Reflections

When Janice was a child she loved chasing crabs on the rocky side of the small island town of Nahant. Catching one wasn’t the point. The fun was in the chase. After a half an hour or so of that, she’d sit on a rock and stare across the bay at the skyline of Boston.  When she was younger it was mostly dominated by older brick and stone structures such as Faneuil Hall, the Old State House, Bunker Hill Monument and the steeple of the Old North Church where Paul Revere waited for the lamps to signal, ‘one if by land, two if by sea’ so he could send the alarm to ‘every Middlesex Village and Town,’ “The British are coming! The British are coming!” By the time she reached the end of her junior year of high school, the older ones were dwarfed and appeared irrelevant among towering glass monsters.

Her senior year would start on Monday. The last weekend of summer break was coming up and her dad, whose name was Glen, had an idea.

   “How’d you like to take in this Sunday’s Red Sox game with your old man?”

Janice’s jaw dropped, “Are you serious?”

    “I figure we can make a day of it. Hit the outdoor market at Haymarket Square, go to Filene’s Basement, get a pizza for lunch in the North End then head up to Fenway and park our butts in the bleachers. I might even buy you a beer if you promise not to tell your mom. You game?”

The normally chatty Janice couldn’t find her tongue but it didn’t matter. Glen could see the answer in her eyes, “Okay, so be ready at six thirty.” Janice was ready by six.

The elevated train station in Lynn, which was the bluest of blue collar cities, hung over seedy bars, shoe repair and barber shops and small stores that sold cigarettes and cigars. It was always dark under there. Janice and Glen arrived early enough for him to stop into one of the smoke shops for a five pack of White Owls. A short man wearing a dingy white shirt and suspenders threw in an extra book of wooden matches, on the house. They climbed the stairs to the platform and waited by the rail for the 7:45 Local. If it were a weekday, the platform would’ve been crowded with commuters. At seven-thirty on a Sunday morning, there was no one, but them.

   “Dad? What’s Boston like?”

   “You’ve never been there?”

Glen simply assumed she and her friends or maybe her boyfriend had been there, at least once.

   “I’ve seen it from the rocks. Sometimes, I can hear the sound of the horse races carries.”

   “You can hear Suffolk Downs from across the bay?”

   “Uh-huh.  When I was little I use to pretend I was riding one of the horses.”

The sudden reminder of the reality that his little girl was no longer ‘little’ struck Glen hard.

   “I wish I’d thought of doing this before,” he said, mostly to himself.

   “I really like the skyline. All those new big glass skyscrapers with all the old buildings, my favorite is one with the old tower on it.”

   “That’s the Custom House.”

   “My history teacher says, ‘the skyline of Boston is like a timeline of our country.”

   Glen mind was stuck in an introspective place of melancholy, “Yeah, I guess maybe it is.”  

The old wooden platform trembled slightly as the sound of the train approached. Janice nearly jumped out of her shoes.

    “Here it comes!”

The level of his daughter’s excitement rocked Glen.

    “Haven’t you ever ridden on a train before?”

    “Nope.”

In a voice only he could hear, Glen cursed himself.

   ‘What the hell’s the matter with me!?’

He’d been so busy tending to the utilitarian requirements of being a father he’d neglected the other things. A daughter needs more than a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in and scrambled eggs in the morning. A daughter needs at least one of her dream to come true and it’s a dad’s job to see that it does. He took Janice by the hand.

   “Alright kid, let’s make it happen.”

In the moment, Glen felt he had his little girl back. In the moment, Janice felt six again..

Janice was surprised to see so many people on board.  The train had made eight stops to pick up passengers before reaching Lynn.  She took a place by the window on one side of two facing bench seats, her dad took the aisle. An elderly couple sat on the bench across from them. The old woman was one of those who never let a chance for a conversation pass.

   “We’re from Salem.”

   “We’re from Nahant.” Glen answered and the old lady nudged her husband.

   “Remember that Saturday when we went to Nahant?”

The sleeves on the old man’s once fine suit jacket were frayed and when he spoke his words came out like bullets.

   “Yes, I remember. But it was a Friday.”

The old lady shrugged and smiled at Janice and Glen.

   “It was twenty years ago. Who remembers from Friday or Saturday?”

   “Tickets, ticket’s please.”

The conductor walked down the aisle, pausing at each row of benches to ask.

   “Tickets, ticket’s please.”

Glen took the two train tickets from his pocket and handed them to Janice.

   “Here, you do it.”

   The classic expression of a clueless teenager washed over Janice’s face, “Do what?”

   Glen chuckled, “Give them to the conductor.”

   “What do I do then?”

   “After he punches them, he’ll give them back to you.”

   “He’s going to punch them?”

The conductor loomed at their side.

   “Tickets?”

Janice glanced up at the man in the official MBTA conductor’s jacket and funny little hat. He snatched the tickets, put little holes in them with a tool he carried, handed them to Janice and went on his way. When Janice went to give them back to her dad, Glen put up a hand.

   “You hold ‘em. They’re our tickets home.”

Glen had his mind set on doing as much as he could in one day to make up for all of the things he felt he should’ve done, as a father, over the past sixteen years. Letting Janice hold the tickets was step one. The little old man was watching the conductor ask for tickets down the aisle.

   “He knows these two were the only ones who got on in Lynn.”

   “So what?” the old lady asked.

   “So, why does he keep asking all the others?”

   “It’s like a ritual. Conductors have to do it. Besides, what’s the harm in asking?”

The old lady looked at Glen, “We’ve been married for sixty-years.”

The train lurched and was on its way.

    “Saugus, next stop Saugus,” the conductor announced.

    “Here we go!” Janice stared out the big window. The old man studied her for a moment.

    “Is this your first train ride?” Janice answered without turning away from the view.

    “Yep!”

    “We’re going to a Red Sox game. They’re playing the Tigers.”

The old lady nudged her husband, “Remember the last time we went to Fenway? They were playing the Yankees!”

    “It was the Orioles. It had to be the Orioles because the Red Sox won.”

    “We thought we’d take in the town a little before the game,” Glen said.

The ride took about forty minutes. Janice never looked from the window once. To her it seemed as if the whole world was standing still so she could ride through it. Rows of tenement houses where laundry hung on lines on back porches, body shops, a scrap metal yard, a place where mountains of gravel waited to be turned into something else, over a bridge, over a river then into an area of wetlands with tall sea grass and reeds. The train blew its whistle and dozens of long legged herons and snowy egrets took to the skies. As the train entered the rail yard it past the New England Confection Company, the makers of NECCO Wafers. Janice didn’t like NECCO Wafers but she liked the building. It looked like a place where good people worked hard.

Unlike the station in Lynn, Boston’s North Station had lots of platforms and commuter trains like the one Janice and her dad had come in one. But there was one that was different. It was an iron monolith with much bigger and fancier looking cars. Its engine heaved angry billows of white steam and men wearing red caps carried luggage to a car near the back. Though her feet kept walking toward the station, she couldn’t take her eyes of the impressive machine.

The day passed like a beautiful blur. One thing led to another and all things led to a new experience Janice was sure she’d never forget. The old city which had been such a distant friend for all this years was now, a close one. The old buildings she thought had relinquished their relevance to the great steel and glass towers were the ones everyone wanted to see. While impressive to the eye from a distance, the grandeur of a skyscraper is quickly dwarfed when the building next door happens to be one where farmers and silversmiths laid plans to give birth to a new nation.

They went to more places and did more things than Janice expected. Getting from here to there meant taking more trains. Subways! The Orange Line, Green Line, Red Line and Blue, trains running through tunnels dug under the city, the harbor and the dirty waters of the River Charles. It was all like a gourmet meal for her eyes, mind and imagination. On the train ride back to Lynn, Glen took a seat across from Janice and watched her watch the same scenes of the same homes and small businesses she’d seen earlier. The little girl face she wore as she watched in the morning was gone. She was a young woman now.  Glen had kept the unspoken promise he made to make up for having been so blind over the years. Janice sensed her dad’s eyes on her and turned.

    “Dad, I love you so much.”

He had heard his daughter say the words before but never had they struck so deep. For the first time, he felt what it felt like to be a father. 

Janice’s SAT scores earned her scholarship offers from colleges as far away as Ohio and Florida but she chose Boston University. She still lived at home with her dad and would drive to the station in Lynn, take the train in and then the Orange Line to school every day. After receiving a degree in marketing and design she got a job as an art director at a Boston ad agency. It was time for her to have her own place. She got a great deal on a rental in Ipswich, a town famous for its sweet little necks and savory cherry stone clams. It was also the furthest most town with a train offering rides into Boston. The track ended there. 

Her dad was getting on in years but still in good enough shape to visit on weekends and dig for clams with Janice.

    “Damn, it stinks out here.”

    “It’s not so bad when the tide is in.”

    “Couldn’t you find a place a little further from these clam beds?”

    “Yeah, but it’s the smell that keeps the rent so low.”

    Glen laughed, “Ha! Ha! I sure didn’t raise no dummy!”

Janice’s job required travel. In the winter she often had to go to Los Angeles to produce commercials she’d created. She, the agencies producer, account executive and a copywriter would hop on jets at Logan Airport for the over three hour flight to the west coast. The seats were smaller than on a train and gave little room for the elbows. The passengers didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with each other. Janice never took a window seat on a plan. The sky she felt, was a thing meant to look ‘up to’ as opposed to ‘out at.’ She missed the train.

On one trip she convinced her copywriter and creative partner Neal to take the train with her as far as Chicago. Once there, they’d take a cab to O’Hare and catch a plane for L.A. The pair had been working together for two years and often joked of taking the relationship to a new level. Neal accepted the invitation hoping Janice was ready to stop joking about it which, she was. They thought they could endure the twenty-four-hour ride sleeping in the club car. Within the first eight hours they had already shared a first kiss and several more. They both agreed, it would be a good idea to get sleeper cabins. Cupid must’ve been the conductor on that day because there was still one available, only one. They decided to share it. When they got to Chicago they didn’t hire a cab, didn’t go to O’Hare and didn’t fly the rest of the way to L.A. Instead, they got on another train destined for Tinsel town. This train had four available sleeper cabins, but they only needed one. Soon they were married and decided to enjoy a honeymoon on the most famous train in the world, The Orient Express.

When her dad died she took his ashes and stood outside the door of the last car on the commuter train from Lynn to Boston and waited until it reached the reedy marsh. The train tooted its whistle. The wading birds flew. She released the ashes into the breeze and thanked the man for keeping the promise he never made out loud. Sometimes the most important promise to keep is the one you’ve made to yourself. Her life with Neal has also come to the end of the line. He grew tired of train rides and of Janice and wanted a divorce. Without regret or rancor, she obliged. Their parting was amicable. They remained casual friends and shared equally in the custody and raising of Matthew, their son. 

Neal would take Matt to hockey games and trips to Chuck E Cheese for cheap pizza and houses of dropping coins into arcade devices. Janice would treat Matt to short train rides to places along the North Shore. Playing whack-a-mole with his dad was giggly fun. Looking out at places where people lived and worked, at different signs and little ‘life things’ was a different kind and harder to describe type of fun. It was the type of fun to think and ask questions about.

    “Hey mom, what’s that place?”

    “That’s a lobster pound. The guys who catch the lobsters bring them there so other people can buy them.”

    “Oh. Hey mom, how come all we ever see on the train is the backs of houses and stuff?”

    “The backside is always the honest side of things.”

    “Huh?”

    “People always make the front of the house look nice, to impress the neighbors. Stores always make the front look nice to impress customers. The backside never meant to impress anyone. It’s the side that always, tells the truth.”

    “I get it. It’s like when you get a haircut and don’t care how it looks in the back.”

    “Exactly!”

Matthew went on to married and raise kids of his own. Janice was now an old lady like the one she met on the train to Boston sixty years ago. She was seventy-six and the cancer had decided she would not make it to seventy-seven. So, she decided to take one more ride on the Lakeshore Limited, the train she took to Chicago with Neal when they fell in love.

At night, the train window was more like a mirror. Instead of still-life urban and landscapes, all she could see in the glass was her own face and the tired eyes looking for something more. The train rumbled along the rails as she felt her life wane. The reflection in the window changed. Her face was gone and in its place images of precious memories took its place. Crabs running for cover under driftwood and rock and watching the old skyline change. Her father entrusting her with the tickets, the big building where they made NECCO Wafers and all of the things she and he did that magical Sunday, including the beer that would forever remain a secret from her mother. The first kiss she shared with Neal and then Matthew being born. Every click-click, clack-clack, toot, whistle and ‘tickets, please’ plea of every conductor appeared to her on the window that night. Janice rested her head against it, closed her eyes and reflected on a life well traveled.

She was suddenly sixteen again and climbing the stairs up to Lynn Station. A low fog hugged the platform. There was only one man waiting for the train and he seemed to be waiting for her. As Janice got closer she recognized it was Glen, her dad. He held out a hand holding two tickets.

    “You hold ‘em. They’re our tickets home.”

Janice shed a tear and smiled. She had no idea what or where the home her dad spoke of was but somehow knew, she was going to love the view.