I was four years old, and we were going to ride on a train. There were three of us children. We were going to our Grandmother’s house, our father’s mother. None of us had ever been on a train. My sister was two years older than me and was sometimes allowed to play around the tracks that ran behind our house, but I wasn’t permitted to yet. I watched the trains from the porch or the backyard, and waved to the people in the windows as they sped by. Sometimes the engineer would blow his horn for me. I wouldn’t move until the caboose went by.
But now we were the people looking out the windows. We had started our trip at the Welton Depot. While we waited for the train, my father walked us to the tracks. He gave us each a penny, and we laid them on the middle track. He said that was where the next train would come through. We had to walk across another track to get to it. Daddy showed us how to put our ears against the steel rail of the track to listen for an approaching train. We waited for an express train to come through. Then we went to collect our pennies. To our amazement, the pennies were now flat, their features unrecognizable.
Later, on the train, I had to use the bathroom. It was in another part of the train. My father took me. My mother, heavily pregnant, and with a child on her lap, stayed put. We had to walk from one car to the next. When my father opened the door, the noise was deafening. We walked through it, onto the platform between the two cars. Now there was a real sense of the motion from the speeding train. I was scared. My father reached down and picked me up. I wasn’t afraid anymore.
Now thirty years had passed, and I was on a train again. This one was different—sleek and modern, with air conditioning, and bathrooms in each car. The windows had shades, and most were pulled down. My wife and two-year-old son were with me. We were going to Welton. We didn’t have to go by train, but it seemed fitting. The landscape was mostly concrete now, with only a few small towns along the way. Now and then children waved from their yards, which were mostly areas behind run-down, box-like apartment complexes. Then, coming into Welton, I saw the old homestead, and there was Mama, sitting on the back porch in her rocking chair. She waved as we went by, and I thought how young she still looked. Too young to be a widow. Tears escaped from my eyes as I thought about the visits I should have made, but hadn‘t. And now my daddy was gone. My wife reached for my hand. With my other hand I reached down and felt the flattened penny in my pocket.
