The path becomes a place
The zen of train windows. Blur of grass and tree and dust and mountain.
Neighbors from strangers. Don't know their names, but them sleeping there gently head on shoulder. Arm crossing the invisible boundary where the arm rest should lie to find comfort in the warmth of husbands heart and rhythm of his breath. We here all lining the walls of this mechanical terrestrial iron wheeled worm. Sentient perhaps, faintly aglow from the running lights in the ceiling, a phantom in the dusty desert night roaring westward through the brush and crackled ground along a predestined track, bound to indomitable fate by two glistening steel rails stretching forward and backward toward two infinite horizons. Infinite yes to a finite mind, a temporal mind, a drowsy in-and-out of sleep mind. Dozing and waking, moment to moment, each of us bound now, somehow, by this ritual as old as life. This resting of the soul. Together now, perhaps, as we slept our souls mingled without the hindrance of walls and awoke to find somehow more familiar than before, more comfortable than before with these nameless people on all sides.
In the lounge car, people go to talk, commune. Some people never come to the lounge car, never leave their seats, never rouse themselves from the unsatisfying slumber pull the blanket closer to the chin of their fetal bodies curled up like a gerbil in the corner of a cage. I pulled a carrot or a slice of cheese from my bag and ate at the table in the back left corner, where all was before me and nothing behind. Each other table, one on the left and its pair on the right formed a layer in a complex nonsensical narrative. Sometimes I would amuse myself watching and sketching the chaos, and sometimes drown it out with a wash of headphone induced melodies as I dove into another fantastic tale in the Arabian Nights. Yet sometimes the stories of the train were even more fantastic. I heard a man tell me of his cousin who drowned forty feet up in a tree and wasn’t discovered until months afterward when all that remained was a parched skeleton in a pair of jeans bound to the tree by a rope tied at the waist. In his pocket still a wallet to remind his rescuers that once he too had a face and a name. I heard a man tell of a city that was leveled by a ocean wave. All the rubbish that once was house piled tall as that mountain in the window and for miles concrete foundations like headless necks protruded from the barren ground.
At last in Oakland at Jack London Station. Sun not yet setting, but weary. The air, a chilly reminder that Texas is far from here. At the curb my cousin, whom I might as well have never before met, for who was I and who was he when last we met nearly a decade ago but two different people yet formed and transformed by the continual tide of time that has brought us now to converge again and not just in space but perhaps in mind and spirit as well?
Four hours to the mountains, I along with my cousin, his sister, his wife, and his child, canned in a car the size of a matchbox and quiet as a purr. We labored along mountain passes to Kirkwood ski resort near lake Tahoe, where this time of year is warm and quiet. The baby hypnotized in the back carseat by the tiny color crystals of television strapped to the back of daddy’s headrest. Ideals, mother said, came crashing down. The child’s cries must be appeased. Whatever is necessary will be done. Sanity must prevail.
What do two year olds and teenagers really want?
Weekend spent reading and watching and hiking and eating and thanking and quietly quietly waiting. For who am I here? Social stratification yet to be established. I wait. Time will come, yes, time will tell, but not now. Patience now. I wait quietly. Long for nothing. This home is established, this family is established and I the surprise guest. The guest of a guest. Twice removed and so twice cautious. Twice shy and twice gracious.
From the Oakland hills the bay is shrouded in fog. Colors turned to neutral gray. Hovering above the city of San Francisco and ceasing as it reaches the shore a cloud of ambiguous nature. Menacing? Mysterious? Protective? I stand on the short brick wall enclosing the small pool in the backyard and delineating the descent to the next tier of houses below, and peer out into the veiled city. My heart thuds, my blood condenses. There it is. Across the bay. Somewhere among the building block buildings is my home and somewhere among them is my job. And they’re waiting for me to find them.
