She Likes Trains: Hogger Stocker To all my huggers, I say Happy thanksgiving. But to my very favorite, the bestest engineer ever, I say, you and your crew have a happy Thanksgiving. “Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.” The text message shines on my screen and I almost dance with anticipation as I go to the resource desk at work to have someone read the header. I haven’t upgraded to the next phone that will read to me using text to speech technology. My phone reads the message, but not the header. Somehow before Earnie reads me the message I know it’s from Glenn. Sitting at Subway, Wednesday November 24, at 3:15 PM, in the first table on the second row of tables I text Glenn between bites of my meatball sandwich with olives, peppers, tomatoes and jalapenos and the tasty marinara sauce they use to slather across the whole thing. I have to try several times to send the message. I get a disturbing message that says “send failed.” Not sure why I get it; I hope he hasn’t blocked me! I think I just did smething wrong, and on the third try, I get a successful sent reply. Sitting here, texting the engineer of my dreams, enjoying my sandwich, is a piece of heaven in a quiet yet steadily busy work day. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I must wish the right one, the one who has comforted and made me crazy, not for any other reason than he just runs the train and he’s my first engineer love. I think he knows that. He doesn’t seem to mind. I wonder in his forty years of running the train if he’s ever met someone as obsessed or infatuated with engineers and running the train. The engineer runs the train, my human connection with the machine. And Glenn, my sweet engineer, doesn’t laugh at me when I ask him which hand operates the throttle. He’s just a married, old head, a kind one with God only knows what kinds of headaches and stresses, but a cheerful disposition and one it seems that kind of likes attention, but not too much. He just simply tells me he operates the throttle with the left hand. So now you know! Who would have thunk it! I’m writing all this, of course, knowing almost nothing about him, only that there is something about him that strikes me. Maybe he just gives good advice. He’s good people. He might remind me of the down home quality of my family, the quality I haven’t been able to find since moving to Orange County and going to college and then working for Anaheim’s largest employer. It isn’t that people haven’t been kind, generous and cheerful, they just haven’t’ been what I grew up with, not much. High strung, friendly, kind Glenn now texts me and I dance because I’ve gotten acknowledgement from him that I am noticed. “Do you hear back from him?” Janice Marsh, bob’s wife, asks me tonight as I wait for a bus and I explain on my phone that I still text him. “Sometimes,” I say. “The last time I talked to him was the day I went to court and he was very sweet. He just gives good advice.” Ok so I just have a mad crush on Glenn. Do I ever! And he knows it! The text message reminds me that in the last month or so I’ve made a few trips to the station. I’ve even met a new engineer though I don’t know his name. “DO you want to ride the Metro link train?” he asks me from the window of 608. It is Monday November 15 and there are a few of the patio and station faithfrul scattered along the platform. These days when I get to the station at night it is almost 7:00 pm. I’ve been working later shifts and so I get here in time to see 608, just like old times, that is when I can get there. Number 4, the Southwest Chief, comes in at 6:50 now. The train gets here just as I make my way back to the bridge to cross it and meet whoever sits high up on that locomotive cab. The train sits in a new spot now. It seems the length of the train has grown by one car and so it stops further up, to the right of it, to the right of the engineer runs that chain link construction fencing that can be placed where ever there is work being done. There is work being done now in fits and starts, construction of the spur that goes out tto the main line which will take passengers out to Corona. The train will switch onto the Orange subdivision and carry passengers out that direction. . Appearign now is a new platform, new benches, more track connecting the station with the main line. The work goes in fits and starts these days. Now the train pulls up parallel to that fence. There is a caution sign that sits right at the end of the fence, the locomotive nose sits just to the left of it. Tonight, no bell announces the train’s arrival, just the gentle whine of the EMD, my sweet engine purring. I walk up to the locomotive and wave. I know it’s not Bobby. Yes, Bobby is back. I’ve seen him a time or two. This one, perhaps the youngest I’ve seen, leans out his window and asks his question. As I recall this is the first question Glenn asked me last year when I stood with Curt on the platform awaiting his arrival, standing shyly back. Then the first one left me with my switch keys and my tears and my sweet text messages. Then came Bobby, the stock broker, the one who wants to take his kids on the Disney cruise. Then there is John, the extra, who asks me if I’ll be here tomorrow, the one, Curt says, who looks like he sits at a café listening to grunge music. Now here is another one. I do not know his name but This makes the fourth engineer I’ve met off the 608. I don’t’ know what he looks like. Curt the engineer spotter is not here tonight to help out. He arrives later, saying he’s been watching a fire near Orangethorp and Euclid, a Fullerton apartment house burning. The engineer does his thing. “Do you want to ride a Metro link train?” “No,” I say cheerfully. “I just come to talk to the engineer.” “Oh,” he says. I think the engineers are surprised when I say I want to talk to them. Sweet Glenn told me two months ago the name of the engineer on the 608. His name was Rob Smith. But he is gone now. Bobby isn’t here tonight. It is this young guy with years ahead of him. Wonder if he’ll make it to his last day. Hope so. A good day is when we don’t lose any engineers. When the engineer asks his question I realize that the engineer is the only person who can ask me this question and not make me mad. If a passenger, ticket agent, or conductor asks me this I am all up in arms. But if the engineer sitting in the cab asks me that I’m okay with it. I suppose if the engineer were standing down on my level I’d be annoyed. Maybe I should just stop being annoyed. “Well,” he says, “have a good day.” I stand back and don’t ask him his name. I just stand there. I’m sure he would talk to me. I just get shy again. Dan sees me standing on the patio by the café a few weeks before this. “Are you going to go see your friend?” Janice asks when I show up one day. “I forgot how to do this,” I tell them once. “I’m as nervous as a cat.” Ok so I want to know. Do cats get nervous? A bus driver twenty years ago now toll me once I seemed nervous as a cat when I was learning how to navigate the bus system. He saw me once a few years later and noticed that my confidence level had increased. But what I really want to know is do cats get nervous? Maybe a little. Tonight I’m not nervous as I stand back from the locomotive. I love my locomotives and my engineers. I respect them. I hear the radio squall. I wave my hand in farewell. The train pulls away. So I’ve met a new one! And I’ve seen Bobby and Carey. I’ve seen Carey once in three months. He asks me how Toastmasters is going. Bobby, on another day, seeing me, calls my name. He remembers me! Somehow I always think that the engineers forget me. I don’t’ know why I think that; maybe I just want to be reassured that they don’t’ forget me. “Shelley!” he says and I come up to the locomotive, shedding my nervousness. I smile. He asks me how long I spend at the station. “I stay here till 9:00 I say. He wants to know how long I’ve been here. “Five minutes,” I tell him. “Number 4 comes in before us now,” he says. “I know,” I say. “Glenn used to tell me when it was coming. Now someone doesn’t tell me that. And I can get over here in peace!” bobby laughs. He has such a great laugh. He smiles. I love it when I make my engineers smile! They’re so funny! Once I wave to Carey, laughing, and he laughs, too. Maybe he thinks it’s cute, someone infatuated with engineers. Glenn just takes it all in stride. Remember his wife has 22 cats. I think he could survive just about anything! Meow! I’m a piece of cake. Sometimes he laughs, he might be amused. Bobby, though, is clearly amused! The last thing I remember about boby is that he laughs. Yes I make the engineer laugh, at least this time. But Glenn, he is the only one I talk to on a regular or somewhat irregular basis. He’s the only one whose number I’ve managed to capture successfully. He is just magical Glenn. The trips to the station in the last month have been quiet, gentle affairs. I don’t sit on the patio, I usually end up sitting with the rail fans near the EB Fullerton junction sign. The signals have been replaced now. They used to be a pole with a single light containing different colored jells that would produce the aspects: red, green, yellow. Now there are three lights on the pole, each its own color. The three stacked light signals are becoming more popular. It has been twenty years, Dave Norris says, since the signals were changed. He’s been sitting there forty years or so, just as long as my engineer has been running trains. He says that sometimes engineers are womanizers, some have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what mine are like, I only know that I think Glenn just loves trains, though he swears once working for the railroad is miserable after Chatsworth. Railroaders like to complain, Dave says. Especially the ones who started in the seventies. A lot of the human elemen has gone out of railroading, he says. I suppose he might be right, but for me, at least, railroading is about the people, the engineers are my pictures. They run those glorious, sometimes broken down, old, and sometimes beautifully brand new hunks of steel. they talk to me and they are happy to share information. Glenn is the only engineer, I tell dave once, who ever told me what freights were coming down the line. I have to train all the other ones to tell me. “He might be a bit of an enthusiast,” he postulates on the bench on a cool fall evening. Yes, I think he is right. Mo tells me once that trains are in his blood. He does love trains. Once I ask Bobby if he likes trains or is this just a job? He laughs and says “sometimes it feels like a job.” Somedays it may feel just like a job, but one thing remains, they’re all my huggers, they know my name, and I have a mad crush on one of them, my romance with the rails. “I’ve talked to 6 t es since 2008,” I text Glenn once, though I meant 2009, “but you are still the best.” They are all stellar, I write in an email to the train group whose Christmas party I’ll be attending in December, but only one is the best. To all my huggers, I say Happy thanksgiving. But to my very favorite, the bestest engineer ever, I say, you and your crew have a happy Thanksgiving.
Copyright © 2010 Shelly J Alongi |