Draw a Line Through His Name

Nearly six years Demetrius has been gone. He is most present in the garage, in his gardening tools. His massive old wheelbarrow I gave to the first person who could move it. In the garage he left rolls of plastic, and vinyl-coated concrete discs and 2x4s, and two fishing reels still in their packaging. (Fishing is about hope.) When dragging 50 pounds of rock salt or oilseed, I sometimes ask him aloud, "Why did you leave me?," and walking where we used to walk, I say, "Where are you? Are you okay?" I thank him for the ramp he built it from particle board, allowing me easily to roll the portable dishwasher into the kitchen; I won't be able to replace it if it breaks. I tell him, "I remember the retired lamplighter" he knew when he was a boy, because that lamplighter will live as long as we remember him, and "I'll never forget Polka the Giraffe," a character in a children's book he was writing but didn't finish. He perfected one short story, about a farm laborer, I'm still sending to literary magazines. In his final months he dreamed that the closet door opened onto a polar landscape with warm furs and a sled and sled dogs waiting for him. (He liked biographies and stories about polar explorers.) In January he rode Amtrak to the Rocky Mountains, bedridden all the while because he'd forgotten about high altitudes. He returned skeletal, angry at everyone, and lived 12 more days, dying less than 5 miles from where he was born.

Seed catalogs still arrive with his name on them, as do letters and newsletters from the radical organizations he so much wanted to be a part of. I write on them "Return to Sender," draw a line through his name, and write "Deceased Feb. '09."

Biggest in the World

It's Railroad Days in Pacific, and special guest Union Pacific Railroad locomotive Challenger No. 3985, the only operating engine of its class in the world, made a whistle stop this morning for about 2,000 train fans who took photos of this huge mechanical marvel built in 1943, retired in 1962, and restored in 1981. The engine alone weighs 627,900 pounds. It runs on No. 5 heating oil.

Powered by Steam

This 12-inch-gauge steam railway gives half-hour, two-mile rides through the woods along the Meramec River, on Sundays May through October from 11 to 4. Pictured is just one of the several steam locomotives of the all-volunteer "Wabash Frisco & Pacific Railroad." Has a roundhouse, switches, a real railroad bridge, water tank, delights everybody including me who finally went for the first time today. There was a single seat left on the first train; as the rare single at this big-butt family thing, I got it. Have always adored trains and it used to be my preferred method of travel. (Grew up next to a railroad spur. I remember the manual seesaw handcars, remember seeing a worker who was fleetingly in my sight at dusk, oh, about 45 years ago.) The train's departure point is the vanished town of Glencoe; it travels also through the the sites of the lost Missouri towns of Bluffs, Mohan, and Yeatman.