The guard touched her elbow and she knew it was over. Head down, her chest ripped with cold air and panic, she stumbled red-faced and shaking into the store. She reached the door of Barney’s at 5:58 p.m., two minutes, two minutes, scared the security guard would turn her away, she tried to hide herself among the people exiting. ![]() Over Lexington, over Park, Madison-bound. Eyes wide she tried to judge which side of the train the doors would open, there was a pattern, left, left, right, or was it right, left, right? She burst from the train and ran up the escalator out into the rain. Willing it past 28th street, past Grand Central, the seconds clocked. She used her cerebral cortex to push it northward 59th street, 59th street, 59th street. So she took the L train to the 4,5,6 uptown. From beneath her duvet she called her babysitter, and then she called Barney’s seventeen times, seventeen times called the store but no one could verify the existence of this particular coat, well of course they couldn’t, it was not that sort of coat. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the stores were closing early. Of course a coat! Riding in boxcars was to be no mean feat. Her daughters plucked from school and safely home, she was free to move on to the next phase of her plan-it was a coat. Though she rolled the words “Interior Protection” safely into her brain, storing them for later usage. Sharply she turned her eyes to the road and the message dispersed like confetti in the air. Everyone was honking, cars swerved around her, shaking her vehicle. The car slowed to forty miles per hour the woman reached her hand out of the paper now thirty miles per hour she was smiling now fifteen miles per hour. ![]() This woman glowed as she stepped out of the billboard to deliver a message. On the billboard was a woman with blonde hair and a pink sweater. Everything was a part of everything, her car, her body, the pavement, the air all moving together like one gigantic ripple through space and time.īy the roadside stood a billboard for interior vehicle protection. Driving her car down the middle lane of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway she felt a profound sense of connection with the road, every rise and fall she registered in her body, as if she were riding a bison, atop a whale, a slap of the tail. ![]() But it was too late her journey had begun. But first she had to get the kids from school.Įveryday life threatened to invade her calling as she drove to collect her daughters. Overalls.Įmboldened by truth and clarity she would continue westward ho across a country she had not been born to, born in, but had come to. She would talk to Willie Nelson, or someone who looked like Willie Nelson and with just a few words and a threadbare smile so much would be cleared up. Nighttime on the City of New Orleans penny a point ain’t no one keeping score, pass the paper bag that holds the bottle, feel the wheels rumbling ’neath the floor. She would watch the stars in the sky barely moving as she rumbled clickety-clack. Making connection, following the route, hollowing a root, striking a clue, drifting the blue, guiding the way, finding the day, shining above, sent with love, to New York.įrom there she could hop a boxcar, find a rail yard, talk to a jail bird, sleep on a mail sack, hide in a luggage rack, walk on the train track. Why, the very purpose of the Erie Canal was connection! Freight moving from railroads to water. She was not worried about what she would do once she arrived connection would be easy. It would be the ideal antidote to her, to time, to all things lost. Hard labor, honest days, moral values, common sense, perfect truth, forgotten youth. Nothing else.īuilt in 1853, or 1808, or 1945, the canal, she knew, held what she needed. She just had to get there, it was the thereness that mattered. ![]() North, blue, Mohawk River, left, Catskill Mountains, Times New Roman, westward, onward, upward. She studied the map so closely she could no longer actually decipher a route to her destination. She had studied maps closely, so closely she knew the mountain ranges, the rivers and their tributaries, the font of the letters spelling out the words new york, the palette of the states. She had to get to the Erie Canal, that much was certain.
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