My Rail Adventure

[Written before my mom died.]
Sunday, I went to church primarily because I was teaching adult education.

Odd dichotomy: I was going to put my mother on the prayer list, yet at the same time, I didn’t want to hear several dozen people individually telling me they were praying for me and my mom and my family and/or they were sorry. [Yet, subsequently, getting several dozen e-mails – or a reading a post like this has been comforting.]

But there WERE people who already knew – my wife had told her Bodacious Bible Babes (R) group, which included one of the pastors, so it was already written in the concerns and announced at the early service. One church member asked what she could do to help. I requested that she take me to the train station on Monday a.m., if possible, so that I didn’t need to take two buses to get there, and she did.

Those living in Albany area know that the Albany train station is not in Albany, but rather across the Hudson River in Rensselaer. There used to be this dingy* building directly leading to the platform. But now it’s all spiffed up.

For years, train travel was the way I got to Charlotte, but it had to be well over a decade

MOVIE REVIEWS: Unstoppable, and Tangled

The 2010 movie Unstoppable, which I saw with my wife on Black Friday in Oneonta in lieu of actual shopping, is a very competently-made thriller about a runaway train with toxic chemicals, and the heroic efforts of a couple railroad hands, a veteran (played by Denzel Washington) and a guy just out of training (Chris Pine, who played young James T. Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek movie) in stopping said train. It reviewed surpringly well, especially with the top critics. My wife’s stomach was in knots most of the way through, and mine wasn’t, but I enjoyed it as a pleasant diversion. “Pleasant?” my wife wondered aloud. Jaquandor’s take on the movie pretty much nailed it.

The movie was a production of Tony Scott, who last year created the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which I did not see, also starring Denzel Washington; from what I read, Unstoppable is the better movie, though it has no real villain, only a particularly incompetent worker.

I’m quite interested in the fact that the movie was based on an actual incident that took place on May 15, 2001.