i'm in the basement of the gaia house, home of our quaker meeting, and a long train goes by and my eyes wander out the window to the cars. it's kind of a typical train in that it has a lot of black oil tankers, like businessmen, in their plain black, going north, but also some old wisconsin central cars with graffiti on them, those are the ones that sit around a little too long in the chicago yards, and then there are the canadian national ones themselves, which, depending on random chance i assume, either show you the side with 'canadian' spelled with an a, or 'canadien' spelled with an e, the french version. it's as if these cn cars speak french to you if they choose, but i assume it's random, and they just put whatever side front they feel like on any given day, because, on the east side as we are, about half are in english and about half are in french.

kind of like the geese, i think, which i assume are also canadian, and which honk a lot, sometimes confused, trying to decide whether to go further south, or just stop right here since we have a lot of lakes, and it's relatively wooded, and there aren't any chemicals until you get into farm country which starts just north of here. now they aren't going north yet, they're still going south, since it's still getting colder, i assume, but half the time i look up at them and they're arguing with each other, as if to say, are you sure you want to go any farther, let's just turn around and grab a little of that grass down there, quick before it's too late.

it's been raining for days now, not that that would make me think of canada, in fact it's probably raining up there too. the cold grim stuff doesn't bother me much though it makes people nervous who have to drive in it, particularly when it hovers around 32, and can't decide whether to turn into snow, or stick, or freeze, or what. somebody asked me what it meant when i said, it snowed but it didn't 'stick'. up here we all know a snow that doesn't stick from a snow that does, because when it does, everything is white and you get this temporary sense of peace and the kids all want to run outside and throw snowballs. you feel quite alive here since nobody ever plans for it and they throw snowballs in bare hands which makes it even better, a nice stinging cold that can only be warmed up by going inside and drying off. but the real first snow is yet to come here; i've seen a little, but it hasn't stuck.

the graffiti on the wisconsin central cars is rich and colorful but has many designs which we just can't understand, being in a small town and somewhat isolated from the culture that produced them. we had a 'tagger' a while back, a graffiti artist, but he made the same stuff over and over again as i'm sure they all do, and they got tired of that pretty quick and they laid for him but i'm not sure if they ever got him, probably he got bored and ran out of walls and headed for chicago anyway. in the same way the african music is in these languages i don't even know, although i recognize the swahili and the zulu, but the malian ones are my favorites and they're in, what, fulani, or these languages i don't know a word of. we play the songs over and over again though so we come to actually know the words even though we don't know what they mean. consistently upbeat, jumpy, lively, they're perfect for a town where everyone is putting their brakelights in your face, refusing to get out of the lane when they're considering turning right. the lights are often not timed right, either that or i'm going the wrong speed, getting caught at them, and it's like, hey, all of a sudden you have a couple of minute break, at some corner you've been at a thousand times in the last week. and what do you do with it? nothing. it's still raining. stare blankly at the car that pulls up beside you, which is occupied usually by someone who is vaguely familiar.

in the same way i take the elevator even though i'm kind of an exercise freak and make sure to swim my 2/3 mile every day at lunchtime; at about three minutes to one i'm coming back into the building with wet hair, somewhat exhausted, have to teach in three minutes, and the elevator is right there ready to give me a couple-minute break. but you never know, there might be people in it, and the door closes and you have this twenty-or-thirty second interval in which virtually anything can happen although i'm usually quite polite and just talk about the weather to put everyone at ease. they could be from any department but usually not mine since our people don't even leave for lunch anymore and if they do they don't come in that obscure entrance that really doesn't go much of anywhere. you occasionally get these bizarre conversations with people who, again, are vaguely familiar and have nothing to lose by just saying something crazy. it's life in an enclosed painted box moving upward mechanically. i'm sure i smell pretty strongly of pool chlorine but it's arguable whether that's more of a sin than smelling like cologne which i'm allergic to, by the way. a little tang on the old system, i might get a little woozy by the time i grab my books and get downstairs, and i'm often a minute or two late.

you hear the trains here every once in a while; it's kind of soft, depending on where you are, but there are two big ones in the middle of the night, and you usually hear those, since nothing else is making any noise. this morning in my grammar class, it meets at ten o'clock, and this morning being the first tuesday of the month the tornado siren went off, as it does the first tuesday of every month, and i believe i told them last month, it's just a test siren, but this month, i told them, we have a tornado every first tuesday of every month, it just so happens we have these tornadoes at ten o'clock, but they aren't very strong tornadoes, so there's no sense even getting out of your seat, since grammar is way more important than tornadoes anyway. this particular class flunked the bejeezus out of a verb-tense exam where they had to write things like i will have eaten and i will be living in carbondale and instead they kept writing i will be eaten and i will be lived as if you could be a victim of a verb like live, as if someone lived you. i tell them, no, if you live in this town, you might feel like a victim, but in fact, you are the one who's doing the living, nobody's living you.

my words sound slightly hollow; grammatically true, but, aomewhat like noise in the wind. a train goes by in the distance; the classroom heater is broken, and students with their jackets still on shiver. what do they know? they're pretty sure it wasn't a tornado. but they have to more or less take my word for the rest of it.