25.5.4
67 Spring - 7 Moon
48th year of the Space Age
Tijuana, Baja California
...construction project at the border trolley station, continued. Pedestrian traffic all tangled and twisted around temporary chain link fences that move around over night. This week they are laying the second sidewalks in front of the Customs Service doors, where you come out after entering the United States on foot from Mexico. This is the San Ysidro Gate, su nombre es Puerta Mexico en espaņol. The work is almost done
All my adult life has been spent walking and riding busses. Then I got the San Diego Trolley. When they first built it, the line to the border was the very first section opened. Critics, including some of my East San Diego neighbors, bitched and moaned and called it the "Tijuana Trolley" and hoped I would agree with them. I could only smile and nod and say, "But I like to go to Tijuana."
Now my life is entering an entirely new phase. The new trolley station will be completed, but I often go to the Otay Gate, not the Mexico Gate. Nevertheless I predict (in my persona of NosTRAINdamus) that this splendid new pedestrian and vehicle and tranvia.trolley transit center at the foot of scrubby hills will last about twenty or thirty years, or until the sea level rises ten feet after the ice sheet falls off in 2027. Never mind the fact that that big new movie is coming out, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
I am going to movies again, now that Tere is back in town and we are living together. Did I mention we went to see Val Helsing? I think I did.
All my adult life has been spent wlaking and riding busses. Then I got the trolley. My mother had another trolley when she was a child in San Diego. She and my aunt Virginia grew up in the house where my grandmother still lived when I was a child. I used to baby sit her when she got very old and she told me stories about Kansas and her home town of Cottonwood Falls, which she left behind almost a hundred years ago to come out to California, where she met my grandfather the beekeeper, who was also an early pilot for the Army Air Corps....
Then I got the trolley. I never had a car unless the women in my life wanted one. Insisted, rather. Now my wife number three has her own again, from the office. I dream of buying a truck with a camper and traveling all around our continent together, from Maya country to Alaska to Florida and then back home to this corner of the world, in these frontier provinces at the end of the earth....
not apo strophe remember
copyright 2004 Daniel Charles Thomas
