graduation

I have never lived in a place where I could not hear the distant whistle of trains. I live now in the only house I have ever owned; from the front porch, the trains are visible. They are double-stacked now, graffiti-covered. They are the color of blue that Silly Putty would be if it were not pink. They are stamped in large white letters : China Shipping.

One month ago, I sat on the football field during graduation ceremonies at my high school. The stands were filled with balloons and families in t-shirts and jeans. When the sun went down, the breeze was still cool enough to feel like spring, but there were no stars visible in the sky, only the lights of airplanes.

Sitting on the field in the faculty section at graduation is a surreal experience. I am behind the graduates, and the flatness of the field obscures my ability to view the stage. The PA equipment is made for indoors, and the names and speeches drift into the air, audible but not comprehendible. My mind wanders. Teachers around me bring cell phones tucked into the folds of their academic robes, and as the ceremony drags on, they surreptitiously check their messages. I play games with the program: Count the Names Based On Liquor. I find a Pinot this time, which is one I'd never seen. I don't know the kid in question, and I wonder if it's pronounced like Pie-Not.

One-third of the way into the ceremony, a kid has a seizure on the field and everything stops while paramedics are called. They push the careful rows of folding chairs out of the way for an ambulance and clusters of robed girls stand near the fence, their heels of their best shoes sinking into the dirt. By the time it is determined that the boy that had a seizure can stay and walk and receive his diploma, and the chairs are replaced, and the calling of names begins again, it is solidly dark outside. The ceremony started late to begin with: it always does.

I assume that it is this delay that runs graduation directly into the train schedule. Right around 9pm, a freight train makes it's slow, rumbling progress on tracks just on the other side of the fence. Before school began last fall, I went to lunch with my department head - a thirty year veteran who taught in my school before it was given a new building and a new name. She told me that one year, a group of boys were taking a shortcut across the tracks, between two stopped trains. As the last boy climbed between the cars, the train lurched to life without warning. While his friends watched, he was knocked down and crushed under the slow, deadly giant. I think about this nameless kid, who should have been older than I am.

It is impossible to hear anything over the grating steel and thunder of wheels on tracks. The boxcars roll by. China Shipping. I imagine the blue boxes being unloaded at port. I think of them on ships, surrounded by water. I realize that they were once in China, they will be emptied here and then returned. Those boxcars, I think, have been more places that I have ever been. None of my students, I think, will travel as far as these trains.