The High Speed Line

Broad Street: 1909

I used to take the train from the station right across from my parents' house, into Camden, to Rutgers, where I was studying literature and creative writing during both my undergrad and graduate years. I would stand on the platform and I could always see our house -- the one I grew up in -- looking benignly back at me with its friendly window eyes. Our familiar family cars would sleep, then, in the driveway, like curled up cats. Maybe corny; definitely true.

Today, I stood on that platform again. This time, I had left from my own house, some distance away. This time, the windows of my old house looked different and they looked differently -- the old friendly eyes had been changed out for new, more angular, more slick and glassy ones. And the new cars of the strangers who walk through my old bedroom; my old living room; my old kitchen...these new cars, they stand on tiptoe on hard tires on the newly blackened drive -- new cats, ready to spring.

Today, I was boarding the same train, but all the way into Philadelphia, not to study writing, but to teach it, in a building in the shadow of William Penn, to young writers who took the train as I had so long ago: to learn.

Still: I teach; they learn; I teach; I learn; they teach, I learn -- and the train runs over the same rails it ran over decades ago, carrying passengers with big dreams into big cities including one who never outgrew big dreaming.

"Don't You (Forget About Me)"

Sheedy in The Breakfast Club

Every year, I give a placement test to incoming freshmen at my school. One of the essay prompt choices is to address something a character says in the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. The "head-case" character (played by Ally Sheedy) says that when you get old, "your heart dies." I ask the students what they think of this -- do they agree?

Some of the kids identify themselves, immediately, as the lower-level sort by beginning a discussion of the contributions of good eating and exercise to a long, healthy life and heart-health. (No, I am not kidding.) But others get it -- they struggle with the idea of losing one's enthusiasm for living and they say some cool things.