Differences between cities: New York gets more crowded before Christmas, but Washington empties out. There are virtues to each. Yes, it is a hassle to get anywhere in midtown when the black-bundled tourists are all swarmed around the luminous Saks window like flies on a warm chuck steak, but wouldn’t you feel sad if they weren’t there? Yes, the capital becomes a much smaller, more navigable town when everyone is bunched into Union Station and Reagan and Dulles, but isn’t there something wistful about a city full of people who aren’t from there?
I’m from here, though, more or less. Another difference: This year I am here, and not in New York. Devoted readers know your humble correspondent’s affinity for the Uno’s at Washington’s Union Station, which has a very strange, not very good bar where anything can happen. It is currently decked out, festooned even, with tinsel, fake evergreen, and glittering MERRY CHRISTMAS cutouts. (The good news of soft secularism has not yet made it to Uno’s.) In recognition of the season, the Bell’s tap is actually working, although the Coors tap, keg, or connection is mysteriously out of order. Groups of tradesmen somehow involved with trains, covens of lawyers, the odd student from one of the city’s mysteriously well-populated institutions of higher education—all have converged on the terminal’s single full-service bar to make a little merry before piling on to buses and Amtraks to points elsewhere. The native representation: your humble correspondent and an older gentleman in a Skins jersey and dreadlocks, who is drinking—mirabile dictu and, perhaps even more so, visu—Blue Hawaiians. Cheers.
Union Station cleans up well. It was better when I was a child, before the changing tides of whatever economic force that controls transit mall storefronts swept away the luxury displays and left empty, fossil-like plateglass windows in the strange imitation Fourth Style East Wing. But it’s still not bad. The Norwegians, in one of those inscrutable twists of foreign diplomatic thought, still pay for a titanic Christmas tree decked out in our mutual national colors. I believe, closer to the happy day itself, there is still a model train display. (Why are model trains so particularly associated with Christmas? It’s a bond as strong as fireworks and Independence Day.) The bums in the toilets, one fancies, are a mite less strident in their mutterings as they monopolize the sinks for Puerto Rican showers; the reek of dope, grain alcohol, unwashed male flesh, and piss is a mite less violent. Cheers to the bums, too.
Perhaps the sole feature that does not yield to yuletide jollity is the train schedule itself, which is, as usual, fouled up. My companion at Uno’s, who is headed west to watch Indiana’s forces of righteousness march on South Bend’s perennially high-ranked choke artists, has received information that his chariot of fire is running an hour, hour and a half late. I’d say, “Cheers,” but the rare pleasures of the Union Station Uno’s proved overwhelming, and he left after two rounds. So, cheers to me and Mr. Blue Hawaiian again, I guess.
My train at least is on time and mostly empty. The rail line that makes the first leg of my homeward anabasis divides the county where I first grew up; it passes the church where I was baptized, the barber I have been patronizing for over twenty years, my late father’s office building, the neighborhood where, in a strange temporal ring, as a child I watched the trains that I now ride up- and down-country on whatever business it is the people in these trains have always been doing. Since it’s dark early, you can see the Christmas trees in people’s windows, the garish lawn displays, and those strange backs of life’s sets that make the most striking and lifelike features of holiday model train setups: garbage truck and schoolbus farms, lumber yards, electrical substations, warehouses. In an hour’s train ride, it’s all here: the stage for a life, a model world.
When I was in grade school, my late father bought set of serious model trains—the heavy Lionel stuff with tracks and signal houses. The idea was that we would clear the spare room and set it up, build it, and expand it year by year, one of those father-son hobbies. With one thing and another and the swift-slipping years passing by, we never got around to it. They were still packed when my parents sold the house. Somehow, though, I think it would have been a letdown, less true than an idea in words, where time and space can be twisted into strange and beautiful knots like a strong-man’s steel bar. Can mere stamped tin show the adult, sitting on the train and bringing the scene into being for himself, as the child stands at the end of a cul-de-sac waving at his future?
Hypocrite reader, my lookalike, my brother—merry Christmas. Cheers.
