How to Train Your Self

A dozen micro-memoirs about a recent trip.

1.

More than 15 years have passed since I took a plane flight. That seems weird to say, as if I’m bragging. I did it for the climate, but I also did it for me. Once the nature writer Gary Nabhan told me he was eating food from 100 miles of his home so he could “weave his life back together.”

The technology of a train is simple— ladders to get up and down, wheels on rails, a combustion engine that burns diesel.

I will roll through the Altamaha River floodplain, through small towns of the South, past backyards of trailer homes, across a zoo, through downtown DC, along Manhattan. Georgia to Massachusetts, I’m not above anything.

I’ll be right in the middle of everything America is.

2.

Five of us stood staring to the south where a set of lonesome train tracks disappeared around a bend. Evening was coming on, and the train was an hour late.

This was my first trip on public transportation since the pandemic. I would make a cross-section of the Eastern Seaboard—Georgia to Massachusetts.

One woman standing near me, in blue head wrap and blue sneakers, was headed to Baltimore. We chatted a minute before her phone rang, except nothing’s just audio anymore, it’s video too.

I checked the train status on my phone. I was a holdout when it came to cell phones. Mine doesn’t work at my house, but it’s useful when traveling, especially for directions. The train had left Jacksonville. Plan on it arriving in 30 minutes.

To the north a wake of vultures began to head home, probably to some tower. I noted moss vervain, a hardy, waste-place wildflower, growing in the rocks between the crossties of an unused track.

I struck up a conversation with an aloof man in his 60s who turned out to be a retired parole officer from Brunswick. His wife had been in Orlando a month staying with her brother.

“Was the brother ill?” I asked him.

“No, they had some projects they wanted to do.”

“They must be very close,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” the man said. “And I’ve been good for the entire month.” Been good, he said. I was pretty sure I knew what that meant but I didn’t ask for clarification.

We heard the train before we saw it. A passenger train’s whistle sounds different than a cargo train’s. I pulled up my ticket on my phone.

3.

I got a window seat. I pulled out a flannel sheet, blindfolded myself with a scarf, balled a sweater into a pillow, and went to sleep. When I awoke, an older woman was seated beside me. She was wearing a mask, and I quickly learned why. A fellow across the aisle was coughing, deep and incessantly, a cough that sounded worse than covid, more like tuberculosis.

I had remembered to pack a mask, and I put it on.

After a while my seatmate and I began to talk.

Ms. Willie Mae worked in finance in New York City for fifty years before she moved home to South Carolina. She was living in the house where she was born. Not much family was left in the area, but she had a good church and a wonderful senior center. She had made friends at the center. One was an older white woman. Willie Mae told me about the first time she had lunch at her friend’s house. The woman was passionate about birds, and she was eager to show Willie Mae her bird window and the birds at her feeders.

Willie Mae laughed. She patted my hand. “I didn’t care about those birds,” she said. “But my friend likes them so I watch them.”

“What are you passionate about?” I asked.

She put her hand on my arm. “What I really like to do is help young people,” she said. “I want to help them improve their lives. And helping them be prosperous helps them in all kinds of ways.” At the bank she organized summer programs to teach children about economics.

I wish I had time to be friends with everybody I meet. Ms. Willie Mae got off before I did, in Newark, and she left me her mailing address. I think I’ll send her a book. I told her about Drew Lanham’s book, The Home Place, but I want to send her one.

4.

Northampton’s station is a timber-frame shelter along the track, and Silas was pulling up as I climbed out of the maw of the great metal beast. I heaved my suitcase into the bed of his Toyota pickup and got in the cab. “Made it,” I said, looking him in the eyes.

“Yay,” he said. I leaned my head against his shoulder. I’d been watching people both greet and take leave of each other, and the protocols varied widely. When one woman got off the train a man stepped up and took her suitcase, but the two of them never touched or even looked at each other.

“So glad you’re here,” Silas said.

Lucky for me, one of his roommates had been in California a couple of months, so I had his room. It was clean enough, and Silas had put fresh sheets and a pretty blanket on the bed.

Silas is a photographer. He just bought a new camera that cost a couple thousand dollars, and he was excited to show me how the built-in stabilizer worked. A couple days later, when I checked his mailbox, the electric company had sent at least twenty letters, wanting its bill paid. That’s an easy choice: buy a camera or pay the electric.

In many ways I have lived too carefully.

5.

On the afternoon before his birthday he drove me through farmland along the Connecticut River. We stopped to take pictures. Silas set up his new camera, I think with a fish-eye lens, near the ground, and we used a timer to snap pictures of us jumping. We were laughing the whole time, trying to leap at the same second.

There was that one photo where we high-fived in the air. Behind us the sky is deep blue and painted with streaks of clouds. A wood thrush is calling from the woods along the river. The dirt road will turn to pavement. It will lead back to town, to the derelict apartment where Silas lives.

6.

His birthday is also Mother’s Day. The journey to get to him took 24 hours, and the journey getting home again will take 24 more. Every minute of it is worth the one moment that Linnea, his girlfriend, sticks candles into a cake decorated with balloons and script, in blue, “Happy Birthday, Silas,” and we all sing to him.

That one moment.

Totally worth it.

7.

I helped him have a yard sale, except the folks in Mass usually call it a tag sale. He decided to sell his record collection. It’s huge. One woman came and looked through every crate. She was newly divorced. Her ex-husband got the record player and the records, she said, so she was having to start all over.

Joni Mitchell is a good place to start.

8.

Silas lives beside Bridge Street Cemetery. It contains the graves of enslaved people, marked as such. The first time I saw that I nearly fell over.

One morning I walked along the cemetery to a house a few blocks away that has a Little Free Library. The last time I visited, I plucked from the tidy box a book about New England’s slavery. It was a powerful book.

This time I pulled out Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I finished it in two days. Then I walked back along the cemetery and stuck it back in the library

.

9.

Those folks, the ones who run that Little Free Library, take it seriously. In each book they place a business card that asks you to follow them on Twitter. I left the card in the book, so I can’t follow.

The last time I was there, they had one glass-fronted box at adult level. Now there is a second box, on a child’s level, and it’s full of children’s books.

In the tree above the tiny libraries they have hung ornaments, lights and balls and blown glass. I know that as soon as I get home to southern Georgia I am going to want to come back and see what books they have added.

10.

On the platform when I was leaving was a young man in shirtsleeves with a sheet wrapped around himself. It was early morning, chilly, and the man had no luggage, no jacket, no money. Of course he asked us for help. He said he was going to beg the conductor to let him on the train.

“Without a ticket?” I asked.

“Sometimes they’ll do it,” he said.

On the way to the station Silas had bought a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, and he fetched them from his truck and gave them to the kid. The coffee was iced, in a cornstarch mug, and about two inches was missing. Obviously Silas had drunk some of the coffee already. The kid didn’t care.

“Watch your stuff,” Silas said to me when the kid headed down the platform.

“Not to worry,” I said.

The conductor didn’t let the kid on the train.

11.

In New York’s Penn Station I sat down beside another young man who glared angrily at me and started unreeling lines of contemptuous but beautiful poetry, extemporaneously. That he had mental health issues was instantly apparent. I’ve got direct experience in that department.

“My mother was a junkie but she had died of fentanyl a year ago,” the kid said to me. “I’m going home. Going home. I’m going to my father. I barely even known him.”

I met his eyes, kept mine soft, and listened.

After a while the kid asked if I’d watch his pile of bags while he went to the restroom. I said I would. He came back. “My train leaves at 2,” he said. “I need to walk around. Will you watch my stuff until I get back?”

The kid was suffering, no doubt about it. I checked the time, 1:09. My train didn’t leave until 3:15.

“I don’t want to be stuck watching your bags,” I said. “How long will you be gone?”

“Twenty minutes,” he said. “I’ll set an alarm.”

“Have you eaten?” I asked him.

“Why do I need to eat?” he said.

“Everybody needs to eat,” I said. “Do you have money?” At that he looked me directly in the eyes. He could have been my nephew. I knew the chocolate brownness of his eyes, his lankiness, his brown curling hair, his distress. And he shook his head, no.

I took out a 10. He’d barely get a burger with a 10. I added a 5. I pointed toward the food court. “Go get yourself something to eat,” I said, as if I were his mother. “Only buy food.”

Okay, for that minute I was his mother. But it’s not easy to fix a kid like this, with a history like his, with an illness like his, maybe with an addiction like his. I know that for a fact too.

When he came back he had a sandwich with him, but he had only eaten the middle out of it, so I knew that food was not really what he was looking for.

12.

Nobody had stolen the catalytic converter from my Prius when I got back to the Jesup station. Maybe you think that’s a joke, but it isn’t. There’s a country junction on the way to Savannah where people park so they can carpool. Last week somebody went during the day and stole all the converters. Considering that possibility I had parked next to the street, my hood pointed outward.

The train was two hours late arriving, but I had no appointments to worry about. I just needed to drive home.

Except the Sugar & Spice Bakery, right by the depot, was open. The Sugar & Spice Bakery has been there over 25 years. I didn’t want anything. But how often do you get a bakery, still open, still operating, still churning out doughnuts in the era of chain everything, of video calls, of vagrancy and untreatable disorders? I got a bread pudding and a sackful of doughnut holes, a dozen.

Raven wasn’t home. He had gone to Miami to our grandson’s graduation party. I had already planned the trip to see Silas.

Raven had left the house in good order, all the dishes washed. He left my favorite kombucha in the fridge—it’s the electric blue one called “Sacred Life,” colored with blue spirulina. He had gone out and picked a bouquet of blue hydrangeas, on the kitchen counter. Then, in the bedroom, he left a vase of the naturalized African parrot gladiola, orange and yellow.

But that wasn’t the sweetest gift.

We had been putting together a difficult jigsaw puzzle, one with 1,000 pieces, a scene of fireworks over an ocean, most of it a hue of blue. It had been ponderous. While I was away Raven had finished the puzzle except for three pieces, which he left on the counter for me.

That one moment. Finishing the puzzle.

I am glad to be able to feel joy.