on the road again...

Amtrak-ing my way up to St. Paul/Minneapolis to visit with Fred and Mona.

... while waiting in the boarding area in Chicago, it's a full waiting room, so I'm sitting on the floor reading, when a guy standing about one step away drops a piece of paper. For about half a second, I think to reach for it and hand it up to him, but then think twice and don't want to interfere in his personal space (or touch his things - he might be sensitive about it), and then think thrice and identify it as "one of those moments, lost".

What do I mean? It's one of those moments that can go one way or another - barely noticeable, but when considered all together they're the fabric, the Feel of a city, a place, a society. Every single person's daily split-second decisions affect the tone of how we all live with each other - vandalize a bus, or help the old lady up the stairs - there's always a choice. We can either become more isolated from another, driving around in our air-conditioned cars, shut up in our cubicles, going home to the cookie-cutter townhouses in the sprawled-out suburbs... or become more neighborly, maybe try walking around, meeting our neighbors, even... just simply handing a guy a piece of paper that he dropped.

... and DAMN if there ain't a whole lot of religious people that ride the train. As I walk out to the lounge car, there's everything from the menonnites (hutterites?) in their garb, to the "Baptized in the Levee" (whatever the magazine is that the woman across the way has), to the standard quietly-bible-browsing-types.


... and why do I keep finding these little notes I made for myself while in Nashua/Boston/D.C.? It's like when you shake all the sand out of your shoes, and then find a little more sand, and never quite get it all out. Anyway, more residual notes to myself, D.C. and otherwise:
- Nighttime rides around Ann Arbor (in after-hours-high-speed-urban-exploration mode) and I find myself at the top of a parking garage near sunset. It seems there's plenty of other people who are fond of rooftops - Roof People, as it were. Not groups, but a handful of individuals or couples that made their way to the top of the parking garage too, maybe just to see that particular sunset, or maybe they were on a date, or whatever, but they definitely weren't there to pick up their cars. I mean, what else would 8 separate people be doing on the top of a parking garage without a single car in sight?
- In the National Gallery: again I'm reminded of my bigotry towards 2-dimension art. Paintings suck. Sculpture rocks. That's all, I just wanted to make sure I made myself clear on that at some point in my life.
- And on the balcony, I look over and wonder again - am I a little bit afraid of heights? I have never thought of myself as afraid of heights, but I get that little hitch in the bottom of my throat (or at the top of my chest) whenever I stand over a long drop (balcony, for example). Now, that might be only in cases where there's a really low railing or none at all... would I feel the same height-anxiety if there were a chest-high railing?

... Everything is exotic and mundane, all at the same time. As I sit on this train, a new (new-ish) experience to be absorbed and savored for its newness, both the environment within the train and the route/terrain we pass through, the conductor walks by and stops to talk with another passenger. To me, this is new. To him, it's something he does every day, and probably holds no great surprise.