Hop a Train

Next time you're feeling wordemptyimagehollow, hop a train. You are going to hear someone sing (real low). You are going to watch someone struggle. You are going to look out the window and see some kiddy pool caught up in the limb spokes of a tree.

Someone will tell you a story.

Yesterday, for example, I was coming home from Baltimore when I got lucky. Sat beside Stacey Patton, an historian and writer whose new book is THAT MEAN OLD YESTERDAY. Not an easy book, but a fierce, smart one, and not Stacey's last book either, that's for certain. We got to talking. She pulled, from her bag, a box of postcards. Not happy, wish you were here postcards, but disturbing bits of the historic record that she's been buying off collectors for a while, images of African American children as drawn by ugly-minded men. Stacey's writing about this, mulling this, telling me about this on the train, and despite the harsh hurt of her subject matter, her passion for it all is glorious, and I just sat, and I just listened, thinking: An hour ago, I knew nothing of this.

I've sat beside poets on trains, who started dancing right in the middle of some grand poeticizing. I've sat behind diva girls. I've sat in front of couples who started out fighting and ended up (end of the line) back in love again. Something always happens on a train, and there's always rhythm wending up and through it.