WHISTLE STOP

Sleeping has never been difficult. In the army we got 5 minute smoke breaks and I could get a 3 minute nap in those 5 minutes. After all these years I don’t remember ever lying awake, waiting for slumber to strike. Oh, I wake up in the night sometimes with a dream, the mind going ballistic but not very often. When I do, there is only a short wait before I slip back into never-land. If the brain will not settle down I get up. Lying in bed wide awake is unbearable. I can clean house or play solitaire or sit down and throw words at the page. This morning is one of those times. 

The last time I checked it was 4:42 a.m. I had been wrestling with a mind trip so vivid I remember details and that in itself is remarkable. In 1973, in a very real but other life I had moved my family from the mountains of Colorado to the flatlands of SW Michigan. It was a new beginning, teaching school in a small, rural town known for corn fields and its football team. For 13 years we lived in that fishbowl. In reflection it was a bittersweet time but ‘Bittersweet’ doesn’t ripen overnight, it needs time to ferment. With career and family there was just enough pause to take things as they came, even feel content. 

Borrowing from Yogi Berra, it was deja vu all over again. The dream had all the right people, playing themselves. Four years ago I went back for a 40 year class reunion. I couldn’t get over how dramatically my former students and cohorts had aged, both in the flesh and between the ears. From one breath to the next we role reversed, they would be narrow and old while I was the rule stretching agent of change. What made the dream profound were well spaced flashbacks. We would be in the present for the moment and then it would be 1976. I was oscillating like a pendulum. The dream reminded me of the movie, ’Fried Green Tomatoes’. In it Jessica Tandy time travels between her petulant youth and the old woman’s hard earned wisdom. Kathy Bates is her willing accomplice whose own drama parallels Tandy’s. First is was Tandy’s busy, bustling village of Whistle Stop in the 1930’s and then Whistle Stop, the abandoned ghost town sixty years later. In my dream I identified with both characters; Tandy in her youth and the older, weathered and worn Tandy/Bates combo. Saint Joseph County, Michigan hasn’t dried up but the lapse between the 70’s and now is enormous. Buildings have new paint and the new school is now the old school but some things don’t change. Football is still king and self indulgent pride is still a virtue. The gene pool has been stirred but old family names are still entrenched. Bittersweet; just a word but it speaks volumes.

Those 13 years shape a major theme in my story. If only a microcosm, neither good nor bad, that experience belongs to me, it’s all mine. Without it I would be incomplete. But like Kathy Bates' character, if you’re not ready to leap when it’s time to move on, you may not get another chance. I have never taken root in a particular time or place. It's never been important, where I'm from. Things in motion tend to stay in motion; Isaac Newton's 1st Law. I have no qualms with those who stay at rest but the thought of growing old in Whistle Stop is sobering. 

Quite a dream! Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  I suppose one could sit down at the fork in the road and ponder action versus inaction. That would create three possibilities. Marcel Proust gets credit for an illustration with a fork in the road. Each arm of the fork has a blank signpost. Having chosen one path over the other, moving on, you can look back to read the writing on the backs of the signs. The one you have taken is named, “Your Destiny” and the one forsaken reads, “No Longer An Option.” Proust understood inertia, both physical and mental. Destiny was somewhere farther up the line and Whistle Stop was no longer an option. 

Lyrically, Leonard Cohen’s, ‘Anthem’ captures the feel if not the fact; the dream and my story. I can hear him sining . . .

The birds they sing, at the break of day

Start again, I hear them say

Don’t dwell on what, has passed away

Or what is yet to be.

Yeah, the wars they will, be fought again

The holy dove, she will be caught again

Bought and sold, and bought again

The dove is never free.

Ring the bells, that still can ring

Forget, your perfect offering

There is a crack, in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts, you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march, there is no drum

Every heart, every heart, to love will come

But like a refugee.

So ring the bells, that still can ring

Forget, your perfect offering 

There is a crack, in everything . . .