Philadelphia: where graffiti got its start

Riding back from the Big Apple on an Amtrak Keystoner, I watched the sky go from gray to blue as we neared Philadelphia.  It was that time in the afternoon when that glitter thing can happen, and Philly's graffiti was lit up, as if for a show.  Modern graffiti (for of course there were cave painters eons ago) started here, the legends go, in the early 1960s.  Cornbread and Cool Earl left their tracks everywhere.  Embellishment ensued.

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The World Going By (on an Amtrak train, with a migraine)

By the time I left New York City yesterday, I wasn't well—a massive migraine had set in and all the dizziness that accompanies the condition. I clung to the pole of the subway for dear life, stood against the wall of Penn Station hoping not to fall, crept carefully down the station steps to the train. I chose the left side of the first car. Could not read. Could not talk. Could only look at whatever was flying past the panes.

The storm had broken. The sun knocking against the wet world yielded a brilliant gold pink, so that the windows of churches were on fire and the concrete smoke stacks surged and all those abandoned brick cities and towers of rubble and runny waterways collected unto themselves a beauty that made me melancholy, for it was all going by so quick, and I did not have a camera. The sky was tripartite. Parts of it were the color of Sasha Cohen's lilac-gray competition dress. (Did you see Sasha Cohen's extraordinary dress?)

I glanced across the aisle toward the opposite windows, where the world wasn't bright, but dull gray. It's your lucky day, I thought to myself. And in some ways, it was.

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