A Pilgrim’s Digression

My coffee this morning is Fair Trade. Looking back at my blog from the past couple months, I see that it has been nearly two months since Starbucks last brewed my favorite coffee, Italian. Both Yukon and Fair Trade have been offered twice. There must be some anti-Italy conspiracy afoot, perhaps because that country has stood by us during the war in Iraq.

Yesterday I brought my wife and son downtown to Union Station to put them on a train to Pittsburgh, where they will visit with the in-laws this week. We arrived downtown at about 1:30, and the train left the station about 5:20, so we had some time to kill. We went to a showing of Spider-Man 2 at the Union Station theatre, but it was a little bit too violent for my son, who is only three. He started to cry during the scene in which Doc Ock’s arms start pulverizing doctors working over him in the emergency room. My wife took him out and walked around the Union Station shops while I finished the movie.

I was impressed with this film. It was better than the first, I think. The scene just mentioned above is actually one of my favorites. The lighting and photography suggests campy, old horror movies, the way the camera shows us the terrified, screaming face of a doctor or nurse in dark highlights, then the shadow of Doc Ocks arm falls across their face, then the camera cuts away to a limp hand lying on the floor. Another scene that I thought was well done is the scene in which Spidey stops the train. It is a tension-filled scene, very well-directed. The director does not allow Spidey to stop the train with the first, or even second idea he attempts to implement. It is only at the utter ends of desperation that he finds the strength within him to stop the train, and then he passes out and nearly falls to his death, but the passengers on the train catch him as he falls and bear him aloft, over their heads into the train car, and lay him out on the floor, unconscious, maybe dead. It’s a moving scene, reminiscent of … I don’t know … Beowulf’s death? The death of Arthur? Name your dead hero.

After the movie, I met up with wife and son and we walked across the street from Union Station to the park behind the Russell SOB, meaning to let the boy run free for awhile before going inside to wait for the train. It’s not a very big park, though, only a little bigger than one of those green medians one sees around Washington, like Seward “park.” I read not long ago in the Post that Ted Kennedy sometimes exercises his dog in that park, at least when reporters are around to witness it.

For awhile, Brendan chased the pigeons near where we waited, then as the pigeons hop-flew farther away, I started to follow him following them. Pretty soon, it was clear he was going to follow them right into the street. I started after him, yelling for him to stop. He wasn’t listening, or didn’t hear, then finally just as I yelled stop one last time as loud as I could, he took one step off the curb and sat down, whether on purpose or accidentally, I don’t know. I caught him up, gave him a little spank and a talking to, and we walked back to his mother. For just a moment, I saw that awful, awful scene from Pet Semetery (both the book and film) playing out, in which Thad Beaumont’s toddler son runs into the street and is struck and killed by a semi. Until yesterday, I don’t think the great horror of that scene ever really penetrated me. I did not catch Brendan, no more than Beaumont caught his son. If Brendan had not sat down on the curb after stepping off …

After catching him, we were walking back to where his mother waited. He was crying, and then he spied an enormous, dead rat lying in the grass of the park. He stopped crying, turning it off like a faucet. “What’s that, Daddy?” “Nothing now,” I said. “Nothing?” He said. “A dead rat,” I said. “Dead?” He doesn’t know what dead is, so I’m not even sure it meant anything to him. We walked on, but there was something particularly awful about that rat lying there. It rained hard enough yesterday to initiate emergency track repairs and delay trains on the Red line. Perhaps the heavy rain had something to do with how that rat came to be lying there, affronting the prettiness of public space.

I thought of that rat again this morning, walking to Starbucks for my coffee. I walked past an expensive restaurant. The restaurant’s cellar doors were open, and the stench of decay flowing up from beneath the restaurant was overpowering. I stopped breathing until I was past that cellar.