Brown paper packages bursting with food

I’m at a writers colony in Virginia, all the way across the country from where I live.  I literally had to take planes, trains, and automobiles to get here.  I knew it would be an odyssey, hot and awkward with my giant purse, computer bag, and 50-pound suitcase (exactly 50 pounds, weirdly enough and unplanned, so that I didn’t have to pay extra baggage fees on the plane), schlepping through airports and train stations.  The train portion of the trip was the Amtrak from Union Station in Washington, DC, to Lynchburg, Virginia.

When I arrived at Union Station from Dulles Airport, I smiled at the sight of the grand, sculpted white building.  I’m a fan of Washington, DC.  Traveling there is one of the things that brings out the American patriot in me.  The first time I’d seen Union Station, in fact the first time I ever traveled to a big city without a parent, was more than 25 summers ago, when I was 16.  My brother, age 12, and I traveled by train from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Washington, DC, so that we could visit our cousins in Manassas, Virginia, and I could tour Georgetown University.  I was semi-obsessed with Georgetown, not for its foreign service school or its sports or any other actual quality the school possessed, but because of the 80’s movie “St. Elmo’s Fire.”  (I freely admit to applying dingbat analytical skills to my college selection process.  I’m a little better at big decisions these days.)

My mom couldn’t come with us, and I’m guessing that the added cost of another Amtrak ticket and the difficulty getting time off from work, plus knowing that I was a fairly mature and trustworthy teenager, allowed her to send my brother and me on the train without an adult.  Being without her allowed me to go into the smoking cabin, buy a pack of long, granny-ish brown cigarettes (some regional brand but not the More’s I’d become attached to) and smoke with the elderly African American ladies with impunity.

My brother and I, inexperienced travelers, packed too much stuff to comfortably carry, and my mom also had the bright idea to send a large paper grocery bag full of green bell peppers with us.  My grandfather’s garden had a bumper crop of peppers that summer, and she wanted us to present the bounty of a Wisconsin summer to my Chinese cousins in Manassas.  We carried the big brown bag with us when we switched trains in Chicago and throughout the path that traced I-80 East and then veered into the South.  My mom had packed us too much food, and as we neared our destination, we resorted to eating contests to try to finish all of the ham sandwiches and bananas before we they were spoiled and mashed beyond recognition.  When we arrived in D.C., we were probably a little rank smelling from the sweaty 24-hour trip.  We hauled our suitcases and the bag of peppers off the train and tumbled into Union Station.  The bag was torn from all of the schlepping and stuffing it into the overhead compartment.  My cousin Lu-Chen met us at the station, and as we hauled our stuff through the bustling station, the paper bag ripped and spilled green bell peppers in all directions.  Embarrassed but also frugal, all three of us ran after the peppers, most of which we found and were salvageable, and my cousin loaded his arms with peppers as steered us to his car outside.

This vignetted played in my mind two days ago as a taxi brought me once more to Union Station.  I hadn’t been there since my Amtrak trip in the late 1980s.  Just in case there were no dinner options, I’d taken the precaution of buying a Chipotle burrito bowl and water at the airport and carried it with me to eat on the train.  As I stepped out of the cab and into traffic, hauling my three big bags and the brown take-out bag.  The bag, wet from the water condensation, dropped onto the ground as taxis whizzed by all around me.  The contents just barely stayed in their foil and cardboard container.  I cradled my salvaged dinner as I scooted out of the taxi stand and marveled at the synchronicity of dropping brown paper packages bursting with food in summer at Union Station.