Can’t sleep. Again.
Im remembering a cold night not quite 30 years ago. I was a slick collared private. Just wrapped up advanced school. Was leaving VA to go home to GA finally for a few days. Ive always been a romantic sucker & my grandfather loved trains so I took one.

I went north to the union station in DC and to me it was a wild, busy grand place. I had enough time to get to my next departure & did so easily. I hadnt sat long when this grizzled guy holding a paper bag stood beside my seat staring at me.

Service? Says he. Yessir says I. He stuck out his hand. His name has been lost to time for me but I have never forgot what he did next. He sat down dug in the bag & pulled out 2 Coors Lights. I wasn’t even 20 yet. We drank beer and talked the 700 miles to Atlanta

So here I lay thinking about all that’s changed since those days. And tonight on some lonesome train there’s probably another slick collar making their way home. But rules dont allow folks to carry beer on a train now. “thanks for your service” has replaced actual talking.

I cant help wondering how different life might be if more folks got an under age beer from a guy on a train after being away from home a year to remind them its ok going back. When I got home my friends welcomed me back. We talk we laughed we cried But I was no longer one of them

Those folks are still my friends to this day. But I realised I had changed. Not superior or anything foolish like that. Just...transcended maybe...the world was a bigger place for me now. I had bigger worries than if one of the gals from HS saw me asleep in my car by the lake

That group has gotten smaller. Prison, drugs and death take their toll. I can’t help thinking, that kid on that train- scared of who he was going home too. You learn so much about yourself in that caldera. Can you really be trusted? Is it just your imagination? Can you cut it?

But the person who left isnt who goes home. This was pre face time pre email stand in line for a 2 minute phone call days. Smell the envelope of the girl who wrote you before opening it days. Your whole life changes and how you view it changes as so much becomes precious

And when you go back your excited and terrified all at once. Will you have changed to much? Your values? Too little? Will they scoff? Accept? Torment? Risk your career for their benefit or fun? The rules change. Consequences change.

Save for one guy on a train.
Who reminded me that its ok to be human. No big talk of where he’d been. No I would have joined speech. Just have a warm beer, and its a nice night for a ride. Check out those lights. I make this trip about once a month to see family

Have another. Cheaper than the bar car. Later we can grab a smoke on the back rail. You smoke? Yeah? I’ll give you one you can pay me back later. Must be nice getting home.
Yessir.
Yessir it was.

I know the world has changed. And folks look for reasons to hate it each other.
But somehow I hope somewhere that someone is sneaking a beer to a slick collar tonight. And telling them its ok to be human. Its ok to be scared of going home. Its ok to grow beyond your friends.

that rubberneckers, is why I don’t sleep lately. How far have we really fallen?
How far will we?
Are we to the point that instead of letting folks come of their own from innocence we need to beat them from them on some mythical altar?
Just don’t know anymore & not sure i want to

But something has to give. This cant go on. There’s not enough bonding just for being folks. Everything has to be a political position now. Everything has to meet some arbitrary phooka standard. People need to find themselves, or find each other, without these gradients.

Thats my late night take anyway. Gonna try to go back to sleep now. Going to remember being told a bawdy joke in the smoking car with a window down rolling through Virginia at night while others slept, with a buzz and wondering what had changed at home.
Because its changed a lot.