I thought of Palmer Gymnasium on the Princeton Campus in about
1922--the June, the quiet trees, the cigarettes like cherry-colored
fireflies, the flappers, a cicada competing with strings and woodwinds,
and me outside because I didn't have the spondulix and the tux. My
throat thickened with something sharper than carcinoma.
If only I had known then what I know now.
And suddenly I remembered that I _had_ known.
In that musky dark, in the dark of a thousand other disappointed
evenings, in the beam and blister of every day, I had been tightening
the spring for the run. The anticipated journey--the slatting of my
choo-choo train around its silver track.