Engine Trouble.

Guess what... 10-hour train rides are not super fun.  We did it--The twins and I. It was just the three of us, and it wasn't so very bad, but it was kind of crazy. We happened to be on an Amtrak train that was having engine difficulties, leading to two unscheduled stops at locations not on the normal route to switch engines... The first engine switch really messed with Stella.  She didn't understand how we could be going in one direction than just apparently be going in the opposite direction and still be progressing towards our planned destination.  It didn't help that the next stop, after the engine switch, was Springfield, Massachusetts.  "We're going back to Springfield?!"

Yes, we were only a fraction of the way along our journey, and it felt like we had been on the train forever.  To travel backward on a stinky, boring, uncomfortable train, knowing the trip has only become longer...  For God's sake, that's the stuff that makes a little person crazy.  Going backward makes every kind of person crazy.

Yet, I have felt like I am moving in circles and isn't that almost like moving backward?  I keep going back to the beginning, don't I, even though the beginning point isn't so clear. Is it so crazy to kind of want to go in a direction which tells us exactly where we will be not so far into the future?  Once, I was riding through an MD neighborhood and there were three at-home-psychics within one block.  What am I talking about?  I don't remember.


Right... The not knowing is scary.  Train tracks always know where the train is going... it guides the train, back and forth, back and forth...  And, jumping off the tracks to frolic in the fields of flowers, like Tootles the Train, is against the rules.  Gosh, that was Michael's favorite book for years...  "Don't go off the tracks!"  But isn't moving backward is a whole different kind of destructive scary?

It is destructive.  No one should move backward.  There's a reason time only goes in one direction.