Way back around the dawn of time, when raptors ran the earth and I was about to turn 16, my parents moved from Western Mass to Wisconsin. They had made arrangements to leave me in Mass, at boarding school. I was initially resistant to this cruel incarceration but one semester at Cheesehat High convinced me that BS was the definite lesser of the evils. Back I went, lucky me, to share a room right next door to the dorm mother, with a girl built like a fire hydrant. She once told me that I was the kind of person she could imagine inviting to a dinner party only to have me stand on my head. I did not stand on my head even once while we were joint captives in our steam-heated room. It wasn't one of my skills, then or later. But I sort of knew what she meant: I was some kind of mid-Western wild woman, bound to disrupt.
In order to get from Not-My-Home, Wisconsin, where the clay under the sod in the front yard absorbed so much water it could suck your moccasins off and disappear them, to BS in Middle Mass, I took the train. At Xmas time, I took the train the other direction. I boarded in Springfield, MA and, some 19 hours later, disembarked in Chicago. The first time I took the westerly trip, I met a guy from a boys' BS, who was traveling home to Iowa.
At that holiday time of year, the only tickets available were in the coach cars. The seats were upholstered in that prickly, industrial maroon colored plush and smelled overwhelmingly of cigar smoke. Snow lay heavy all over the landscape, robbing it of variety. A traveler could doze, read, munch on the cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches from the vending machine at the Springfield station, stare at one's zits in the mirror in the lav until someone pounded on the door for the third or fourth time, hang out in the dining car, spending every last cent of travel money on stale sandwiches. . . Or socialize.
I don't remember what we talked about, me and Joe Prep. We had a lot in common or not much at all. Somehow, we found things to say to make each other laugh which, it turned out, we both liked to do. By the time the train got us across the Mass/NY border, we were fast friends. We shared cracker packs and licorice. We bought soda in the club car. We fell asleep leaning on each other and woke up at midnight, in Buffalo.
There was a long layover in Buffalo. Since we were awake, we got off the train. The station was cavernous and almost empty, in the wee hours. Lots of marble and ornate trim, left over from the days when Buffalo was a grand place and travel was for high style people. There was waltz music playing somewhere, wafting through unseen speakers throughout the station. Joe assumed the dance position. I stepped into his arms and he waltzed me in stately circles, swooping through the station until we were laughing too hard to continue and I had to pee.
Of course, Joe and I lost touch after BS. Nearly thirty years later, we got back in contact, had a brief, long-distance (planes, not trains) romance and then he married someone much more suitable. Last year, after a while of silence, he sent me a card, thanking me for my friendship and announcing that he had early Parkinson's. Since then, more silence. No responses to FB pokes or silly e-cards. But stalwartness was always his style.
In three days, Joe will turn 70. I wish him love, miracles and spontaneous waltzing in midnight marble caverns.
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