Off the Track

(Photo by punkindunkin; thank you!)

There's another train, there always is
Maybe the next one is yours
Get up and climb aboard another train.

~ Gene Morton, in "Another Train," on One Big Joke
(although I like Cindy Kallet's version even better)

I got way off track a few days back. I get like that. I have always been drawn to the order represented by a printed train schedule, and I seem to have trouble remembering that even something that official-looking is just an idea. A plan. A set of hoped-for outcomes. I put together the little train schedules of my life, and get very attached to them. Except that they only truly exist in my head. And sometimes the universe – as embodied by my wife, our son, or the weather, for example – has a different plan.

At night, sitting in my bed with my laptop on my lap, I can hear the train whistle as it warns anyone who might be thinking about doubting the bells and flashing lights at the crossing.

You'd think by now that I would have learned to pay attention to the no-less-obvious signs in my own life. But as a wise friend once said to me, "Lessons will be repeated until learned." Guess this may mean that I'm destined to be sitting in the back of the class taking the same notes again for who knows how long. Sigh.

But life don't clickety clack down a straight line track
It comes together and it comes apart.

~ Ferron, in "Ain't Life A Brook," on Still Riot

Thanks to the good women of Mama Says Om
for whispering "train" in my ear.
Want to see what others heard?