USO-TAS Lounge Chicago Union Station more sheets of blank stationery. Hey, give me a break. It's hard, you know, finding something to write about when all you've got for inspiration are a few sheets of blank stationery. Letters never written. Where should I go with this? A riff on what might have been? I don't think so.

Pennsylvania Railroad - Burlington Route - The Milwaukee Road - Gulf, Mobile and Ohio R.R.

A sepia print of the station. In green. Right in the middle. Did you write over or around it?

I wish I remembered meeting the fiancee' there, or seeing him off. I don't. But I envision him in his uniform, and me pretending I am in an ad from National Geographic in the 40's. Something about buying bonds.

I have taken the train from there. Home to Decatur, later, after dumping the fiancee' and living the good life in Chicago. I remember the conductor calling, "Decatuh, Decatuh, Soybean Capital of the World." I remember a conversation with another conductor about atheism. I was holding my infant son. He told me that if I didn't believe in God, I would just throw my son off the train. Because without God, there is no love. So, no matter what I professed to believe, he knew I believed in God. Very irritating. He put a damper on my smugness.

That great scene in "The Untouchables" with Kevin Costner, on the stairs, with the baby carriage, was shot in Union Station. I know Al Capone travelled from there. So did I.

Blank stationery pad - Fort Knox, Kentucky. A black and white drawing at the top shows a tank, guns blazing, three soldiers with drawn bayonets crouched behind.

The cardboard backing for the stationery pack reads:

"This Stationery was prepared especially for you. Use it freely and write home often."

Bean Publishing Company, Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

Postal information is listed below:

First Class Mail - 4 cents (there is no longer a "cents" sign on a keyboard)
1 oz. - 1-8 sheets stationery with envelope.
Air Mail - (You used to have to buy this separately) - 7 cents. 1-8 sheets stationery with envelope.

Talk about spelling it out.

We talk, from time to time, in my writer's group about future worlds - how to imagine them. Some people question the imaginations of others from time to time, saying that they don't believe the world would change that much in just 30 years. I quarrel with that idea. I don't think 1963 could have imagined 1993 for all the tea in China (which saying is now just as passe' as the 4 cent stamp).

A newspaper clipping - a young man I don't remember - a friend of the fiancee's, I believe. One David Lee, "home on leave following completion of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J." He graduated college and enlisted. That's what young men did then. They didn't necessarily like it, but they did it - two years, and they would be done. It was a given.

College graduates - most of them, in 1962/62 - wouldn't have been able to find Viet Nam on a map.

"Lee will go to Fort Holobird, Md., following leave to attend image interpreter school." I wonder if he survived.