Today is is dark and damp, grim looking. Nothing is moving in the thick, still air. I’m going nowhere today. I’m not even getting dressed today.
I got to celebrate yesterday. I spent the afternoon with friends. We sat outside around the table and talked, caught up with each other. We dined on cheeseburgers and potato salad, the perfect July 4th foods. It was quiet yesterday, no firecrackers, but I had heard the bangs the night before, late the night before. Neither the cats nor the dog were bothered by the bangs. Henry slept right through.
When I was a kid, summer days felt endless. I was up and gone early, sometimes on my bike, but most summer days I walked down the hill to the playground. I had tennis lessons, played horseshoes and checkers and was on the softball team. I did crafts. One summer I painted a tray for my mother. I was so proud because I, the artless, had perfectly painted the flowers and even the tendrils. I made gimp lanyards for everybody but gimp bracelets for only a chosen few. One Christmas my mother put gimp in my stocking. It had been many years since my gimp days, but my fingers remembered. I made two lanyards.
I love train rides. All of the ones I love are somewhere else. I rode the auto-bus from Quito to Guayaquil. My friend and I were in the first seats. I think that was first class. Anyway, I had to shut my eyes when the driver ran over a chicken and then a few more animals and finally almost a human. If one blow of the horn didn’t get them off the tracks, they were goners. The part of the trip I loved was the ride itself. We went through the banana growing region. We rode a switchback up a mountain. We saw the Andes capped with snow. We rode until the tracks ended, and we had to take a ferry across to Guayaquil.
The train hardly runs in Ghana now. I am sorry for that. I took the train whenever I could, usually from Accra to Kumasi where the train line ended. I always took a first class carriage. It wasn’t expensive. The day cars had stuffed chairs, four of them, and glass doors you slid to open like they did in old movies. I once took a night train from Kumasi to Tema. I was on my way to our mid-term conference. At the first station, people peered in my window. I put down the blinds. During the night, the train derailed. I was jolted out of bed. We were told to pack up and get off the train. We walked across a trestle bridge where the gaps between trestles was huge. People passed kids across. We waited a while, probably a long while based on experience but I don’t remember, and then a train came. We got on and got off in Tema. That was the end of the excitement.
My favorite rides of all were the subway trains into Boston when I was a kid. We took a bus to Sullivan Square where we boarded the subway. I remember the whoosh of the train as it came into the station. I’d wait right by the door for it to open. My mother sat in the middle of us. I’d turn around to look out the window. I’d stay looking until our stop. We were in Boston. We got off at the Jordan Marsh stop.
I still love trains. I love the sounds and the smells. I remember the jerking to start and stop. If I were rich, I’d have my own train car or even cars. I’d pay to attach my car to train lines. It would be glorious.
