Train Thoughts

Last night, I was sitting at this very desk, sweating with the still lingering spring heat in Los Angeles and making an entry on my companion blog, "Legacy of A Courtly Curmudgeon". A truck rumbled too fast up the narrow street outside. The sound sent me back to my little Bronx bedroom on any July or August summer evening, just after the sun had gone down and the sidewalks still radiated their day-long exposure. No computers then. I might have just shut off my portable record player. Could be 1966. It isn't just hot, but ponderously humid and we don't yet have such as "conditioned" air. We have the standard swooshing fan that just moves around the warm.

My bedroom looks down on a long yard, nothing more really than a back alley, and faces the back of the building on another street. Kids, lingering at play despite the calls to "come upstairs, shriek, in finishing a game of tag. My parents' TV is going in the living room, Saturday night, "Mission Impossible" is just starting with its characteristic Lalo Schifrin theme and the lighting of that fuse. I am crazy about Barbara Bain and Martin Landau, the really married couple who play colleagues and spies extraordinaire. I'll get out there in a minute. A man in that other building, I think it is one of the upper floors, is playing his violin. He plays it often and well, but the sound always makes me sad. I don't know why I think it is a man. I have never seen the musician, but only heard his song. A cat is yowling near the garbage cans. My father calls me, "Aren't you coming out to watch the show?" My mother and father like it too, not like the Monkees on Tuesday at 7:30. That they could do without.

And then, one more sound, about four blocks down towards Jerome Avenue, but still loud on a quieting day into night, the steady rumble/click/rumble of the El on its way to Woodlawn Station. I don't know why that sound is comforting. I have no place I want to go right now, except into the other room, where Rollin Hand is donning his latest disguise and Barney Collier is bypassing some phone lines. All those years ago.