NEW YORK « In Which We Try To Sit With Ourselves Again »
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:55AM 
Warsaw
by MEREDITH CHAMBERLAIN
My grandfather loved trains. He had models he worked on in his basement, kind of like Mr. Rogers. Every year at Christmas he'd lay the tracks down in a circle around the tree, and watch the cars chug by the presents. He worked in the steel business, and never took vacations. I think these are two of the reasons why he liked his small trains so much. They were dreams, realized. He sold steel, he was a cog, but in his basement he could be the machine. He had five children, he couldn't take them on trips, but in his trains he could take them anywhere. I didn't give much thought to the trains back then but I'm thinking about them now.
But why did you sell steel? Collect small trains? Love them so? I think he may have wanted us to ask him these questions. I think that's why he put the trains around the tree. One day we'd grow up, wonder, ask him. He'd lay down the tracks, remember his story. I grew up, wondered, a little too late.
I love old things. I love records, record players, heavy cameras, photographs. Are they old now? The kind you hold? Letters, stamps, typewriters, books. I am often discouraged by the way we communicate now, and so, I hold the old mediums dear to my heart. Trains are certainly old, and they do deliver messages, but up until this past summer I had no real reason to add them to my list of Old Things to Romance and Stare At and Touch.
There is this scene in Before Sunset. Julie and Ethan are catching up at the cafe, discussing the many faults of Paris, New York, America and France, when she recalls an upside to Eastern Europe:
I remember as a teenager I went to Warsaw when there was still a strict communist regime...After a couple of weeks, something changed in me...It took me a while to figure out why I felt so different. I realized I'd spent the last two weeks away from most of my habits. TV was in a language I didn't understand, there was nothing to buy, no advertisements anywhere. So all I'd do was walk around, think and write. My brain felt like it was at rest.
Last May I moved home to live with my parents. There were so many reasons to do so, I didn't have to pick one. My grandfather died, my dad fell off a roof, I was broken up with, there was a recession. I needed to save things. Save money, save face, save myself. I had to get out of New York.
Getting out of New York meant getting on a train every morning, every night, for two hours. It meant spending four hours a day next to strangers, without television, without internet, in another country. It meant spending four hours a day with myself, in communist Poland. A friend of mine once told me that she never gets on the subway without a book to read or music to listen to. Because she does not want to be alone with her thoughts. My thoughts burned through every book, article, song I took on the train with me this summer. They rejected every distraction I offered, so eventually I had to give in and start listening to them.
I listened and I cried. I wore sunglasses. I didn't realize how long I hadn't been listening. I'd just been doing and going and rolling my eyes. I'd get off the train at night and go to my grandmother's, listen some more. How does it feel to love one man for seventy years and then to lose him? I'd listen to that. I'd get off the train and go to the hospital, sit with my dad, pour him some water. How does it feel to lie in the same bed for seventy days? I'd listen to that. I'd stop rolling my eyes. I'd start opening them.
I'd get back on the train in the morning and I'd write. Things I'd never heard before. I'd put them in a journal. I'd fill three of them. It felt nice, to be making things I could keep. Things I might scatter around the Christmas tree one day, memories I'd like to pass on. Maybe not to my grandchildren. Maybe a little too racy. I'm twenty-six and I enjoy men. But at least to myself.
I have notes and photos, I keep them in a box, from a relationship that ended in 2001. In the beginning I kept them because they mattered to me, in the end I kept them because I knew I wouldn't be getting anything I could put in boxes, other than inboxes, ever again. I give these types of things—notes, photos, boxes—to men I'd like to win back. This summer I ordered several prints from iPhoto and hunted down a typewriter to conduct something called "Project Grand Gesture." I thought I'd been insensitive. I sometimes go to extremes. I came up with this plan on the train one morning.
When you spend four hours a day in another country, you start to pick up the language. When you write love letters in foreign languages, you can't expect the recipient to understand. I don't regret sending them. I don't think back and roll my eyes at myself. Someday he'll feel alone and unloved and he'll look at a letter I typed up and those photos we're smiling in, and he'll remember that there was that one girl—at least there was one girl—who thought he was worth the time. And he was. Everyone is worth the time it takes to make a record of what matters.
I meet people now, I listen to them. I listen to I hate my job, my dad. I don't believe in love. I listen and I think: get on a train, please, take a long ride back to the center of yourself. Because right now I'm not sure you can hear. Because I'd like to believe what you're saying to me, but I don't think I can, until you sit with yourself, in Warsaw, and listen.
Meredith Chamberlain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here.
"Father to a Sister of Thought" - Pavement (mp3)
"Extradition" - Pavement (mp3)
"Motion Suggests Itself" - Pavement (mp3)
"Serpentine Pad" - Pavement (mp3)
Reader Comments (7)
I loved this article. I think about that Before Sunset quote at least once a week, and so this is wonderful.
It is actually a strange coincidence, but those two were the first films I watched (for the first time, the same day) I ended my relationship of 6 years with an ex. How beautiful and honest they are, as is your piece.
and I do strongly agree that riding the train is a great form of self therapy. Sometimes I consider riding the 2 all the way through its course just to displace myself a little. I also like to take long completely aimless walks in places that I've never been, so seeing is new. Also, wandering through the Met has this affect (as it is entirely massive, and you never know what you'll connect with).
Great article. Pavement songs at the end were just the cherry on top of a beautiful written piece.
Evocative and well-written as ever.
I think that that is the beauty of public transportation - being cut off and pushed in with a bunch of different people rather than truly cut-off in your car transporting yourself to and from a place. Travel doesn't have to be international to help in self-reflection it just has to be something that gets you moving and thinking in a different way, cutting you off from the everyday and normal.
Looking forward to the next piece.
this is beautiful--one of the unique ironies of the city is that one feels most alone in those most public of places, the train foremost among all.
i am sure it will not surprise you that I absolutely love that scene in before sunset
I was asked few days ago by my collegue that When There is a free company transportation is available from your house to office, Why do you take bus and metro to come here?
And That's what I replied : When I travel in bus or metro, I do get to see lots of stranger and of course I don't go to them and talk to them but I do see lots of facial expression and that makes me wonder why she is smiling a lot or why he is so silent? I get to stick my own story to their faces and it gives a wild ride to my thoughts. But If I travel in company transportation, I would meet known people, I know their past and their present, I know why they are happy or sad. I even can predict their reaction on certain topic, Which does not give me surprise element. That's why
But after reading your article, I think your thought on taking public transport is more convincing then mine....
Keep it up.
all white is the most pleasant of interior aesthetics