He didn’t see her approach. He stood and leaned against the glassed bus stop watching the procession of traffic, the angled light creeping up the brick faces of the two- and three-story buildings. She quickened her step, straightened her sweater and smoothed her pants. This is the miracle of the modern city, of modern times. All the nervous courting gestures. The bus stop lean, the approaching night, her attempts to look the way she wants to look, conscious of how she smells, hoping her perfume still has the desired effect. These gestures are everywhere. They are familiar. The questions these lovers’ signs suggest and the future they tease are ageless, though their resolution is new every time. Apprehension and delight are as old as salt. Old, too, is the fact that the young lovers think their love is a secret. They think that what they feel and want is new, freshly unpackaged and radiant, that their parents never felt the same way. They think it is a secret, though the old lady behind Vera with an umbrella and a limp can tell by the skip and clatter of Vera’s step where she’s going. The owner of the vacuum-cleaner store on the corner reads Lester’s feigned indifference, his studied nonchalance, as a siege of will and pride against Vera’s tardiness. They’ve seen it all, but Vera and Lester think and feel they invented it. Where do they get this confidence, like that of doctors, to believe they are making life anew?

Lester turned and caught sight of Vera over his shoulder and stood straight but didn’t know what to do with his hands. She hurried to him, breathless and fresh. The Hoover dealer turned back to closing his shop, barely aware of the drama, this simple street drama of two lovers meeting at the corner, but he knew it, at some deeper level, at a lower register, so he didn’t have to watch anymore. He locked the door and gently thumbed off the light as the day ended.

It dominated the trainyard. Sphinxlike, in proud ruin amid the piles of bitumen mounded at the fence edge at war with the weeds. It was king, indifferent to the rusted rails on which it sat but, as anyone could tell, led nowhere. Axles, huge dumbbells of iron, were piled carelessly, sunset colors pounded in the rigid metal.

The Twin Cities Hiawatha made its last run on January 23, 1970. The FP45 engine was harnessed to freight service, but the coaches, Superdomes and Skytop Lounges were dragged to the Milwaukee Road service yard between Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue, destined to rust and then die.

The glass was broken out and the skylights in the dining car empty of everything except sky that saw no change, no shifting frame of landscape. Just the dark bright dark bright tunneling of the sun. The city skyline was too shallow then, too distant to offer a view.