04
Showing it
During the spring, I see the sun rise up from the Potomac on my morning train ride into work, all reds and oranges and pinks. In the fall it is still dark when I get to work in the mornings. The days turn chill, quickly it always seems, but I suspect in actuality slowly. Out comes the woolen cap, the gloves; no longer do I wear my windbreaker or my sweatshirt but rather both, zipped together in a puffy winter jacket amalgam. On the first day of the new cold snap when these things are brought out, I feel myself slipping back. Once upon a time I used to hop freight trains in this jacket, with this cap pulled way down until even my eyebrows were covered. I get off the train and walk through the empty city the rest of the way to work, examining the gloves for some sign that I really did those things. These gloves once gripped rusty railings and got soaked through with morning dew, but they do not show it. They’ve never been washed, but I think that it is my imagination when I smell the faintest hints of coal and soot and oil upon them.
I almost died one night, foolishly racing over gravel along the side of a moving train whose speed I could not hope to match, reaching out a gloved hand for the passing railing and giving my legs one last desperate burst of speed only to trip and fall in towards the train, towards the wheels that would have soundlessly cut through me -- had my gloved hand not caught the railing just then, commuting the death sentence for a more agreeable several miles of dragging along-side the car until I finally managed to swing my legs up and scale the railing. So many adventures I had in this jacket, in these gloves; so many times I put myself at dire risk -- and came away without a scratch; I do not show it. The hat sports no blood stains and even the sweat is long-evapourated.
The jacket keeps the proofs of my adventures that the gloves do not confess. Ticket stubs from the space needle in Seattle, a train time-table from New York, a small smooth stone from somewhere in Iowa. With my hands in my pockets, I finger these things as I walk to work, long since past needing to pull them out in order to see them before my eyes. One day I may pull these trinkets out one by one and show my son, telling him the story behind each one. I will show him the hat and the gloves and tell him about the time I almost died, about the cold and the wet and all of the things that I sought out in order to prove to myself that all things are survivable -- poverty, homelessness, hunger, chill, being trapped in the middle of nowhere, being dumped, getting bad grades -- that we have nothing to fear from life if we just have faith.
I have a new jacket. It is a trench coat, more adult, more respectable in appearance. It hasn’t seen train cars or abandoned buildings, hasn’t snuck to the tops of skyscrapers or stowed away on Greyhound buses, nor felt the sensation of waking up on the ground cold and wet. Now, when the days turn chill, I pull it out of the closet. Though lighter than my old jacket, it keeps me warmer.
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