Dreams of Train Whistles Turn into Our Collective Gun-Violent Nightmare

You snapped upright from your slumber, hearing that whistle, 3AM, and a hum over tracks –badaBUM, badaBUM, fading eastward, then silence after your dog’s nightmare yelps grew quiet as you fell back deep into a safe place.

Saturday Catechism done, the priest screens The Bowery Boys with Huntz Hall and delights in your classmates’ howls.  You march out of the rectory basement, little soldiers in single file, and you crane your face up to the sun to warm your skin, imagining anything good was possible. You welcome the train’s comforting horn and remember your parents told you to return home when you heard it. Three miles later you walk through doors no one ever locked, smell the roast in the oven, wash your hands and sit down for dinner.

Startled from sleep by a snore gone awry you yearned for that familiar refrain. As it came into range, this night’s music played its notes more quickly, pushed along by an operator eager to finish his shift after the back and forth between the dank, cavernous underground and the last station 23 miles away.  You stared at the mirror for a moment and mouthed the words to yourself that another three hours with eyes shut would be so worthwhile, and drifted off.

You and your teammates stop playing mid-pitch as the train crawls to a stop north of Cannondale aside the sandlot. The operator waves his cap then yanks three times –woooo, wooo, woo. The leftfielder forgets to return to his position after moving five steps to the foul line for  a closer view of the one-car train, carting a little leaguer’s  father or two one more stop north to Branchville. The engine driver muscles the throttle, tons of steel rolling onward.

The television slapped you half-awake and you faintly heard a broadcaster announce something about Gabby and little angels deserving a vote. You changed the channel and now, mostly alert, saw a fellow wearing an impossibly big hat. Graphics identified him as a gun dealer who thought teachers should carry firearms to protect schoolchildren. Gun sales have been brisk since the tragedy in Newtown, he said. Then you heard a man explain he was going to buy a pickup truck but decided instead to purchase a semi-automatic weapon while he still could.  He worried anti-gun advocates would prevail in banning them, blaming a Mayor from New York.

Asleep again you gaze into an abyss, watching yourself answer questions at a job interview  long ago with the NRA in Stamford,  just a kid looking for work to pay your $86 share of the monthly rent. Fast forward, you see a man wearing a crisp suit politicians-turned-lobbyists can afford in a dimly lit hotel room practicing a PowerPoint praising outsourced security, a growth market the slide notes say. And you so desperately want to wake up but cannot. Then as an angry man walks down the aisle of the third train car you see in slow motion a spent 9mm shell casing carom off the wall, tumble to the floor and roll under a seat.

This time there was no whistle to wake you. The train was stuck indefinitely at Merillon Avenue.

Our waking hours have now become America’s collective nightmare. How difficult it must be for Rep. Carolyn McCarthy to yet again answer questions about gun violence.  After LIRR, Columbine, Binghamton, Virginia Tech, Casas Adobes, Aurora, Newtown and the thousands murdered each year by guns in this country, are we now at a different place as a nation? Can we balance the Second Amendment’s original intent with today's weapons in deranged hands that kill innocent people? If placing victims’ rights ahead of gun profits keeps just one person’s dream alive, it will surely beat this recurring nightmare.