TRAINS LIKE A RIVER By Dick Croy Lying in bed at my grandparents' in the clean-smelling sheets the room at the top

of the stairs faintly redolent of fresh paint and the desiccated pages of dime novels from my uncle's boyhood I loved hearing trains fill the valley with their night music. Long before the lit passenger cars or endless logo-stamped faces of the freights snaked past our slumberous neighborhood the rising drone of the diesels the metallic hum, the ringing tone of steel rails stroked and compressed by a hundred or a thousand steel wheels preceded them the sound hypnotic incantational held between hills like the Hocking River itself pushed ahead by mass and momentum like its turbid brown waters in flood. On this reverberant swelling sound I floated from my bed above the white chenille spread into a realm beyond geography or night where the future and the world outside this valley merged. Envisioning travelers' dreams and destinations feeling their wanderlust and aspirations I took the train to possibility from the sleepy province of experience.

Memory has all trains running west along the edge of town a half mile from my bed or slamming past the station on whose platform I stood in awe beside my grandfather. My aunt, another uncle were eastern passengers from New York City sitting up all night in cramped hard straight-backed seats to spend the holidays or a week in summer with her parents enlivening the house with wit laughter and conversation sophisticated even to my youthful and provincial sensibilities. Graced by my grandmother's cooking my grandfather's deep resonant voice the silver, flowers and fine china lace tablecloth, candles and immaculate cloth napkins we eschewed at home the mahogany table flanked by cabinets of arcane culinary items and a mysterious spicy fragrance offered up provender for a boy's imagination as enticing as my grandmother's cherry pies. Though I soon tired of the talk above my head and asked to be excused from the laden table I'd lie awake listening to trains running west like a river steel still molten with possibility until I was transported beyond the horizon carried off on a current of sound.