Memory Trains
Remembering the sounds of my childhood
Hello friends,
It’s time for another contribution to the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic for this upcoming issue is Trains.
Also, my birthday is this month! So I’ve decided to have a little birthday sale. All month, new subscribers will get 31% off in honor of my 31st birthday. That discount will last 12 months. Find the nearest train conductor and let them know.
The neighborhood I grew up in sat near a railroad. There was no wrong side of the tracks. There was only a childhood desire to balance on the rails and to hop from one wooden beam to the next. Walking home from school as a kid, the tracks acted like a yellow brick road of sorts. Just follow the iron and wood, and you’ll get home eventually.
I only strayed from them when I reached the park, a small green oasis that felt like the middle of nowhere to my young imagination. Where the railroad bordered one side of my neighborhood, the park spread along another. Sometimes I delayed my return home and meandered into the shade of live oaks, pines, and cypress trees. Spanish moss hung from their limbs like dusty strands of silk. On the boardwalks of the trail, I could look down on a sea of soft ferns and sharp palmettos. Everything was green and brown and quiet unless, of course, a train passed through.
In my memory, a train came every day around five p.m., but I don’t know if that’s true. It was a freight line, so trains were constantly coming and going. But I remember evenings marked by shaking windows and blaring horns as golden light trickled into the house. Sometimes a train grumbled through in the dead of night, clacking and moaning in the distance. It never disturbed me, though, no more than the crashing thunder and pouring rain of a great storm. The clattering and screeching of that hulking metal beast as it lumbered through the dark became a lullaby. Somewhere in the night, someone else was awake, guiding that creature. At that moment, we inhabited the same space.
I spent a lot of time alone when I was younger. I should have guessed I’d be a solitary adult. That used to bother me, the idea that I might end up alone. Now, though, solitude is like a warm blanket, a place where I’m safe. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone. I don’t need to justify my existence. I can wrap myself up in my surroundings—the hum of the fish tank, the churning of the ice maker, the owl signaling the onset of dusk, the jet engines piercing the sky, the squirrels chittering in the trees, the crickets encompassing the night.
The sounds of trains growing and receding were the sounds of home. The clanging bell of the railroad crossing heralded the coming symphony. Sometimes I liked to run outside to get a glimpse of the passing steel slug as it heaved itself across the road. Mostly I just enjoyed listening as that rumbling coursed through the walls and into my bones. Hear me, the bone-humming called. We are the same. And then it was gone, and I was me again, and it was time for dinner.
Weekend Potpourri
I’m still living in the musical aughts—lots of nostalgia from me recently.
Deepansh bestows such wisdom every time he writes. He’s like the ancient oracles. I can’t get enough.
The only time I stop reading Deepansh is when Ella Francis Sanders sends out a new Sometimes Newsletter. She’s like poetry incarnate.
I had no idea the Bee Gees were some of the pre-computer-age looping musicians.
Finally, here’s something completely ridiculous and wonderful.
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget the sale! If you feel like it, let me know what the sounds of your childhood were.
I love your imagery - it's as safe and cozy as it is stimulating and thought-provoking.
Love this line: “Sometimes I liked to run outside to get a glimpse of the passing steel slug as it heaved itself across the road.”
You convey the sounds so well in your writing. I didn’t grow up near a train track and it was very exciting to see a train.