This is what a train is: it is a brute engine, pulling steel-wheeled
railroad cars, coupled together, over ribboned-miles of steel track.
A train is a freight machine, and sometimes a shuttle for passengers,
brutal, efficient, noisy, romantic, and old-fashioned. In the night,
when birds are hunched into the trees, the train is a clickety-clack
on the wind, and a deep harmonic songs up through the trees.
That is what a train is, except when it is not that;
when it is a silver ghost, held close above the earth
by something that electrons do, a minute and five miles
from where it just has come and gone.
We should not be wrong to say that trains make steam
of wood and coal and water boiled, hauling lumber east
and people west and cattle up from Texas. But trains
are diesel, too, and monorailed, and levitation magic.
Marriage, we like to say, is a union between one man
and one woman, a honest way to make babies and grow old,
a Norman Rockwell picture on the wall, except when
it is a woman left alone with kids to feed, or a Let's Pretend
We Really Wanted Kids, but rather would live alone.
Marriage is a union between one man and one woman,
except when it is not; when it is hell on earth and brutal abuse,
when it is a screwing contest, or a golf winnings gone wild.
To say that marriage must be Norman Rockwell painting
is to insist that trains must all burn coal, and whistle steam songs
across the tall grass prairie. It is to confuse an instance
with everything a train could be and has become.
It is to confuse what maybe once we had wished
with what is really there, and what we can become.
It is to confuse an instance with a larger picture.
Marriage isn't God's way to keep a man's pants buttoned,
or a woman's hem below her knees. It is not a plan
to have children, and send them to seminary and dental school.
Marriage is a promise people make to each other,
who want their lives be something together they cannot be apart.
It is the way we say to our friends and lawyers that
we have committed something to each other; that
we are willing to be held accountable to each other,
and to the town and consequences of what we want to do.
Some marriages have children.
Some are disasters, best undone.
Families are not always a pairing for sake of sex and kids.
Marriage is not a way to dispose of daughters,
to wed old and new money, nor a way to match
genders, like playing musical chairs, with leftovers.
Some commitments are male and male, or women together;
sometimes to rear children, and sometimes not,
but always a commitment we make to each other for all to see,
to honor as well as good intention can manage our own fragility.
All roads do not go to Rome, nor all trains to Dodge City,
and Gary, Indiana. We do not know what trains shall become,
but when they do, we shall be amazed, and say it is a train.
railroad cars, coupled together, over ribboned-miles of steel track.
A train is a freight machine, and sometimes a shuttle for passengers,
brutal, efficient, noisy, romantic, and old-fashioned. In the night,
when birds are hunched into the trees, the train is a clickety-clack
on the wind, and a deep harmonic songs up through the trees.
That is what a train is, except when it is not that;
when it is a silver ghost, held close above the earth
by something that electrons do, a minute and five miles
from where it just has come and gone.
We should not be wrong to say that trains make steam
of wood and coal and water boiled, hauling lumber east
and people west and cattle up from Texas. But trains
are diesel, too, and monorailed, and levitation magic.
Marriage, we like to say, is a union between one man
and one woman, a honest way to make babies and grow old,
a Norman Rockwell picture on the wall, except when
it is a woman left alone with kids to feed, or a Let's Pretend
We Really Wanted Kids, but rather would live alone.
Marriage is a union between one man and one woman,
except when it is not; when it is hell on earth and brutal abuse,
when it is a screwing contest, or a golf winnings gone wild.
To say that marriage must be Norman Rockwell painting
is to insist that trains must all burn coal, and whistle steam songs
across the tall grass prairie. It is to confuse an instance
with everything a train could be and has become.
It is to confuse what maybe once we had wished
with what is really there, and what we can become.
It is to confuse an instance with a larger picture.
Marriage isn't God's way to keep a man's pants buttoned,
or a woman's hem below her knees. It is not a plan
to have children, and send them to seminary and dental school.
Marriage is a promise people make to each other,
who want their lives be something together they cannot be apart.
It is the way we say to our friends and lawyers that
we have committed something to each other; that
we are willing to be held accountable to each other,
and to the town and consequences of what we want to do.
Some marriages have children.
Some are disasters, best undone.
Families are not always a pairing for sake of sex and kids.
Marriage is not a way to dispose of daughters,
to wed old and new money, nor a way to match
genders, like playing musical chairs, with leftovers.
Some commitments are male and male, or women together;
sometimes to rear children, and sometimes not,
but always a commitment we make to each other for all to see,
to honor as well as good intention can manage our own fragility.
All roads do not go to Rome, nor all trains to Dodge City,
and Gary, Indiana. We do not know what trains shall become,
but when they do, we shall be amazed, and say it is a train.
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