Beaconsfield Time Warp

"The Child is father of the Man"
--Wm. Wordsworth

I'm older now and have less confidence in memory than I once did, but I will tell you this: the Beaconsfield stop on the green line trolley in Brookline, Massachusetts is a time portal. I discovered it when I brought my son to nursery school there.

The above-ground trolleys charmed us when we first moved from Brooklyn to Brookline a few months before, but as the D train rhythmically chuh-chunked into the Beaconsfield station, an overwhelming feeling of familiarity came upon me, an eerie feeling of peace. Not déjà vu exactly, it's more like sensing but not quite hearing a distant music I've never heard before, but somehow know by heart.

Step off the train into a sunny morning and look up to see a large crow winging across an expanse of bright blue. Look down to smile at my son beside me. Look up again and the crow-- a raven maybe?-- has vanished into an empty sky. Another time we see a small flock of wild turkeys in the parking lot there-- then suddenly gone, too quickly to be accounted for by our brief lapse into conversation. It's the Bermuda Triangle of train stations; a doorway to another dimension. The New York City subways we left behind roared and screeched into their cramped and teeming stations, but the Riverside-bound green D train can gently chuh-chunk you into eternity.

The platform is never crowded when we arrive, often empty, and the only sounds we hear are birds and the trolley rolling off into the distance. We climb the outdoor stairway, and my son runs up ahead of me and smiles down from the top step. A light breeze ruffles his hair, and out of the corner of my consciousness the peaceful feeling grows stronger, morphs into bliss.

The strange familiarity intensifies as the staircase lets out onto street level. Dean Road curves blindly here, and there is no crosswalk, only a small yellow warning sign. Dutifully placed I think, but minimally useful. Dozens of parents walk their preschoolers across this road to the church basement a tenth of a mile ahead. It's an accident waiting to happen, I think. Or consider this: it's an accident that did happen. That park across the street from the station-- was that the last thing I saw before my car slammed into a tree when, in a life prior to this one, I swerved to avoid a pedestrian? Or maybe I was the one who got hit? Because I've never thought or felt this way before, but the air is telling me I might have died here. For the next year and a half that my child attended that nursery school, there was never a time I was not visited by a mysterious frisson there, like a mystic cloud descended on an otherwise ordinary suburban public transit stop. Avalon, to a believer.

Afternoons, my son takes my hand and we skip together, swinging arms; or I race him up the sidewalk; or we amble, chatting about his time at school. What was his favorite part of the morning? Who did he play with today? "Name five words you heard in the story-time book." "Do you remember what we had for dinner last night?" And I remember, too.

I remember how I loved these memory games when I was his age. The nursery school I attended was in a synagogue only a few miles from here. I felt proud when my father would quiz me about my day and beam his approval. I had such good faith that I and my super memory would find a bright future in a hopeful, welcoming world. Am I making this up, or do I remember that I played a kind of memory game of my own? Take in the sights and sounds, the overall feeling of a place. Then focus on one feature to remember it by-- a cousin's red and white striped pajamas, or a street sign. I had a series of these intentional memories scattered like pebbles along the path of my early childhood. The game was won, it brought me joy, to periodically revisit them. Was this, then, one of my memories? Could I have looked up at that sign that says "DEAN" with my three-year-old eyes?

My father died a few years after my boy left nursery school, and looking through old photos with my mother I startled upon one I'd never seen before. It's of me, age 3, and my dad in his youthful prime, sitting together in the park at Beaconsfield and Dean. Lifetimes ago it feels like, as unreal as any past-life fantasy my imagination might conjure. Lifetimes later, I have a child with a wonderful memory, and less confidence in my own. But still-- good faith.

On my way to the market (Flash Fiction)

Bright white sun my only company this summer morning. Glinting on slate roofs and gleaming on painted shutters; the sun is dancing in bountiful gardens zinnia to tomato vine, hydrangea to sweet pea; winking from treetops and sliding like satin over a coiled green hose, a silver bicycle, a child's red pail. The day smiling at me and me smiling back; not looking down, so I startle and "Oh!" out loud when a meter ahead of me on the sidewalk I spot a dead bird.

A robin she is, not a fledgling new to flight nor yet fully grown, laid out on her side on the clean concrete. No blood spread beneath her, no injury I can see, she is in fact beautiful with her ruddy heart of a breast still puffed out proud. Why? or how? I puzzle, shaken, as I walk on a half mile, looking up only when the supermarket looms suddenly before me.

What luck to see Mai, there among the yogurts with her rainbow striped gloves. It was in the frozen foods five years ago that Mai and I first met, the only two people around wearing wool gloves and sweaters in the blazing summer heat. Mai lived fifty cold New England winters that year I first moved to town, and she shares her advice for keeping fingers and toes warm, as well as her spare gloves on the occasions I forget to bring my own. We discover not just cold sensitivity, but we also have in common low blood pressure and a tendency to vertigo, and we joke that despite our obvious ethnic differences we are DNA sisters under the skin, members of a shared genotype. Mai is a sanguine spirit in the face of chilly temperatures and the open stares of ignorant, ungloved fellow shoppers; she is unruffled in response to her sometimes impertinent teenaged daughter.

Today it's not Mai's daughter who is with her but her friend Thérèse. Decades ago, Thérèse was a healthy young woman crossing a street, but a CEO in a shiny sedan ran a light on his way to a meeting that was more important to him than Thérèse was, leaving Thérèse barren and heir to a lifetime of painful surgeries that are paid for by a generous settlement with the CEO. Thérèse will tell you more about her physical condition on any given day than you need to know (especially, it seems, when you are in a hurry to get somewhere else). She is also the transmitter of reams of information on all matters of health-- biological, environmental, sociopolitical. As she speaks in her heavily accented but remarkably fluent English, points of light gather and twinkle in her blue eyes in a way that makes it easier for her husband to forget their childlessness. Today she is bothered by plantar fasciitis. Mai knows that pain too and I do as well and I can see where this conversation is headed so I quickly divert to the riddle of the dead robin.

Thérèse's got this one. She thinks the bird might have been sick-- the Departments of Health of all the towns in our region note a preponderance of dead birds such as this as a sign that West Nile virus is about. Mai laughs and says the bird could have just gotten pushed out of the nest. "That happens, you know, if the nest is too crowded. Sometimes one gets shoved out." And she laughs again. I blink, twice, and turning to Thérèse, ask her about the West Nile thing. Has she heard of West Nile in our area this year? Mai cuts her off and chuckles again about the bird being sacrificed, as if this is a joke that bears repeating. I have to go. I get what I need and head for the check out.

I get that Nature pursues its own ruthless Agenda with no regard for our individual human sensibilities and Mai is wise to accept this but to laugh? I'm not there yet. I'm not sure I ever want to be there. The afternoon clouds and I notice too late that I've missed the turnoff for the shortcut; I'm on the long road back. I'm confused, my bags are heavy and I need to get home. Home, where love is supple and abundant and there's enough food and bedding to go around and space is tight but we make do with what we've got. It's time that's our precious commodity. Not enough time sends us trampling over each others' words and brushing past each others' open questions and upturned faces; time hurrying on cleaves want from need, reveals truths we sought unknowing.

Still, you think you know a person. I don't understand. I want to understand, but I might never have the time to understand. My family will be hungry; I need to start cooking dinner. I take refuge in the bell peppers, in their ripeness an unyielding primary red.