Leonora (Leo) loves trains. The romance of them. The casual nature of travelling in them. The sound of the wheels on the tracks. The song in the conductor’s voice. The people and their stories entering and exiting.
What Leo loves most about trains, though is that when she is on one, it is perfectly acceptable to do nothing more than look out the window. Leo always fills her backpack with books, magazines, and newspapers. And sometimes she reads or skims them. Mostly though, she is so drawn to what’s on the other side of the window—the mural of rarely seen back-city landscapes—that it is impossible for her to focus on anything else. The reading materials lay strewn about her, often untouched, as she presses her forehead against the window with a blank and quiet mind.
Yesterday, when Leo took the train from Washington, DC to New York City (specifically to visit the elevator shaft museum in Lower Manhattan) and the train wove its way through Philadelphia, she noticed pagodas and a courtyard come into view. She realized with a smile that she was looking at the Philadelphia Zoo. She had been there once before, as an eight-year-old tagalong with her friend Denise’s family. Leo remembered nothing of that day, except getting a cherry snow cone and a bird using it for target practice.
Leo tried to recall whether she laughed or cried at her ruined cherry snow cone. Or if Denise’s father bought her a replacement. The memory of that day didn’t provide any life altering insight, just a pleasant re-rolling of a movie that hadn’t crossed Leo’s mind in more than twenty years.
As the train trundled away from the zoo, Leo began to take notice of other things—things mostly hidden except from the window of a train:
An old, rusty water tower with ivy growing up its spindly legs.
Huge, empty cable spools—tables for giants.
Piles of scrap metal and mountains of junked cars.
A field full of burning tires.
Factories with rooftop mazes of conveyer belts, exhaust pipes, fans, and conduit—the game “Mousetrap” on steroids.
Kids bouncing a ball on a street lined with crumbling houses.
Three old men sitting on chairs behind a building, a mangy dog at their feet.
Metal trashcans in desperate need of emptying.
Trailer trucks backed up to banks of corrugated garages.
Pink trees! Yes, Leo saw a plot of land with fifty or more dead trees, all spray painted pink, as if the Cat in the Hat himself had been there.
And then there was the graffiti. Colorful, curly, bulbous, blocky letters, words, and phrases that were, in and of themselves, art. Leo thought the graffiti was beautiful, and like most art, only meaningful to the one who created it.