When as a child I looked at a map or a globe or out my window, I knew I lived in the middle of everything. I thought it meant something. I didn’t know it then, but the middle is not the gravitational center of life, activity, population, culture, or much of anything. But try telling that to a boy who can find any and all entertainment he will ever need.
I remember distinctly sitting beside the railroad tracks, on top of the slight rise, and having a full circle of field and sky to view. As I felt the tremor and heard a far off whine, I was shaken from the only calm my day would have and looked up the pair of lines leading to and splitting the horizon. She was on her way.
On freezing, dry prairies, snow doesn’t quite stick to the ground. That’s not to say that it doesn’t settle. It doesn’t stick. A slight breeze stirs up flurries afresh.
Trains at full speed offer more.
I might back up a few steps and wait patiently as the train crept toward me at full speed until it came close and flew past at full speed. Then those dry drifts that had packed against the tracks would burst into a furious blizzard of cold, cutting wind and thinly veiled curtains of white.
Even on the coldest days, having frozen stiff by the tracks for 10, 15, or 20 minutes, I always found that there was nothing more refreshing than standing in that whirlwind. When I was warm in the family room, fire smoldering and oven baking, if I looked out the window as a train passed on a cold and snowy day, just the distant view would quicken my heart and brighten my eyes.
As a boy, there was nothing like it. So too as a man.
I bought a painting years ago facing an old engine and some carriages from a slight angle. More carriages undoubtedly behind those visible are masked in white, as is the horizon and anything else in the far distance around the off-center focal point of the painting. Only half way across the canvas has the animated snow not cloaked all behind it. There you can begin to see the sparse copses, lonely farmhouses, and broad fields of Minnesota, all frosted and quiet in the wide, rural north.
The painting hangs over a dingy couch in a studio apartment in a city not in the center of any map but central in our urban imaginations. Some days I see the painting and stop for a half second to consider it afresh. Some days I don’t see it at all, just like I don’t see the thermostat in the corner or the crusty bowl left on the coffee table or my face in the mirror making me wonder on the train whether my hair isn’t a mess. Some days I purposefully walk by, eyes down, sensing its presence and that it has something to say I’d rather not hear.
After riding the over-crowded commuter, working in an open office, and walking sweltering streets where the heat radiates from the cement, I find myself (regularly, not daily) in my bar. It’s as dingy as everything else. I figure why change just the one thing when I’m already acclimated.
Near the kitchen, at the bar, drink in hand and burger ordered, I sweat humidly as I peel my forearm from the beer-infused vinyl. I sit here probably about as unsatisfied as the next guy, nowhere near as despondent as some, and I actively try to avoid the thought of that which clings so tightly to my consciousness that my nostalgia will not let me store that old painting where I might be able to forget it with my troubles for a while.