Wednesday, January 19, 2005, 5:55pm
Wednesday, January 19, 2005, 5:55pm
By the ritual of the brake test I conclude that we are soon to leave – which is a good sign. There were no platform announcements at 5:50 when the train should have been announced, but just now as I begin to sniff around for a seat, the leading edge of a purposeful crowd filters aboard.
Likely the concourse message board and video screens have announced this train, even though the guys in the announcing house have forgotten us – or perhaps the speakers are dead at this end of the station concourse, or maybe I’ve entered a Twilight Zone where such messages are now being delivered via mental telepathy, and my receiver is down.
Finally, the polite conductor from last night’s train announces our impending station stops. And so it seems I have chosen well and guessed the roll of the dice once more.
At 6:05pm we are underway on an evening not quite as cold as I had expected. But I am feeling a measure of melancholy anyway. Darkly reflected in a window at my shoulder, a human face slowly recoils. This face is the most obvious feature I ignore whenever I stare into the near-blackness of night beyond this glass. The view is never truly black because internal reflections from the carriage itself provide a three-dimensional ghostly image extending eight feet out into the night – overlaid atop what little can be seen, or becoming the entirety of my view when no apparent light arrives from the outside world at all.
The ignored hazy image of my own mirrored face in the foreground is subject to interpretation because there is rarely enough of an image to show much more than a silhouette of someone staring into the night with a fringe of illumination and ghostly features at best. At times I look the way I did ten or twenty years ago – a familiar form that speaks of the prime of life. More often lately, even in the mostly ghostly and incomplete visages, the skin sags, the puffy eyelids bloom, the hairline retreats and thins. For my whole adult life I have looked five or ten years younger that my actual years, but now, at least by my own perception, the image in the window is approaching 50 just like the person observing it. Fifty isn’t so bad, but it is enough to consider the notion that I’ve reached whatever peaks I will ever climb and have begun the long slide into irrelevance. For now the recent graduates in the South Boston office listen to my old war stories for a sense of perspective, I suppose, but eventually I will be beyond any useful value when the questions stop and the stories are heard as the noisy snoring of an old man. I wish not to retell the same yarns, as is the folly of many whose lives enter their twilight. Yet from whence doth new material arise once the storyteller’s life plateaus?
Do I lament my passing youth? Perhaps only in how I never valued it much while it was there. Have I created everything that I am ever going to create? Dodge Morgan built a sailboat in his early fifties and traveled non-stop alone around the world. Do I have something over the immediate horizon like that? – something I’ve always wanted to do, but haven’t tried yet for lack of urgency – or because I felt I had all the time in the world?
In a lightly falling snow cars on the Pike are crawling towards the Weston tollbooths, while aboard the train we are make good time. I suppose this is one of those nights when I’ll be home before those who drive their cars staring straight ahead into a steeply pitched windshield without the company of their own face in the window reminding them of their own mortality.
We part ways with the Pike turning to the south a bit, again crossing over Route 128, again rolling past several three-story office buildings, then again plunging into the blackness of the eastern forest. Pressing my face to the window reveals nothing of the outside world until the brief sodium glow of Wellesley Farms Station streaks past in a blur of platform warning strips lit unevenly by streetlamps from overhead.
The 6:05pm train out of South Station running express out of Back Bay is a 25-minute non-stop river of steel and humanity snaking though a wintry night.
