When I was quite young, seven or eight, I had a visceral fear of trains. Not riding on them, but being near the tracks when trains drove by. Just looking at a train rolling down the tracks filled me with a kind of dread verging on nausea. Trains almost made me want to puke. Why would an East Coast suburban kid, hardly even familiar with trains, wholly unfamiliar with fast-moving freight trains, have such strong feelings about a slow-moving commuter train, harmlessly rolling into or out of Boston?

In Canton, on Bolivar Boulevard (I’m pretty sure that was the name), there used to be an MDC pool. The MDC, or Metropolitan District Commission, was a state agency that used to handle all the state parks around Boston, the sewer and water for Boston and many suburbs and some recreational facilities, mostly ice skating rinks and swimming pools. My dad worked for the MDC at what anti-government types would then have called a real Photo-Mat job, in by ten, out by two. Anyways, the MDC had a swimming pool all the way out in the suburb of Canton and it was just down the street from my house.

My Dad is a generous guy. He is generous to me and he is generous to people who are not his children. When I was very young, before the divorce, he was always taking note of kids in the neighborhood whose families were not well off. He would always ask how their grades were and if they were even remotely decent, he would try to offer their parents a few Celtics tickets that had fallen into his hands, perhaps due to his political job, as a reward for their efforts in school. God forbid some young man had a particularly tough time of it. Then my father would hold him up to me as an example of how it is possible to persevere in life. He would also make some special effort on the kid’s behalf to see that he was getting by ok, perhaps by overpaying the kid to mow our lawn. My father was just cool like that.

We used to go to that MDC pool out in Canton. In Stoughton we had a pool in our yard, but not in Canton where we had an older and nicer, but less modern and convenient house. It didn’t matter about the smaller yard or lack of a pool though. There was a big park across the street with a ball field and a pool just a half-mile down the road. My mother would take me and my brother there on most hot and sunny summer days. Though Canton was a snobby place in many ways, because the pool season is so short in Massachusetts, there has never been any stigma associated with not having a pool or going to a public pool. Lots of kids I knew were there and it was fun and so on.

One of my dad’s casual charity project kids was in Canton. He lived just down the road, kind of by the MDC pool, more or less. He was on the honor roll at school. The honor roll was something I had heard about, but never personally experienced. My parents suspected that I had sufficient talent to make the needed grades and so I was always being hassled for my persistent non-honor roll status. So this kid from down the street would be mowing our lawn and my dad would say, “He is on the honor roll and he still has time to hustle around the neighborhood mowing lawns. Imagine that.” Then I would roll my eyes and go back to watching TV. What really made this kid exceptional wasn’t his grades though, or even his family’s poverty. It was what had happened to his older brother, who had also been on the honor roll at one time, but who was no longer in any condition to even attend school, never mind get good grades.

Whenever some brutally awful shit happens to somebody, we are all possessed of two conflicting impulses. On the one hand, we want to sympathize with the unfortunate soul who has suffered some ugly incident. On the other hand, we want to blame them for their predicament, so that we can believe that such an awful thing couldn’t also befall us since we know and act better than they did. When some young guy who smokes cigarettes gets cancer of the jaw, we say, “Holy fucking shit! That is some bad luck.” but we also say, “That is what you get for smoking cigarettes.” We say this even though almost nobody who smokes gets cancer at age twenty-five. Nobody who smokes cigarettes as a young person can reasonably believe that behavior could result in getting cancer by age twenty five. Still, we moralize and finger wag and try to forget that non-smokers have probably about the same risk as smokers for getting jaw cancer as a twenty-something. It is such a freak occurrence that the smoking probably doesn’t really explain it. Sometimes it isn’t about how somebody fucked up. It is about how they got fucked. And it could happen to us too.

Aside from short-shorts and creeping testicles, there was really only one drawback to the MDC pool, or at least only one other thing that I viewed as a drawback. Looking back on it, I am kind of embarrassed about my reaction to this drawback situation. It is like the time I saw all those retarded kids eating at McDonald’s when I was just four or five and it made me feel sick to my stomach and gave me an odd nausea-association with the smell of McDonald's for years afterwards. I felt sick because I was confused and frightened and didn’t really understand developmental disability and how innocuous those kids really were. I say embarrassed and not ashamed since I was really young and could hardly be expected to figure all that out on my own at the time. Similarly, at the MDC pool, there was a guy who freaked me out and upset me whenever I saw him. He didn’t freak me out because of anything he ever did to me, he scared the shit out of me just by showing up.

Everybody understands you aren’t supposed to get shit-faced down by the railroad tracks. It is bad behavior. It is bad behavior because it carries a risk, albeit a tiny risk, that you might get confused out there in your drunken stupor and not take note of an oncoming train. Still, in this great country of ours hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of kids have gone down to the tracks to pound beers. How many have been hit by a fucking train? Only a few. That is why the behavior is so common, notwithstanding the alleged risk. It’s a million to one shot, or so it seems and people, especially young people, aren’t afraid of that kind of long shot coming in, especially if the chance to get falling down drunk is dangling in front of them, like a string in front of a frisky kitten.

In the first season of The Wire, Avon takes his nephew D’Angelo to a state hospital to look in on Avon’s uncle, a man who is lying on a bed, completely oblivious and useless and broken and destroyed, but still alive and taking up hospital space. Avon wanted D’Angelo to understand the gravity of the risks that they were all taking by dealing drugs in Baltimore City. Even though both Avon and D’Angelo could probably have named a couple dozen men who had been shot to death behind drug dealing, Avon thought that his uncle, lying in that bed, was a better reminder of how fucked over a person could possibly get, if they drew the really short straw. When you watch a corpse get dropped into a grave, it can ruin your day perhaps, but you walk away from it and eventually you forget. You vainly imagine some foolishness about an afterlife and come to feel OK about what went down. It is not the same when the victim is alive and not well, perhaps suffering and certainly hopeless, staring at you vacantly, a mere shadow of their former selves. It makes for the kind of lesson that you don’t forget easily, so much longer lasting than mere death which only lasts an instant.

I used to wonder what his mother was even thinking that she would bring him around to the pool. Now I suppose I understand better. Her son was hot and sweaty and he needed to cool off. It didn’t matter to her that he was all spastic and groaning and drooling on himself. She probably got used to that at some point. She was with him everyday, all day and you get past shock and horror pretty quick when you deal with something everyday, all day. Besides, even I could tell that he liked the pool. He would jump around and flail around terrifyingly randomly. Still, there was something glad or happy in his moaning and whirling about. I was too scared to appreciate it at the time, but looking back I know this is true.

I suppose that, on balance, it is a good thing that his mother had the courage to bring her kid around to the pool, notwithstanding his disability. His happiness, however impaired or imperfectly experienced, more than balanced out my idiotic and childish terror, which I eventually overcame anyway. And by seeing that guy I learned an important lesson as a very young child. Every time I saw him at the pool and I shuddered and looked away my mother would say the same damned thing, “That’s why you should never play on the train tracks.” And I never did.