weird life detail
Feb. 19th, 2020 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2T18Jnd
So last night my dude and I went to a bar for dinner. It’s in an old industrial part of town, our hollowed-out Rust Belt city, and as we came out, there was a clanking rushing sound in the air, and Dude, who grew up near this neighborhood, said “Freight train.” We looked, and sure enough, over the viaduct a little way down the road, a train was passing in the dark, at low speed. (The tracks behind his house got pulled up in the mid-90s, but this line still runs. His are now a cramped subdivision new-built in a city with thousands of vacant homes, the new construction wrecking the drainage in his mother’s yard and sending windows peering through hers.)
“There’s a freight train that blows a whistle at a crossing every morning around 4am,” he said. “I hear it if I’m awake then.” He recited the pattern for me: long, long, short, long. Every time, he said, except sometimes they truncated the last long blast because they were already through the crossing.
I thought about it. I’m often awake around then. “I don’t know if I hear it,” I said. I grew up with a train crossing about seven miles away, in remote countryside, and I remember hearing distant train horns and, as a child, thinking they were the Wild Hunt or somesuch, except that i heard them all the time, so clearly they weren’t, but what an idea.
So last night I woke around 3:50, too warm, and accidentally hit the cat with the pillow as I rolled over; as I was convincing her to stay in the bed with me, I realized I had been ignoring a train whistle. I raised my head, but it was gone; I hadn’t really heard it, and i wasn’t sure that had truly been what it was.
Around 4 Dude turned over, and I whispered, “Did the train go by?”
“Ten minutes ago,” he confirmed.
I’ve heard it, every night, and I have never actually heard it. If you asked me I’d’ve said no, but now I realize, I’ve filtered it out every night.
We have lived in this house since 2005.
So last night my dude and I went to a bar for dinner. It’s in an old industrial part of town, our hollowed-out Rust Belt city, and as we came out, there was a clanking rushing sound in the air, and Dude, who grew up near this neighborhood, said “Freight train.” We looked, and sure enough, over the viaduct a little way down the road, a train was passing in the dark, at low speed. (The tracks behind his house got pulled up in the mid-90s, but this line still runs. His are now a cramped subdivision new-built in a city with thousands of vacant homes, the new construction wrecking the drainage in his mother’s yard and sending windows peering through hers.)
“There’s a freight train that blows a whistle at a crossing every morning around 4am,” he said. “I hear it if I’m awake then.” He recited the pattern for me: long, long, short, long. Every time, he said, except sometimes they truncated the last long blast because they were already through the crossing.
I thought about it. I’m often awake around then. “I don’t know if I hear it,” I said. I grew up with a train crossing about seven miles away, in remote countryside, and I remember hearing distant train horns and, as a child, thinking they were the Wild Hunt or somesuch, except that i heard them all the time, so clearly they weren’t, but what an idea.
So last night I woke around 3:50, too warm, and accidentally hit the cat with the pillow as I rolled over; as I was convincing her to stay in the bed with me, I realized I had been ignoring a train whistle. I raised my head, but it was gone; I hadn’t really heard it, and i wasn’t sure that had truly been what it was.
Around 4 Dude turned over, and I whispered, “Did the train go by?”
“Ten minutes ago,” he confirmed.
I’ve heard it, every night, and I have never actually heard it. If you asked me I’d’ve said no, but now I realize, I’ve filtered it out every night.
We have lived in this house since 2005.
