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Letter on the Road

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From: Jaye
Date: 08 Nov 2002
Time: 04:15 PM

Comments:

This little piece is copyrighted. Please don't use any of 
it without asking me - jaye.pd@care2.com if you don't know 
me, otherwise use my regular email.

Written on my way home from Carol's in November 2002.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Letter on the Road
November 6, 2002

The fall colors seem pale this year, the trees wispy.  
Many of them seem to be going directly from yellowish 
green to brown. After breakfast and a nap, I spent my 
morning gazing out the windows at the rock hills of West 
Virginia, at rushing waterfalls sliding down every low 
place, at rivers swollen brown from several days’ rain. I 
suppose it was the summer drought across our shared 
latitude that made the trees so vague here and at home in 
Maryland; the misty moisture makes them look at times 
fairly-like, at others simply half-hearted.  I remember 
that on my October trip, the Ohio River valley where the 
train runs along it on the Kentucky side was inhabited by 
shapeless pearls of fog that turned to pink as the sun 
lifted them, but the sun rises later these days, so the 
wet scene was merely gloomy today.

The scenery is gorgeous along the Cardinal’s route. Train 
travel, with its schedule-wrecking lackadaisical progress, 
must be an end in itself to be enjoyed.  Despite the 
screaming children in coach, the over-used rest rooms, the 
ghastly Snack Car food, and the union rules that have one 
fellow count you, another give you a pillow, and a third, 
the conductor, punch your ticket, it’s an anachronism that 
I hope never goes away entirely. I met a surprising number 
of people who travel by train because they’re afraid to 
fly, but I do it partly for the extremely good bargains, 
but mostly just for the fun of it.

It’s the manners of the staff that most delight me. I go 
to the dining car: someone greets me, indicates a seat at 
a white tablecloth with whoever came in just before me, 
and withdraws, gravely honored by my presence. As I notice 
that the tableware is all plastic and there aren’t enough 
menus to go around, I exchange travel information with my 
tablemates. One must ask and be asked where one got on the 
train, where one is getting off and the purpose of going 
there, and if things are going cordially, to identify 
one’s occupation and those of one’s near relatives, if 
needed for clarity. Everyone is nice, everyone is 
pleasant, everyone tells stories as if at a meal with old 
friends. The waiter comes at last, with dignity befitting 
the bearer of 30 years of train lore, which he can 
probably not be persuaded to expound upon lest other 
guests’ needs be neglected. In a suspiciously short time 
the food arrives. We are grateful if it’s hot through, or 
at least only slightly frozen. We blanch at the price 
(although it’s included with sleeping compartments). We 
tip with the largesse of people who depend repeatedly on 
the same staff.

This morning at breakfast I was seated with a doctor, a 
specialist in family practice, who was on her way to a 
professional meeting at a resort in the West Virginia 
hills. We discussed the difficulty of family doctors in 
diagnosing Parkinson’s. She said that it just wasn’t 
something you thought of, especially in young people. Then 
she asked me what my first symptoms were. Plantar 
fasciitis, a rotator cuff injury, stiffness in my neck, 
and bradykinesia--slowness, pokiness, outright sloth at 
times, I told her.  She was surprised that the chronic 
pain along the bottoms of the feet and the shoulder injury 
were part of the PD picture.  When we came to depression, 
I explained that the clinical depression that can be 
associated with Parkinson’s Disease is often not, and in 
my case pretty certainly not, due to the knowledge of the 
diagnosis, but comes from actual brain cell death due to 
the disease process itself. She appeared surprised again, 
but readily accepted my neuropsychiatrist’s credentials, 
while I devoutly hoped that I had quoted my doctor 
correctly.
For her part, the good doctor, although she enjoyed the 
family aspect of family practice, regretted that there are 
so many dysfunctional families out there. I had observed 
that myself, but I was sorry to hear it from an expert.  
Just as sadly, we found no solution to sniper crime nor to 
the political situation pertaining to stem cell research.
Returning to my compartment after a lunch with two 
hospital administrators and a fashion advertising 
freelancer, I was aware of the necessity of doing 
something about the beer I drank with my lunch—vacation, 
you know—which, disappointingly, wasn’t helping me take 
the nap I had hoped it would induce but caused something 
more inconvenient. In the microscopic world of a “standard 
bedroom,” this means I had to heave my 50-pound suitcase 
onto the vacant seat, close all the shades on both 
corridor side and view side, lift a lid which doubles as a 
stair step to the unused upper berth, and squash myself 
into a space the width of an airline seat in a 757, the 
memory of which reminds me why I’m not flying and makes 
railroad travel seem like a real, er, relief.  I folded 
down the lavatory above the second, much narrower, stair 
step, and did my best to wash up with the trickle of cool 
water allotted to me. 

The tiny compartment that I rented after boarding was 
hardly as romance-friendly as I had thought it might be, 
looking forward to some future trip. After interrupting my 
companion’s reading or sightseeing for about the seventh 
time in a day to either, uh, sit down next to him or force 
him out into the teensy hallway, I’m afraid I’d stop 
feeling quite so alluring.  Nor was the bed very 
comfortable, but perhaps it was just the claustrophobic 
feeling of being in a sleeping locker or in a layer of one 
of those trucks that take livestock to market. No, I was 
better off with my feet hanging, so I made the bed back 
into facing seats after my first nap. Too, while the noise 
of coach class is several cars away, the sleepers are 
closer to the engine and therefore to the whistle, which 
is blown almost constantly while in the Commonwealth of 
Virginia, for whatever reason.

Still, I was free to move around, to take a walk if I 
wanted one, to buy souvenirs and snacks, to stop at any 
seat and chat with anyone I recognized from the dining car 
or my last trip, to use my tray-table to read or write or 
watch DVDs on my computer, or to sit in a seat wider than 
I am and only stare at the motion beyond the glass while I 
wove new plans or reconfigured old dreams.  There are 
bigger compartments available that would be worth trying.

After arriving in Washington less than an hour late, I 
checked a monitor for the next commuter train and 
discovered that I had no more than three minutes to get 
past about six gates and then find the correct track.  
Approaching the train at the blazing speed of my quickest 
shuffle, I held up a hand to the conductor, who I believe 
held the train a few seconds for me; at any rate I was the 
last one to board. On home town turf in twenty minutes, I 
was greeted by that most beautiful sight of all journeys, 
a friend who had missed me.

The visit was a good one. Carol is doing quite well, and 
so am I. I may stay home for more than the week I’d 
planned so I can fit in a church group meeting and help my 
neighbor in the first few days after his DBS surgery, but 
I’ll be on some kind of transport to Kentucky again soon.

Last changed: 09/01/05