21January was my birthday. 73. Pretty amazing. We went to a fancy Italian-themed chain restaurant, Maggianno’s Little Italy. There were families there. Several babies were there, passed around the table for aunts, uncles and grandparents to cuddle and smile at. A little girl with pigtails was eating penne pasta, beside her pregnant mom and little brother, who had yet to receive his first haircut. Another family featured 10 and 12 year-old brothers showcasing their table manners. They did well.

This is a restaurant that gives free desserts on special occasions. I received a crème brûlée to share with J. There was a bodacious quantity of food to take home. J finished off the crème brûlée first.

I took a nap, watched some football, even though I said I wouldn’t. Robert came by with a French tart from Whole Foods. Tasty, a perfect birthday indulgence

I could say more and I just might later.

I’m breathing slowly, sitting in my chair, waiting for a train to pass on the Virtual Rail Fan YouTube Channel. The Amtrak train, #97 Southbound Silver Meteor, passes through town, on the way to Miami.

I can imagine a couple, newlyweds, on The Orange Blossom Special, headed to Miami Beach, for a stay in an Art Deco hotel and a properly improper honeymoon. Is it their first time? We won’t say.

What we do know is that both are eager. They’ve spent their lives wondering, reading the marriage manuals. Now, packing condoms, pessary and spermicide, these naive innocents will began their adventure in adulthood

The return trip will include college on the GI Bill, mortgage from the VA, that shiny new DeSoto, and an inexhaustible supply of diapers from the Stork Diaper Service.

He hopes his job at the advertising agency, handling the cigarette account will be lucrative. She hopes she won’t be too bored with keeping the house, playing canasta, and listening to how her neighbour Betty lets her hubby Sam, take her back there. At least she won’t get pregnant. Again.

All these little dramas end when the letter from The Government arrives, telling him he’s been called back, to report to Camp LeJeune for God knows what.

So it’s off on an another train, alone this time, as the Twentieth Century unfolds before him.

I have one light on, in the open area between the living room and den . There is light enough to see the keyboard and the text I create.

On the television, streaming from YouTube is the webcam picture of the railroad tracks in Ashland. I’m waiting for #98 The Silver Meteor , bound ultimately for New York. The train originated in Miami, travels past Cape Canaveral, St Augustine, Jacksonville, Savannah Charleston, the North Carolina Piedmont , into cotton, tobacco, and peanut country. It passes the commercial hog farms with their noisome smells. I can’t recall if the Meteor stops in Smithfield, North Carolina. If it did, one could disembark and visit the Ava Gardner Museum Her shrine sits near the tobacco fields, whose produce ultimately killed her. Irony is merely knowing too much.

By the time the train reaches Virginia , with more cotton, peanuts, soybeans tobacco and hogs, we have seen the South, in all of her tragedy, glory and squalor.

This is about as old as one can get in America, except for Santa Fe in New Mexico. Four hundred years from Jamestown and the malaria that prompted a move to higher ground in Williamsburg and architecture only a Rockefeller could duplicate.

I wish I could say the Silver Meteor stopped in Williamsburg, but it doesn’t. It crosses Virginia at the Fall Line of the Appomattox, the James, the Rappahannock and Potomac, of battlefields and burial grounds, the dirt patches of war, so readily forgotten, but for the Myths engendered.

I should go back to bed, the little bed, maybe to sleep some more and dream of lovers I’ve never met, of wives now divorced, dead or who simply spurn me in Baptist purity, a chastity reclaimed.

Time for another cup of tea, as I watch a freight hauling plywood.

Good morning, folks.

By considering what I don’t act on as an indicator of what I fear, I can tell you that my own happiness is my greatest fear. So many things I keep bottled up, unexpressed, private to only myself.

Now, if I want to be a writer, an author, this is a great big helping of cognitive dissonance that I keep piling on my plate.

It’s time then to write. I have an entire life of experiences where I’m not the hero. I was waiting to be a hero. But I’ll never be that hero.

I simply have to write the damn books.