DEC-B-7
ON MY SECOND TRAIN OF THIS TRIP,
I HAD GONE ON METRA TO “HIGHWOOD” ILLINOIS LAST NIGHT,
NOW HEADING ON AMTRAK TO GRAND RAPIDS,
A FOUR-HOUR RIDE AFTER A SIX-HOUR WAIT
Dec. 20, 2001
When I went up the East Coast on Amtrak’s Acela Express, I discovered the electric outlet that would allow me the computer charging line for typing enroute from Washington to Boston immediately after the September 11 airborne disaster. I have now discovered that the Amtrak generally—even on this coach car, has electric outlets at each seat, so I am taking advantage of that power source now, when it was unavailable to me anywhere in the terminal where I just spent six hours waiting. I had thought I might be able to get an earlier train to GR, but this is the only one going there all day, so I had to wait, while simply reading, and I finished the National Geographic I had brought along because if its story of the Antarctica environment. I wound up reading the whole issue—the one with Abraham on the cover. So, I am now headed home in about the time it would have taken me to drive there, if the waiting time had been added to the riding time.
Last night I took a taxi from the Whitehall Hotel to the Ogilvie Center Northwestern train station to get the Metra rail system to go up to the northern suburbs just past Highland Park to Highwood. This dropped me off a block from the Del Rio Restaurant in time for the intermission and the second set of the opera performances of the evening, which Virginia had said would be a better show. The Tenor Larry Johnson, had questions about his blood pressure reading and cholesterol. The baritone Lorenzo Formosa, was trying to learn the foreign text to the piece that was a duet, they decided not to do until next time. Winifred, the lyric soprano from the career that included being Virginia’s voice teacher as well as having performed at the Met, also was in the group that included Kit, the accompanist who has a MDA degree in piano pedagogy. I got a chance to sit with them “backstage” in their deliberations about the program as well as the kinds of discussions that are the kinds of nonsense “shoptalk” that happens in such settings as the OR, usually on extraneous subjects.
When they went down to perform and start the second set, I stood at the bar and waited, so that we could all sing the usual Christmas carols and other songs that are the hit of the evening, including the raucous “Twelve Days of Christmas”. It was a good show with very good performers.
Today was essentially an early takeoff in a sleepy day to get to the train station around eleven and wait until the 5:20 PM departure, since I found there were no earlier trains leaving. But, now I am on the roll back into the Eastern Time Zone, so I will be about five hours later on my watch in arriving to meet Milly, and a Calvin program of some sort is planned for tomorrow night in the theatre at the Fine Arts Center—so I am having as theatrical as ever session this Christmas season.
Along the “Miracle Mile” of State Street (that “great street”) and Michigan and other thoroughfares of the shopping district, with such like as the Water Tower Place and Victoria’s Secret and F A O Schwartz along the way, all the trees planted along the streets are studded with white lights. The taxi driver told me that there were over a million of them in the trees, and when I asked if they were left there all year, he said, No, they are all taken down. And when they are taken down, they are all tangled and it costs too much to disentangle them, so they are all thrown away every year. And every year there are still more of them to be put up because they are going on trees that are ever bigger, so this could stand even more than the shops and the runaway materialism on display with the mall rats running through in their covetous envy as an example of a “Materials Intensive Economy.” At lest no one is talking about an energy crisis during this holiday, since the lights are on in great profusion, and the mild winter gave evidence only once a spitting of snow.