Vanishing Point

Two parallel lines
Recede behind my train and
converge into one.

How banal. But I love watching out the front or back of the train, being mesmerized as the tracks go by. It's rare these days to get to watch out the front; they've got the engineer boxed into his* private compartment and unless he's breaking the rules by leaving the door open, we can't look out. So the end car, the erstwhile caboose, offers a more consistent view, and a more wistful one: where we've been, not where we're going. It also offers, on straight track, a perfect illustration of the powers of perspective. The parallel tracks appear closer and closer together, until they might as well be one.

*Always male - I think I've never seen a female engineer on one of my commuter trains. Conductors, yes - but not the engineers.

Dogwood Haiku

A leaning dogwood

So lovely, so hopeful, yet

Not long for this world

There's a dogwood in our yard, a white dogwood just hanging on. It arches down the hill, unbalanced, because one of its uphill branches rotted and fell off, and another cut loose one day when we were rescuing the tree from some pernicious vines that a previous owner had allowed to run rampant.

Someday, the rest of the tree will go, but until then, I love its eccentric lean, its vaguely Japanese aspect, its crisp white flowers brightening a foggy day.

Open, please

The dentist's office
always had one magazine:
Highlights For Children

The email the other day from the Parent Blogger's Network was titled Blast From the Past. And indeed, that's what it felt like. Because Highlights For Children was very much a part of my past: there was always a stack of them at the dentist's office. I don't remember seeing it anywhere else, and we never had a subscription, but it was a reliable treat when waiting to see the dentist - that and the cartoons in the New Yorker.

We had a great dentist, Dr. Eisenberg, a kind man who worked out of a suite of offices attached to his split-level suburban house. His wife, who dyed her hair black, was the office manager, and doled out little plastic toys when you were done getting your teeth examined. My mouth is full of fillings, all still intact lo these many years later. I think it's a testament to his skill that my original fillings are still solid - my husband is the same age as me and has had to have nearly all of his childhood fillings replaced; they just crumbled away in his mouth.

I hope that Miss M. is spared the drilling and filling - she brushes with fluoride toothpaste, drinks fluoridated water and has had one dentist office fluoride treatment. And I hope she grows up knowing that the dentist is nothing to be scared of. But most of all, I hope she never has to go to the orthodontist because those people are costly sadists who never have the good magazines!