October 28, 2105 Article

The Old Coot rides the rails.

By Merlin Lessler

I was sitting in the Amtrak train station in Sanford, Florida the other day, waiting for my car to be unloaded. A 30-something guy was on the bench next to me, talking about his experience on the auto-train. It left northern Virginia at 4 pm and arrived in central Florida at 9 am. It was his first time; I’m an old pro.

 I asked him how he’d slept. “Not well, not well at all,” he replied, and went on to describe just how bad his night was. He woke every hour; first it was his hip that got him up, sore from lying sideways on a reclining train seat, even though it was longer and wider that those in first class on an airplane. He’d turned to the other side, but an hour later, his shoulder started to ache and woke him up again. A little later, a cramp hit his calf, forcing him to leap over his wife, waking her in the process as he rushed to the aisle to shake it out. An hour later, the train stopped to change crews. The quiet roused him from slumber. He’d gotten used to the click, clack of the steel wheels on the metal track. Sore hip, sore shoulder, leg cramp, quiet and finally, a 2 am call from Mother Nature that sent him down a narrow, winding staircase to the rest rooms, just as the train hit a bad section of track, sending him reeling into the wall. “I got 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour at a time,” he said, in summary.

I chuckled, but only to myself. He’d just described a typical night’s sleep for an old coot. I didn’t want to depress him, so I refrained from telling him that he had many of those nights ahead, in his not too distant future. Thirty or forty years by the calendar that will seem like fifteen minutes when he gets there and looks back. It’s a speeding, rocking train, this thing we call old coot time.

Finally, our car came rolling out of the automobile container unit; I said goodbye to my 30-something friend. That was 30 seconds ago, by old coot time, 28 days by the calendar. Pretty soon, 10 days from now, I’ll have to face up to a train ride back home. I won’t be able to complain to my wife about the fractured sleep we will endure, the rocking motion of the passenger car, the long wait to get going, a longer wait for our car to be unloaded. I’ve shot my mouth off too many times about how fast time flies. If I start bellyaching, she’ll look me dead in the eye and say, “Why are you complaining; it will be over within 10 seconds?” She is right (as usual). I’ll be home before I know it and complaining about something new. The weather!