Quixotic

Don Quixote de la Mancha

would never tilt at these towers

that dwarf Dutch ancestors.

No cloth laced wooden blades

at which to take aim,

just edged steel, spinning swords

splitting wind in twain,

separating energy from air.

Arms atop spires

the color of sun bleached bone

scattered in sparse dry grasses.

Inorganic crosses arms wide,

spinning hypnotically,

enthralling witnesses and martyrs,

as cattle and pronghorn

worship, heads bowed,

grazing.

Two-for-One

Sometimes the triggers are subtle: a smell, a song, a sound.  I will be sitting there and think of my mom and want to share that moment with her, then realize that the only way to do that now is through prayer.  But there are days, moments, that hit like a sledgehammer.  Mother’s Day this year snuck up on me as I focused on the joy of my wife, mother of our children, and on our eldest daughter, mother of our incredible grandson.  Probably I had subconsciously pushed the sadness to the side, to save for later, to feel in a private moment.  Two days ago, as Jean-Marie and I flew back from a conference that I attended, I realized it was Friday May 6^th and Mother’s Day was only two days off – which would make it May 8^th this year.  That was when the sledgehammer fell and I fought off tears, May 8^th Mom would have been 82. 

I have never been a good enough son to remember Mom’s birthday with any reliable accuracy for much of my life (my wife Jean-Marie improved my memory in that regard substantially!).  I am truly terrible with dates in general.  I have trouble remembering my sister Laura’s birth date, and that of my little brother Greg.  Ginny’s birthday is hard to forget since it is on Independence Day, and my older brother Chris only takes me a little math to work out (he is one year, one month, and one week my elder).  Mom’s birthday I always linked with Mother’s Day.  When Mother’s Day approached, I would buy a card and a gift and use them for both – I’d like to think that Mom admired the practicality of it, but that is only my guilt tossing a coin into the wishing well.  This year I can give her no card, no gift. No two-for-one phone call.  The only gift lying about is for me, the blessing of having her for 53 years, the gift of the memories that lie in her wake.

It is Sunday today, and I close my eyes and I can smell the cooking of breakfast.  As a family, we fell into a ritual of watching Award Theater on TBS on Sunday mornings eating homemade Egg McMuffins. Mom made these using egg rings in her electric skillet for maximum authenticity.  Dad of course dubbed these “Egg McMommies,” they were better than anything made by McDonalds.  One Saturday night, I had been over at my best friend’s house hanging out and watching TV.  It was getting late and I needed to get home, but Summer of ’42 came on and Ben and I had to watch (what teenage boy wouldn’t?!?).  So I spent the night forgetting to call home.  When I got up the next morning seeing it was almost 9, I hustled out the door and ran home (I was a runner then and ran everywhere, and Ben only lived a mile away).  As I came in the door that particular Sunday while the family was amassed in the den in front of the TV, Mom said to me that my breakfast was almost ready.  “Mom, I fell asleep last night at Ben’s.  I’m just coming home.” I said this maybe hoping for punishment to ease my guilt at not having called.  “Oh, I thought you were just out for a run.”  She knew I was safe, and she trusted me.

I sit here and listen to the early silence of the house, and I can hear Mom laugh.  Mom loved to laugh and she was good at it.  I loved to make her laugh.  She would get a silly smile on her face that I could see even over the phone, and if the moment were good, with eyes squinting she would double over just a bit.  It was not a raucous laugh, but one submerged in her chest constrained a bit by politeness perhaps, but it was genuine and fun as all getout to watch.  My brother Greg does a good imitation of her laugh, maybe I will call him today.  Laughter is the best medicine, especially when dispensed by Mom.

I set my memories free to run through the grass of every sports field I had touched while growing up, and I cannot find a one where Mom was not in the bleachers cheering.  Football from Pee Wee to Varsity, home or out-of-town games, I see her bundled against the weather and smiling.  Basketball games in gymnasiums with the high pitched screams of teenagers echoing off concrete block walls, there was my mom sitting in the sheet metal stands.  Every track meet, even the ones where the coaches had put away their stop watches in the gathering dusk before I finished the two mile race (during my slower days), Mom would be there encouraging me through my final laps on a cinder track.

Mom, I miss you, I love you.  Today I can say through the tears as I write, “Happy birthday, and happy Mother’s Day,” not because there is any happiness in your absence, but because even in the sadness, I can see your smile and that makes me smile.

Romancing the Rails

Trains captivate.  They are the haunting mournful cry in the night, the horn that seems to call through the darkness for no reason, yet touches our souls.  They enthrall us when we are young, we curse them at grade crossing when we are older, we long for them and their mythical destinations through all our lives.

When I was young, my grandmother would travel to see us every Christmas by rail (that is before air travel became more common place).  The family would go to the station nearest to our home in Orangeburg, SC, to await her arrival.  I would look towards the far distance with anticipation that never resulted in disappointment.  The locomotive and the cars in its care would first appear as a pinpoint that quickly grew in size and intensity until it finally arrived, a thing of power and noise and iron carrying my grandmother.  From the gleaming stainless steel coach, my Nanny would emerge into our arms and cries of joy to be taken home with us.  When Christmas time was exhausted along with the adults, we would return to the station to see Nanny off to her home in Ridgefield, CT.  She would climb aboard as I would ache at her leaving, and watch the train depart.  Her pilgrimage to us being enacted in reverse.  The engine that had brought her to us now took her from us, and we would watch as long as we could.  The cars moving down the rails, further from view, getting smaller and smaller as the parallel rails grew closer and closer, until in the distance rails merged, the train disappeared, and the horizon claimed all.

In my young mind, it was at the point in that far distance when all was lost beyond the limits of my sight that Ridgefield existed.  The train appeared from that event horizon and returned to it.  That was all the proof I needed to draw my maps, to know that distance was not measured in steps or miles, but in the reach of railroad tracks and train whistles.

The fate of being born early enough to witness the miracle of passenger rail service, being born early enough to learn from my mother that I once rode a train with my tiny feet in her face in some cramped compartment crowded with my parents and we their children on an adventure to the Yankee filled north had left an indelible mark on me.  Perhaps that memory hung in some primal part of my brain when I attended Clemson as a Mechanical Engineering student and stumbled into a research assistantship with Dr. Harry Law who was at the time a leading railroad researcher.  That tingle of rail travel helping me to see not just the science in what I was working on, but the magic as well.

It has been a path that has lead me around the world and into scientific intricacies that have enthralled me for the past thirty years.  I have been researcher, supplier, and consultant in this industry and loved every minute of it.  Before my wife’s retirement from her successful floral design business, I would happily tell people when asked what we did that my wife played with flowers and I played with trains.  As adults, what professions could be more childlike.

This week I am at another rail conference in my career and presenting soon on the latest project to occupy my time and efforts.  Such moments never fail to bring me back to what brought me to this industry in the first place.  I can’t help but think of my late grandmother, of the rails that brought her to us and sent her home.  I cannot help but think of the call of train horns in the night as special to me as the sound of owls that haunted the pines.  My career continues as a romance that combines my love of math, physics, and the iron highway.  It’s not rocket science, but it is very cool.