A scar, a childhood beach...and choo-choo trains.
Scarred for life!
When I was a tot, my parents used to take me to a beach in Warwick, now a boat yard. It was on Greenwich Bay, across the water from Goddard Park. It had an unofficial name, quite racist, which I cannot repeat here.
To get to it, my father had to drive down a gravelly one-lane road beneath a short railroad bridge. If you put your hand out the window you could grab and pop these balloon-like pods on some bushes alongside that lane that descended to the beach. I don't know their name.
I loved that beach, the picnics there with capicolla and provolone sandwiches and root beer and watermelon. And I liked playing with my pail and shovel along the edge of the water. I've never learned how to swim, and I almost drowned once as a teen in the swimming pool on Federal Hill. My parents, ever practical, weren't interested in the bathing so much as in the quahog-digging in the adjacent mud-flats. They brought bushels of those bloated mollusks home after a typical Sunday afternoon, steamed them, added them to spaghetti sauce, transformed them into caldrons of stews and broths. I myself hated those quahogs and never ate them, not then.
My sister Mary used to take me up the hill from the beach to the nearby train tracks, and in those days, in the course of even a few minutes, you could watch good numbers of trains whizzing by...freight trains as well as the passenger service of the New Haven Railroad and Pennsylvania Railroad lines. The proximity of the tracks evoked a sense of thrill and danger and excitement. The train whistles could be heard minutes before the first glimpse of the locomotives. The trains and their whistle-sounds evoked, even in my unsophisticated mind, the thrill of going places, of storybook adventures that would form my feelings for decades to come. From my bed, in the middle of a quiet night, the distant sound of a train whistle is still one of the most haunting yet oddly soothing sounds I know.
...As it was with a Bengal train for Apu and Durga in Satyajit Ray's poetic film Pather Panchali.
One day, while playing in the sand, I cut the side of my left thumb on a piece of broken glass. The half-inch gash left a scar after it healed, which I bear to this day. I often look at that thumb and think of that beach and that sand and my parents and those trains whizzing by. And also those popping-bubble bushes as evocative as Proust's madeleine in his A la recherche du temps perdu.
Rueing the loss of one's youth, probably ad nauseam as a recurring motif in my journal, is perhaps the one truly universal theme in all writing.
Me on that beach at age four.
My photo of a train approaching in Warwick in the 1950s.