Soul Train
SOUL TRAIN
The date is sometime in the late 1980s. The place – the Jamaica station of the Long Island Railroad. I am sitting in a westbound train, book in hand, like Hopper’s girl in Compartment C. I have the luxury of not having to change trains at Jamaica. I am nestled in my seat. Comfy and cozy.
The train sits for five quiet minutes and a peculiar feeling washes over me. I was on my regular train going to my regular job sitting at Jamaica Station at the regular time. Everything was as it always was, yet for five minutes, it was not. For five minutes it was something quite different. There was peace and a pleasant unreality. I felt the serenity known only in dreams.
The book in my hand became more than this one book, this particular book. It became all the books I had ever read and all the books I would ever read. Here they were, in this eternal moment. And I myself was everyone I had ever been and everyone I would ever be. All of those myriad me’s were sitting in that motionless train.
Then the doors closed. The dream dissolved. And the train pulled out of the station and resumed its westward journey. I looked at the orange-marbled cover of the book that happened to be my traveling companion. It was Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer.
I had been reading it at the kitchen table that held my electric typewriter and doubled as my writing desk. An orange-marbled paperback on the gray-marbled Formica. Then I had taken it with me to read on the train. Now it is forever associated with that precious vision of the unremembered but ever-longed for home.