Trains are dancing through my life. Passenger trains, their gentle swing and sway, what Hawkins and Winnsboro, Texas, Sunday School teachers of children attentive as best they have been instructed in tiny wooden chairs arranged in a smile, declare the oil of gladness, that soft clicking now only heard in late afternoon slow slippings into dreams, what children of the fifties sift from memories gifted to those still living, the gentle hum of remembrance.

Fourth grade, my parents conferred and agreed to drive me to Mineola, Texas, the closest town where passenger trains stopped, most heading to or returning from Dallas, to risk my riding the train to my mom’s sister’s house in Dallas, McCommas Avenue, afraid I would jump a freight train boxcar, having been taught by Depression hobos stopping at our house for a handout meal back door, my mom knowing they would “mark” the house–signal of grace for other hobos to bless the family’s generosity or curse its lack of compassion, who offered me their art of jumping for ladder rungs on the right side of the boxcar couplings in case I missed I would smack into the side of the boxcar, not fall into the open space and be sucked beneath the wheels.

Then fearing what I might do alone on my dream train, my parents paid my three-years-older cousin’s fare, knowing she had sense and might be able to keep me on board, both literal and metaphorical, what I could not yet comprehend.

High school, my best friend Marcus and I unloaded boxcars of Macobar oil-well drilling “mud,” each bag 100 lbs., our workout gym digging out the train-shifted bags, loading seven each on an iron-wheeled dolly to push to the storage shed and stack above our heads, building muscles I dreamed high-school cheerleaders and majorettes would slide across the front bench seat of my ’55 Ford Fairlane to snuggle close, a promise of kissing later, the best I could imagine, or hope for, it being 1963 in East Texas: Viet Nam I-CORE, Danang, and the DMZ an unimaginable 1968 away.

And now turning 80, all my chosen memories and what may still come riding the rails, anointing me with that obstinate oil of gladness.