December 27, 2016
The year wanes, eroded like my patience today. How many times can you be reminded to take your passport, tag your bags, get to the train station on time, get up by 8 or you’ll miss all to see in the city and eat your spinach, all in three waking hours?
Yes, she means well. She needs antidepressants. Or I do. Life gives us both anxiety, but she panics unceasingly whereas I do less often. Her fear outpaces mine by leagues. “Can we breathe more in 2017?” I asked her son that moments ago.
The daughters plugged in and tuned out almost immediately upon finding our seats, an ordeal of considerable magnitude as we had to walk over the seatless encampment of refugees between cars, the one we circled going up and down levels, forward and back aisles, squeezing through the narrow corridors of human passage to find our way through the maze.
How hard could it be? Cabin number and seat number. It took ten minutes of mind boggling math and engineering to finally land at the last quad of seats in back of coche 15.
A child’s English words catch my attention. The adults respond in French. Flocks of birds circle sporadic homes peppering the rural landscape whizzing by. The TGV doesn’t bullet the way it usually does, like when we flashed by kilometers from Paris to Narbonne 15 years ago. Perhaps after our stop in Perpignan, the train will pick up speed, dashing us to Barcelona.
In the gaze of the other 