Taking the kids on the train to NYC

(717 words)

We’re four hours into an eight-hour train ride to New York City and I’m once again reminded of the late John Clouse, for years The Guinness World Record holder for World’s Most Traveled Man.

He’d been to something like 364 of the world’s 365 countries, islands and territories.

For me, he was the World’s Most Entertaining Story Source. 

Anytime an editor would summon me with an assignment about something exotic, I knew to call John, a six-times married-and-divorced WWII Battle of Bulge veteran and the most beguiling storyteller I’ve ever known.

I think of John — he died about 12 years ago — anytime I board a train, something I used to do twice a year, and something he told me he reveled in.

“I’ve ridden everything with legs or wheels,” he said, “and nothing beats the train.”

That declaration may surprise you Type A sorts who are aware of Amtrak’s sometimes casual notion of punctual scheduling.

It’s not as bad as it used to be, but the passenger trains were once notoriously late, often for hours at a time.

I remember doing my typical train gush to a friend and he said he once took the train from Latrobe to Chicago when an inexplicable breakdown occurred.

“I spent three hours,” he said, “staring at the same cow’s ass.”

I still defend rail riding even though I was once the incredulous victim of a still-hard-to-believe eight-hour foul-up.

It was in the late ’90s, pre-cell phone days. I waited eight hours on the Latrobe platform for a train to take me to Manhattan. 

Do you know how much time you spend staring west down miles of track hoping you’ll spy the beaming headlight of an east-bound train?

About 7 hours and 57 minutes.

Every couple hours I’d dash away to a payphone to check on progress. And every time, the Amtrak rep said, “It could be a while or it could be 15 minutes. Better hold tight.”

When the 8:20 a.m. locomotive finally dawdled in at 3:30 p.m., I was furious and got on the train expecting a riot. But there was none. All were serene.

I asked a fellow passenger about the absence of uproar.

“Oh, everyone is angry when they board,” he said, “but then they find out the good news: They’re givin’ away free chicken up front!”

Woo! Hoo!

I learned two things that day: there will never be such a thing as “train rage” and that the only thing better than buying a bucket of the Colonel’s secret recipe is getting to eat it for free as you watch the Pennsylvania countryside roll on by.

“I’ve ridden everything with wheels or legs and nothing beats the train.”

Oh, how I miss being able to call that man. We never met and one of my life’s regrets is I never ventured out to Evansville to join him for one of his legendary Happy Hours.

I can’t mention him without telling my favorite John Clouse story.

Playboy magazine in 2001 was doing a series of “What’s it like to …” stories and wanted to know if I knew anyone who’d ever dined on testicles. Why they thought I’d be the perfect writer to sink my teeth into this topic is a matter about which I’d rather not speculate.

I called John right away and asked if he’d ever eaten testicles. He confirmed my wisdom in calling him by answering, “What kind?”

Anything unusual?

“Well, I once dined on some elephant balls. It was in a restaurant in Berlin that was serving ‘Elephant Soup Burundi.’ And, no, they didn’t come in a really big bowl.”

It’s a great train story and that’s what I love most about riding the train. Every train ride is a conversation incubator.

We talk to strangers, to staffers, seatmates and we lavish talk on our loved ones.

I’m so pleased my daughters are enjoying the sublime novelty of a great American train ride and just hope the sometimes quirky mechanics of the train don’t bestow on them the unwelcome opportunity to study for a couple of hours the same cow’s ass.

Because right now we’re having a ball.

And, no, not the kind that comes in a really big bowl.

Related …

On bored Amtrak

We all love New York

"Go Steelers!" & recent tweets

I was making phone small talk with an interview subject in Minnesota the other day. He said, alas, the Vikings stunk this year and good-naturedly concluded, “Oh, well, you can’t be good every year.”

I risked professional good will and retorted, “We can in Pittsburgh!”

It’s true. We’re about to play the New York Jets Sunday in what will be our 15th AFC Championship game since the leagues merged in 1970.

That’s astounding. I’ve been to nine of them. In that same span, the Steelers are an unprecedented 6-1 in Super Bowls. 

This will be Pittsburgh’s fifth AFC Championship game in 10 years. Only the New England Patriots have done better, winning three Super Bowls.

But we can’t forget: they cheated. And admitted to it.

So I’m really excited about Sunday’s game and, in fact, about all the remaining teams. It’s a great and historic line-up of traditional teams. The Chicago Bears playing the Green Bay Packers is a monumental rivalry and Sunday marks the first time the two teams have met to go to the Super Bowl in 182 games.

The Jets have only won one Super Bowl, but everyone has to be impressed with what they’ve done to get to the championship round. 

Plus, all four teams hail from cold-weather cities. That’s important because northern winters can be so nasty and our lives so meaningless and devoid of things like Speedos and beach volleyball, we need competitive football to get us through to spring.

It’s one of those short, busy weeks so I’m going to stop now.

But as I don’t want to short-change anyone who is counting on www.EightDaysToAmish.com to burn off at least four minutes of company time, I feel obliged to throw in an assortment of random thoughts and recent tweets.

Here ya go . . .

• The fact that only 70 people have signed up to follow my tweets @8days2amish doesn’t bother me a bit. For me, twitter is just a handy farm team for little lines that one day might grow up into full blog posts. For instance, it won’t happen with this next tweet, but it might with the one after.

• “I saw a man wearing a musical bellows on his chest during a recent chilly morning. He was dressed accordioningly.”

• “He was a great man, but does JP II really deserve sainthood? What'd he do besides act really popey?”

• Remember Andrew Gold? I heard his 1978 song “Thank You for Being a Friend” on satellite radio the other day. It reminded me of another one of his, “Lonely Boy.” I downloaded both of these tuneful songs and am delighted to have them in heavy rotation again. He was a rare two-hit wonder.

• “I nearly made the bad taste mistake in referring to the healing Gabby Giffords as "open-minded." Instead, wisely chose to use "even-handed.”

• “Soon, ‘dodged a bullet’ won't be a quaint phrase about evading a challenge, it'll be the answer to the question, ‘So, what'd you do today?’"

• “The sun, nearly 109 times the size of earth, is nothing but a big old space heater.”

• “It's unlikely to happen, but for reasons of proper English I'm urging all gardeners to begin describing themselves as petalphiles.”

• “Just once I'd like to hear news reports of a man being slain by a blunt instrument and learn the weapon was a tuba.”

• “New census says there are 308 million Americans. That means there should be at least 308 million-to-1 shots each and every day.”

• “There ought to be hangover parking just a few stalls down from handicapped parking. And there ought to be vendor selling Bloody Marys.”

• Feel free to visit here if you’re interested in reading my msnbc.com story about my quest to find the original, famous Ray’s Pizza in New York.

• Pittsburgh rapper Kellee Maize asked me to share with my readers her YouTube rap “City of Champions.” She somehow thinks mentioning her song on a blog with the word “Amish” in the title will somehow lead to notice I think she deserves. Poor kid. Still, I whole-heartedly recommend it. She’s all black ‘n’ gold ‘n’ blonde and I root for anyone who roots for the Steelers. And the video’s a love letter to great views of Pittsburgh.

• I thought about just cutting ‘n’ pasting the Ray’s Pizza story and passing it off as a blog post, something that would count against the 12 posts-a-month to which I aspire every lunar cycle. But I thought that would be cheating.

• Sort of like this tweet post only not as blatant.

Long live the spork & me!

I can say without hyperbole I nearly died yesterday.

I lead a soft life bereft of danger. My health is good and exposure to threats minimal.

That meant Sunday in New York elevated all my risks. I’d be inebriated in an unfamiliar city, increasing the chances I’d stumble in front of a speeding taxi or get gunned down by any of the numerous homicidal maniacs who call the Big Apple home.

Any of that would have at least made an interesting death story, and I’m all for that.

That’s why my near death experience would have been fatally embarrassing to my humble legacy, had I not survived it.

Blame it on a bacon-armored shrimp.

John and I were enjoying dim sum at the Golden Unicorn in Chinatown. Dim sum is a great exotic treat where the food is served on little carts pushed by waitresses offering trays of tiny feasts. The girls bring the carts past and you point with your chopsticks at what you want.

It’s wonderful.

And John, whom I’ve recently mentioned as my most corrupt and soulless friend, is great company. He’s witty, profane and so sacrilegious I imagine dining with him would be much like sharing dim sum with Satan.

Our bellies were full from an hour of rapacious over-eating. Yet, we pressed on.

I don’t remember how it happened. I may have been distracted by my eagerness to work the words “dimolition derby” into the conversation whenever the carts collided, but the blame goes to simple poor manners and gluttony.

I didn’t even realize I was choking.

All I remember was my body started shutting down. I remember reaching for a glass of water and my hand starting to shake violently.

I don’t remember feeling pain. Only bewildered alarm.

I remember ordering my body to behave. I didn’t want to make a scene, even as I was choking to death.

An unchewed golf ball-sized chunk of lightly fried shrimp wrapped in bacon was lodged in my throat.

Now, I know better than that. But as this was a Chinese restaurant, the custom is to use chopsticks, the most ridiculous dining utensil ever conceived to convey food into the mouth.

You can’t saw steak with chopsticks. It takes practice to skillfully pick up some General Tso chicken, let alone a slippery pork dumpling. They are inferior to even the spork, a really handy innovation that by all logic should reduce by a full third the space of every single silverware drawer in the world.

But after an hour of using the chopsticks I’d gotten careless. I didn’t want to bite the piece in half and risk having the remainder plummet into a puddle of soy and splash stains on my shirt.

So I just shoveled the whole chunk into my mouth.

John later said it lasted about a minute. He thought I was having a seizure.

Somehow, I got that sucker down. I restored to normal almost immediately and we began to piece together what had happened.

The incident, of course, dominated the conversation the rest of the day. I didn’t see my life pass before my eyes or anything like that and take away no great lessons other than the reinforcement of the ones my mother told me about proper table manners.

I haven’t had any foxhole conversion to lead a better life, change any of my habits or enjoy this precious life any more than I already dearly do.

We spent the rest of the day just as we’d planned. We hit the bars and whooped it up with unbridled revelry.

John, of course, is already spinning the story to his advantage. He said today he intends to compose an e-mail telling all our friends about my piggish behavior and the heroic steps he took save my life, a complete fabrication which I fear will somehow take hold in spite of the lies.

I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say I could have died right there. People choke to death all the time. And that’s not the way I want to go.

I have no fear of death as long as it doesn’t have to hurt. I argue the best way to go is to die peacefully in your sleep of multiple gun shot wounds, which isn’t nearly as contradictory as it sounds.

I can now say there isn’t much real pain involved in nearly choking to death. The body just seems to check out. I’m happy I’ll soon be home in the arms of my loved one who, despite all my jokes, need me around for many more productive decades.

John selfishly wondered what would have happened to him if I’d have died. Would he have been stuck with the whole bill? Could he have persuaded the manager to offer him and a guest a free meal to compensate for the unpleasantness he’d endured the day his old buddy died?

I asked John to describe how I looked as the death mask tried to descend on my face.

“Oh, it was awful,” he said. “Your face was turning bright red. Your eyes were bulging and you were shaking so badly I thought you might overturn the table. I thought you were a goner. It was very disturbing.”

I told him I was surprised by his humanity.

“Oh, I didn’t mean I was disturbed for you. I meant it was disturbing for any of us who had to see it.”

So I’m damn glad to be alive today. Every day, really. I hope you are, too.

And I hope when I do die it will be quick, neat, and far from my evil friend who’s disappointed he couldn’t use my untimely demise as a bargaining chip for a free meal.