The Great Train Race

Dear Boo and Bubble,

    

Sometimes it’s funny what runs across your mind.  I was thinking the other day about your great, great grandmother, Mattie, who suffered in her latter years from what was called “hardening of the arteries.” We never heard of Alzheimer’s when I was growing up and, from what I know, I don’t think that was what happened here.  Her personality never exhibited the negative mood swings.  She just gradually lost her memory.  It became very obvious one day when she met us at the door with two sets of clothes on, her second pair of stockings pulled on over her shoes, a dainty white slip covering her purple shirtwaist dress.  No confusion registered on her face.  She merely forgot that she had dressed. 

 I find myself musing now about memory and how important it is to us.  I decide to conjure up my earliest memory, if possible, and my mind titillates with the exercise as if saying “Gee, we haven’t been here in a while.  Why don’t we stop on this brain cell and see what pops up.  Want to?”

In a split second, I am riding in the back of a 1948 Chevrolet with your great-uncle Bryant.  Great Granddaddy Schaefer is driving with Mamaw Mary riding in the front passenger seat.  It’s hot, all the windows are down.  There are no seatbelts nor any air conditioning and I’m standing with my head resting on my folded arms pressed against the back of the front seat.  This is the best place to get some sort of cooling breeze.  The road is two lanes and straight, forever straight for miles and miles ahead.  We are somewhere in southern Louisiana about three-fourths of the way from South Carolina on a visit to see your great, great grandmother Bethany in Houston, Texas.   If I’m three years old, it’s not by much.

Paralleling the highway is a railroad track.  Before long, a freight engine pulling an endless chain of cars rolls along beside us heading in the same direction.  He stretches a nose beyond us and Dad speeds up a little to catch up with him.  Bryant and I shriek with laughter as we both hang our heads out of the rear window on the track side. 

Dad honks the car horn.  The engineer blasts back from the train. 

“Keep up with him, daddy!” we implore. 

Dad presses the gas pedal a little harder.  I have no idea how fast we are actually going, probably a snail’s pace by today’s standards.  But, in my mind we are flying.

We wave at the engineer and he waves back.

Dad honks.  The train toots.  This goes on for miles.

Finally, we come to an intersection between the highway and the tracks.  Despite our profuse encouragement, Dad prudently decides not to see if we can beat the train across the tracks.  We stop and watch as it goes by, squealing and waving and honking all the while.  We count the cars.  It seems like a thousand until the last one rollicks down the track and absorbs into the landscape to the west and indelibly into my memory.

  

If there is anything earlier than this in my brain, I haven’t recollected it.  I will keep trying, though, to remember as many things as I can before the time comes when I’ll be the one standing at the door with two sets of clothes on merely having forgotten that I’d dressed already.