Success, Happiness and the Lives We Might Have Lived |
We live near railroad tracks, not far from the Baring Cross Bridge over the Arkansas River. The first bridge at that location opened in 1873, connecting Little Rock and what would become North Little Rock, and the present structure remains one of the busiest railroad bridges in the country.
Consequently, I hear trains. During the day they become part of the general machinery of the city, whistles and grind mixed with traffic, sirens, leaf blowers and all the other noises we tolerate as the price of civilization. But sound travels differently after dark. A locomotive that passes almost unnoticed at noon becomes solitary and consequential at two in the morning. It is moving while almost everything else is still. It has somewhere to go.
Some nights, lying awake, I listen to the trains.
There is a Paul Simon song called "Train in the Distance," built around the notion that life might have been better. Simon says that thought is "woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains," which may explain why it survives so much evidence to the contrary. I am not unhappy. But there is another life moving through the dark, running on a parallel track toward another destination.
On that train, I got off the bench. I was a Division I athlete, which sounds impressive until I add that I did not play very much. I was a professional baseball player, which sounds even more impressive until I explain how low the league was. I was good enough at golf to play some mini-tour events in the 1980s, though I never made a cut. I was just good enough to witness how much better the genuinely talented are.
The same pattern followed me into writing. I have been successful by any reasonable standard and luckier than........