.
It is the end of summer.
I think my heart picks this bubble because twenty years of bringing children to this quaint beach town sprang from that moment, from those soft days. Everything that has happened since then is really just a dream we’re dreaming at that Formica table as the waves crash and a symphony of beeps, dings and electronic chirps plays from the arcade next door.
I said that just seeing the train was the only event, but I forgot that there was another thrill.
These evening trains were long. I suppose the train left Chicago and picked up freight all the way to New Orleans. By the time the train reached Jackson, it had added cars in Kankakee, Champagne, Carbondale, Memphis, Greenwood. As the cars endlessly crawled past, an impatience took hold of us.
So we’ve seen the train. What next? Why are we still here? What are we waiting for?
The caboose!
We’re waiting for the caboose!
Somehow all the pre-school discussions of trains had invested the caboose with a mythology. It was a little red cabin at the end of the train where some man performed unspecified duties. Just being in the caboose was fun. Being the caboose man was fun. He was happy.
Just by being the end of the train, the caboose was magical.
I began hallucinating the approaching caboose in the distance, already in the shadow of the evening, only to keep seeing more box cars fan out around the slight bend in the tracks.
As I muse upon this memory after hearing the mysterious horn in the Brooklyn night, the drama of waiting for the caboose feels symbolic.
For a while … a year? ten years? for the 40 years since I left Mississippi? … I’ve felt a bubbling, mysterious impatience, like the impatience I felt watching that long train pass. Now, suddenly, I am remembering the approaching caboose.
I’m 60. Mentally, I feel 20. But I’m now experiencing undeniable signs of real aging. My sore feet and aching back and the way stairs seem harder to climb hit me with a shock of discovery: “Oh! THIS is aging!”
We all start pretending we’re old at 40. We say to the 25-year old “Just you wait! Oh boy!” as we still leap to a catch a frisbee on the beach. Then you wake up at 60, attempt the transfer from bed to feet in the pale dawn and notice that something very real has changed. Nothing all that dramatic. An inexplicable numbness here or a pinprick there. And in that moment, you know with utter clarity that while “age is only a number” and “you still have a rich and rewarding life ahead of you,” you have just taken the first step on the path to decrepitude.
So you naturally start thinking about the big black caboose.
When a 55-year old drops dead out of nowhere, people weep and shout “Such a tragedy!” When a 72-year old drops dead out of nowhere, people shake their heads and say, “Aw, that’s so sad to hear.”
And the 60-year old thinks, “Damn, he was only twelve years older than me. Only twelve more years or less until people aren’t shocked if I drop dead out of nowhere.”
Hopefully my life will be as long as those freight trains on that last leg on the journey to New Orleans. But I do find myself squinting down the line of cars sliding into view.
The caboose is coming.
Eventually, my father would say “Get ready. Here it comes. Here it comes.”
The brick-colored cabin glides past.
A man is there, leaning on the low iron fence at the edge of the narrow platform outside the caboose door. The red glow of his cigarette is a tail light for the train. He gives us a big wave as he recedes into the gloaming, into the night time.
Way off at the edge of hearing, the engine blows another long moan.
I open my eyes, and I’m lying in my bed in Brooklyn. Did I really hear that?
Kenny Nowell 