I haven't been in an automobile since Thanksgiving. The night of the winter solstice, I set out to find out if it's safe to walk from my River Market-area building to Little Rock's Union Station, also known as the MoPac (Missouri Pacific) Station.
I have a parka that kept Paul Greenberg warm on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1983. I stuffed its pockets with keys, wallet, phone, phone charger, three bandanas and a pen, and lit out west on Third Street. No malingerers. Sailed down Victory Street to the station. Totally safe. The clerk sold me a ticket to Chicago.
Coach class: The toddler on my left slept on his mother's chest all the way to St. Louis. Nothing but soft snoring noises. The baby in front of me was also polite. A cry here and there.
Unless your destination is St. Louis, don't get off the train. St. Louis is a great American city, and its classic post-World War II great American city mistakes are concentrated around the train station. They tore everything down. Good buildings remain in sight, but at a distance not to be dared during a one-hour layover.
I crossed the public transit tracks to a generic, convention center hotel and bought a plastic (an old friend's brother calls plastic bottles of water "plastics" because there is so much plastic in the water itself) from a young man who asked "Where'd you get that jacket?" I told him that it's an old North Face but my husband (I didn't bother with the customary "late") sewed a Yukon Route patch over the logo.
"He's dope," said my friend at the boring hotel coffee shop.
Dope as they come. So dope that the only dope he could tolerate was a finger of good scotch. "Half a beer for you, Greenberg," his old publisher and editor Ed Freeman used to say.
If you get off the train at St. Louis, you have to get in line to get back on. Everyone in the low-ceilinged lobby (circa 1975) looked sad. I was ready to get on the Texas Eagle (southwest bound) and head home.
A sense of safety and comfort came from four young people who lined up before me. College kids heading home, maybe. And then a dapper young man caught my eye. Seated, among the sad, he looked fresh in good clothes: a button-up shirt and khaki pants. His hat rested on his suitcase and his leather satchel sat beside him, in one of the seats reserved for sad people. He was reading a paperback.
My comforting young people began to speculate: Is he a professor, just taking the train up to Chicago to teach a class?
They continued to imagine. Who was the young man, so well dressed, and reading a paperback?
We all got on the train to Chicago, and I hope the four kids found out something about the beautiful young man.
Back on the train, I sent a text message to my Little Rock neighbor who comes from Chicago and knows Chicago. I booked a room in a nouveaux-riche hotel.
Trains are not like airplanes. You just get on.
And you get America. You fall in love with Springfield, Ill., which looks like Stuttgart, Ark., my first American city, except bigger, and they didn't tear anything down.
Commercial buildings. Houses. I want to come back and spend some time in Springfield.
America. Rolling by. Chicago was wonderful to walk around in. Chicago is a city with a north-south/east-west grid, and it is wonderful except for the freeway that cuts off the city from the beach.
I took the Chicago Avenue Subway, which means ugly and dangerous underpass, to get to Lake Michigan.
I touched the water.
I could have taken a swim.
It was Dec. 23.
. . .
2023 is a common year beginning on a Sunday. The first of the year was a Sunday and the last of the year is a Sunday. A good year to take over the column written for 20 years by Tom Dillard. As ever, thanks, Tom.
Thank you to the publisher and publisher emeritus of this paper.
Brenda Looper caught my "coy ponds" and saved me from minor embarrassment. David Barham caught something that is still too embarrassing to print. Thank you.
Karen Martin, my Cleveland Plain Dealer, thank you.
Readers, thank you. Thank you to everyone who has written, emailed, texted, called, said something to me or my parents. I live for this. Please keep it up.
Thanks to my friend from Texarkana.
And thanks to my friend from Little Rock. I'm glad we grew up together, and I am happy to be sitting in your house in Baltimore.
Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email brooke@restorationmapping.com