By Don De Grazia
I first noticed him about a dozen years ago, on my morning rides downtown to school. I’d be holding on to the silver bar, standing with a jam-packed trainful of bleary-eyed commuters. At every stop his voice would come over the mike and he’d make some happy comment.
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“Gentlemen, if you see a lady standing, please give her your seat. And ladies, if you see a young man frowning, please give him your smile, because what the world needs now is love sweet looooooove.”
I thought he was kind of cool, turning a mundane job into a fun one, discovering an obvious medium for expression that nobody had ever exploited. But, then again, this was a long time ago–I was young, and desperately trying to find my own niche in the world.
Then he reached over and grabbed Cool Breeze’s baseball cap by the button on top, giving it a gentle yank. The kid looked up, surprised, and said, laughing, “Come on, man.” The conductor sat down and pulled out of his pocket a piece of folded-up newspaper. He gave it to the kid, who started reading it. I peered over the kid’s shoulder and saw, right in the middle of the page, a big picture of the love-train guy himself, leaning out of the window of an el car, waving. The headline said, “The Rapper makes every train ride a lively one.”
“Hey, man,” the Cool Breeze said, “can you make this thing an express? To Morse?”
The clipping was from Des Moines.
