From the train window, the wet blacktop behind the warehouses of these Connecticut towns slithers by. Banks of dark green foliage on the other hand—dark because it is August and also eight o’clock—they whoosh by, like wings.
My taxi driver this morning, who took me from mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to the wedding at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, was named Steve. He used to be a sausage salesman, which he liked for the same reason he liked the taxi business: he took care of people. Losing that sausage job, he said, was harder than his divorce.
And there were friends, friends I saw this weekend, though not as many as there used to be. Ray and Sherri, who took me in, even as they were packing to move to Florida. And Phyllis, Phyllis my Oracle, eighty-seven years old and tucked away in a houseful of antiques on Edgewood Street; Phyllis, who asked me in all earnestness what it was like to break someone’s heart.
There was a toast at the wedding reception this afternoon, (held on cotton table cloths and paper napkins in the church hall) a toast given by a friend of the bride, a searching-eyed, long-haired young man who quoted from Emily Dickinson. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” He and the bride used to memorize poetry together, and she used to love him, but he never did. Then he sat down.
Before the train got to this great iron bridge, the color of cities in Connecticut, the color of rust, we passed by a lake, filled in among reeds and cattails. Two swans were swimming across the surface of the black water, cutting V’s into the gloss.
