Time Machine

   I love the fact that my girls enjoy going to Vermont.  They are happy to visit their cousins or, if they’re just with me, to ramble this way and that among the small towns and back roads.  The like hearing some – but not too much – about what it was like to grow up there. 

   These days, when we visit, we like to stop in Bellows Falls for a hot dog at Fat Frank’s or a cone at the Dairy Joy.  Or both. 

   I’ve shown them the old train station in Bellows Falls, where I used to catch the train to and from college.  But I can’t really say what that was like:  standing in the old station at midnight with my father, waiting for the train to come at 12:15 in the morning, feeling badly that he would have a short night before a hard day’s work.  Watching the simple old man who manned the station grab for his cap and holler out that the train was a-comin’ when he saw the headlight appear up by the dam. 

   Coming home was worse.  I got the train home at 30th Street Station in Philly, watching out the window as we rolled past the boat-houses on the Schuylkill, adorned with strings of white lights.  I would wait and look for the big letters on the bridge that say “Trenton Makes - The World Takes” and wonder how long they have been there.  Then, after Trenton, I would settle in, flipping on the overhead light and rummaging in my knapsack for whatever I was reading at the time and one of the candy bars I had bought at 30th Street.  Reading until New York.  Then resting while they changed engines at Penn Station.

  If the train was quiet, and I wasn't stuck sitting near the café car, I usually could be asleep soon after midnight and New Haven, stirring every once in a while to lift a gritty eyelid and check our progress north.  Sliding through the change at Springfield, where it seemed we always hit the cold, then following the Connecticut River north like a ragged string of wild geese.

  If you rode that train back in the day you know about the moonlight on the snowy hills and the forests in the night; about the cigarette smoke that lingered in the air about the car; about the good feeling you had about the conductors, knowing they would keep track of your stop and make sure you didn’t sleep through it.

   And then, finally, the train pulled slowly in to Bellows Falls and it was time to get off.

   The train was like a time machine that had brought me back to the cold night air of Vermont.  My father, standing by the Volkswagen, its little motor running, under a street light in the lot across the tracks.  The whistle blowing as the train pulls through the crossing up by the dam as I stand there for a moment with my bags, looking into the only past I’ll ever have.