Giornale Pugliese VI: Train

 Drawing by Hallie Cohen

You meet an Argentinian couple on a train from Bari to Rome. It’s one of the high-speed trains that make the whole trip in approximately four hours. You start at the sleepy Bari station, where an impoverished beggar woman is urging a child barely capable of walking to panhandle. Poverty creates a certain discipline, and the child runs assiduously after the coins pitched in her direction, arousing both pity and respect. She chases after the money the way the pigeons scamper for crumbs in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. The couple on the train is almost dissolute looking, the woman bored and her companion unshaven, but they have a cultivated air. They are generous with information about the train’s stops, even though they’re not inhabitants of the country. You wonder if he knew Borges. Trains are a dominant means of transport in both Italy and France and play an enormous role in the way society conceives of itself—a way that is largely absent in America, where long-distance trains are curiosities whose breakdowns and eccentricities of schedule are a constant source of grousing among those who attempt to use them. Preston Sturges immortalized the train to Palm Beach in The Palm Beach Story, with its outrageously funny Ale and Quail Club scene. Then there’s that wonderful train carrying the innocent fugitive through the Scottish highlands in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. And of course there’s Strangers on a Train, based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. This Rome-bound train is not lacking romance or eccentricity, but it is all business, arriving at its terminus without fanfare only twenty minutes after its scheduled TOA of 6:15.

The Spoils of Boynton

It is odd that Florida has become the retirement destination for so many older people, since all the streets in the Sunshine State are indistinguishable from each other. It’s not exactly the ideal rest stop for potential sufferers of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. The experience of landing in West Palm Beach feels very much like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day. No sooner do you leave the grounds of some new housing development, situated on a golf course with the inevitable bougainvillea covered entrance, than you come upon its exact replica. One marvels that anyone is able to negotiate the many odd thoroughfares, with names like Military or Jog Trail, which bake in the sun and are as wide as beaches, with house numbers that seem to go on to eternity.

The early-bird special is a legendary feature of Florida life, and the prices are so reasonable that many see them as an alternative form of food stamps for the middle and upper-middle classes, whose long lives of service to society are repaid with unlimited refills of salad and Diet Coke. Coupon-cutting is an art form for Florida residents, who take workshops in these matters.  Golf carts circle for prayer and meditation meetings on the ninth hole of Robert Trent Jones courses. Preston Sturges’s Palm Beach Story features the uproarious Ale and Quail hunting club scene, in which a group of revelers is headed down south. But that Florida, the world of ‘30s romantic comedy, was another kettle of fish.