“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn’t really in the whistle—it is in you.”
– Meindert DeJong
Railway stations make me smile. When I see a train on the track I want to hop on – no matter where it’s going. The thought of train travel didn’t always make me smile though, especially when I commuted into New York City for school, and then my job. Every morning I longed for the train to break through the end of the tunnel at Penn Station and keep going. Anywhere.
When we graduated from school my friends took jobs at large corporations, their eyes fixed on the prize of retirement accounts, pensions and two week vacations. I took a job at a small recording studio, my eyes fixed on free concert tickets and an endless supply of records and music.
I greeted famous musicians coming in to record public service announcements. Chuck Mangione serenaded me with his trumpet. Seals & Croft asked what my favorite song of theirs was and then broke into a chorus of Summer Breeze. My guy crush Kenny Loggins put his arm around me for a photo of what I was sure would be the first of a lifetime of photos of us together. Alison Steele, The Nightbird, one of the country’s first female disc jockeys on the progressive rock station WNEW-FM, interviewed the musicians. Meeting these talented people almost made the commute worth it.
After nine months at the job a slump in the record industry caused business to screech to a halt. No more concert tickets reached my desk. No radio stations returned my calls. No musicians came in for me to greet. With nothing to do the engineer stood in his doorway and complained to me about his life. Every hour I went into the back room, opened the window, gulped in exhaust filled air and let out the silent screams of a bewildered twenty-one-year old going down the wrong track.
It took a long time to get on board the right train. But when I broke through the tunnel walls I built around my life I was able to appease my longing to keep going. Anywhere. And everywhere.
