Every mornin’, I get up, I shave, get dressed, and make my way down to the train. I try to time it as closely as I can so that I’m not wastin’ no time on the platform, but the train gets there late sometime. You see, the platform is where all the trouble is gonna happen if there’s gonna be some. That don’t mean there has to be. Most folks mind their own business. They don’t got not time for a man holdin’ an old umbrella. Sure, they got themselves busy lives. But I watch them. Not in a bad way, but just maybe payin’ attention a little more closely than other folks do.
So, you know, you ride in a railroad train long enough you get to know faces. Some people, they commute every day, but others just take the train when they got a problem with their car or somethin’. Still others, well, they go down to the train station just because they’s drawn to the folks standin’ around on the platform, and those is the ones you got to watch. Continue reading “The Umbrella Man Watches”
The year is 1918, and we find ourselves riding mostly westward via rail, but on a path that drifts in directions that make sense to neither Man nor God. The long icy train carrying a cargo of cattle, swine, and leathery human beings wends its way upon tracks bent round mountains, over gorges, and through rocky walls. The almanac had predicted a bitter, harsh winter, but the passengers, being the men and women they were, denied nature’s potency—not to mention the acumen of the lily-white college boys out in Pennsylvania who rejected both war and hardship so that they could publish their preachy little weather books.