And now something recent.

I’m a native Californian, conceived in Buffalo but born in Hollywood. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Monterey Park, then ten years in Riverside, then 52 years in Altadena, and now one year in the Bay Area looking across toward San Francisco and the Golden Gate. So I’m a transposed Southern Californian, happy to be still a part of what I do believe is the Greatest State in the Union. And of course I notice differences between the south and the north. I think of trains, subways, monorails, metrorails. I never had much experience with trains. Riding them was new and far between. Not like my wife who was ahead of me in so many ways. She rode trains when she was a little girl. Her mother had to stay behind in Los Angeles to work, but she put little Shirley in the care of the solicitous porters who made the trip to Iowa to see the relatives as a great adventure. Hearing about it, I was jealous, because I had nothing like that in my own childhood, nothing to compare. I also liked the stories about little Shirley, dressed adorably like a little Shirley Temple, put forth by her mother who never had the movie career she yearned for, working in restaurants to be noticed but never, and then by default little Shirley, in the aisles on a bus, singing little songs, maybe a little dance, hoping for the notice that never came.

She also rode the red cars a lot. Those were the wonderful street trains or trollies that took you almost anywhere you wanted to go in greater Los Angeles, a wonderful system of transportation blind-sided and destroyed by petroleum and the automobile industry which couldn’t take the competition and lowered the standard of our lives. I rode the red cars only once, in my late teens, when I took Shirley to the Shrine Auditorium to see some really great cultural event, and the tracks went right by the auditorium and the car stopped for us, and I thought how amazing and wonderful, and inexpensive too, and that was just about the last chance I had because just after that the whole line was decommissioned , the tracks still in the streets for a long time before they were finally removed. And tracks in the right-of-way along people’s back yards through the city, even longer before they were removed, and the grass grew up and people forgot they were ever there or never knew. History, and I can get emotional remembering because it reminds me of loss, and I carry it with me to the Bay Area and it’s always still there.

And I think of the time in Riverside, still an undergraduate and before we were married, when Shirley and my roommate rode a train the few miles to San Bernardino. My roommate was from a railroad family in Needles, he had some kind of pass, and encouraged us to come along for free. The conductor didn’t see it that way, there was an ushering off at the next stop, and I, my memory is hazy about the details, was by advice sent to hide out in the toilet, but that didn’t work either, because the conductor asked for the ticket I didn’t have, and I doubled over clutching my stomach as if in pain and said something like “Krank, bin krank, so krank,” some few German words or phrases learned imperfectly from the German class I wasn’t studying for and was failing, they put me off at the next stop, I didn’t know where, and I couldn’t call anyone, I had no money, but somehow my roommate came to get me, and laughed about it, but I didn’t think it was funny at all.

And then, so many years later, when we finally got to Europe and bought a Eurail Pass, good on busses and ferries and the wonderful rail system all over every country, and we had, I have, memories of the train from Patras to Athens, narrower gauge than the rest of Europe, and so crowded that students on summer holiday, probably impatient Americans, fed up with the waiting and stopping, opened the windows and threw their luggage out and crawled out to join it and finish the trip on foot, and maybe got there ahead of us.

And the time in Paris when we were eating late at a nice restaurant, and the waiter cautioned us to be sure to enter the metro which was closing soon at midnight, because once we were past the gate we were OK, but if we missed the time, we were stuck until the next day and would have to find lodging for the night or a very expensive taxi if we could find one to take us to our more distant arrondissement, and the waiter ran with us to the metro entrance to be sure we made it in time, and not because he wanted another tip but because he was a good person and because the terrible things they say about the French are not always true.

But then from Paris on the train bleu to Nice, and we had a sleeping cabin, bunk beds, and then a French couple came in to share the compartment and the wife was furious with her husband for booking a compartment with American tourists, and tongue lashed him in loud French which I could understand just well enough and yes, I have sometimes an edgy vicious streak, said to Shirley, “Aren’t the French wonderful? See how the man brings his mother with him on vacation!” and the wife furiously understood me back and shut up, and we all slept, but in the morning we woke up and found they were already gone and so was our camera, so we lost the pictures of Paris but still had the memories.

Finally, too many train stories to relate here. Like the time we rode by train all along the Rhine to get to our next stop on the itinerary I was afraid to deviate from, so we never really saw Germany except through the window, and a fellow passenger woman pointed out the places where there were bunkers from the war, “We know where they all are,” she said. And I remembered my German professor at UCR telling us about his war-time experiences, pointing to photos from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and the great Nuremberg rally with the masses of troops facing Hitler and the professor pointed and said, “See, there I am, that’s me!” and he told us the story of riding on a train along the Rhine during those days, possibly the same train we were on so many years later, and German officers were looking out the window and he said, just masking his resistant disapproval of the whole war, pointing out the Lorelai rock where the maiden lured men to their death, and he asked the officers, as if he’d forgotten, who wrote the famous poem and they said with great respect and affection from their youth, “Why our Great poet Heinrich Heine”, and he asked, “But wasn’t he Jewish?” and they didn’t know what to say. A train story, though not my own, but one I enjoy re-telling.

And trains again, and mass transit, and the metro line around and through Los Angeles, an attempt to make up for the loss of the red cars. And I still haven’t ridden on them, Shirley and I talked about it and sort of always planned to take the ride at least from Pasadena along the Arroyo, the scenic route to Grand Central Station, but we never did, and it’s still on my list, because we had positive feelings as we watched the system develop over the years, the excavations, the laying of rails, then finished, and we so often saw the metro cars pass by us on the freeway, and we thought, just for fun. And they go all the way out to Palm Springs where we could visit our friends. And there’s constant talk about developing a bullet train to Las Vegas, so someday.

And here in the Bay Area, I see BART all the time, the cars flashing by, sometimes elevated, sometimes going out of my sight under the Bay itself, and I haven’t yet, but will soon.

And I imagined what it would be like, and used that speculation to consider the imagined differences between Southern and Northern California, and I jotted this down 6/30/23. So yes, very recent, and as always subject to revision. And offered here even though I’m a little afraid to include things that would as previously published be unavailable for submission somewhere else, but I do want to get words out to people. So, here:

---

BART

Bay
Area
Rapid
Transit

what a clever
name
I step inside
the doors close
and we’re off
I’m aware
that I can’t see
the source
of power
I look out
	the window
	to see
	the world
	flash
	too fast
	to comprehend
	but not too fast
	for the thrill
	always there
	if I allow it
	and people
	in the same compartment
	I pretend
	not to look 
	but I look
	they look
	we look
	away
	all kinds
	of people
	all those lives
	democracy
	in action
	in a capsule
	of the universe
	going toward
	the rest
	of their lives
	sometimes
	we talk
	we break
	that ice
	we find out
	something about each other
	we find out
	about ourselves
	past our usual
	unknowing
	and there’s comfort
	we’re all going
	in the same
	direction
	a mix of fear
	and danger
	and the rush
	of feelings
	we can allow
	not those
	clamped down
	to numbness
	to endure
	the ride
	but for me
	it’s still all new
	I’m from
	the warmer
	Southern
	California
	can’t you tell
	where people
	more relaxed
	in many ways
	more open
	the Mediterranean
	pace
	of life
	goes with the sun
	and people open up
	but in the northern
	here
	intensity
	when people finally
	talk 
	maybe having
	more to say