the longest train ride

There's a Simpsons' sky, cool cartoon blue, innocuously white puffy clouds. Every so often, the landscape looks dry, brown, parched. I want to dig down and find salvation, but someone's already beaten me to it. Piles and piles of gravel, sand, dirt, clay, who knows what. There's construction too, so the train crawls, and I get impatient because it reached us a half hour late, and it's now an hour and a half behind schedule. I won't get off the train til 4, and I didn't bring any food with me -- the last thing I had to eat was half of a day-old tuna sandwich at 9:30 this morning. I feel like hell.

A busted tin shack straight out of the Cape Flats or maybe Rio with volcanoes of trash studding the backyard like fire ant hills -- they're contagious. A ghetto-fabulous girl (gold winter jacket, gold and black purse, highlights on already-dyed hair, a Superbowl baseball cap) sitting behind me has two CDs, the first one is Toni Brazton, the other a constant a hip-hop techno beat that she decides to keep cranked up so all can hear. Thump-thump-thump. I consider homicide.

And those orange trees! We pass by endless orange groves, pruned into meticulous hedge-like columns.There may be nothing nature gives us that is better than a beautiful ripe navel Florida orange. It should not be infected with the smell of melon, like the one I took from Smita's this morning and had to junk at the station.

But she gave me Eat, Pray, Love, so all is forgiven.