The details of the day my father and I arranged to pick my mother up at the Chicago train station are hazy, but the events were memorable enough – the emotions were extreme enough – that it remains among my first concrete memories.
My mother was returning by train from a visit to her family in Kansas, and for some reason she and my father had arranged for him and me to drive to Chicago, meet her train, and then drive back to Ann Arbor together. I don’t remember being consulted as to the wisdom of the plan or its potential for confusion. Had I been, no doubt, I would have advised against it, but there you are.
So at some point en route to Chicago on the eventful day – perhaps even upon arriving at Union Station itself – my father learned that my mother’s train had been delayed for two hours or so. Rather than spend two boring hours on the platform, he decided that I would enjoy some intellectual stimulation greater than he would be able to provide himself, so the two of us went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry – a famous source of exploration and hands-on fun for kids at the time. Two hours passed in presumably entertaining fashion (at least, I have no memory otherwise), and we returned to the train station in a good mood.
That quickly disappeared.
It turned out that my mother’s train had for some reason been split into two, and the ETA we had been given referred to the later-arriving half rather than the one she was on, which had arrived as scheduled. She had thus been deposited on the platform at the assigned time to find nobody waiting for her, nobody answering the phone in Michigan, and – in those pre-cell-phone days – no way of contacting us. With no way of knowing where we were or what, if anything, had happened to us, her patience, over the intervening two hours, had transformed to frustration had transformed to anger had transformed to panic.
The path back to anger was a quick one. Ohhh, did we hear it (luckily, most her anger was directed at my father, but I suffered by proximity). We explained ourselves, but it took some time for my mother’s anger and panic to subside, even as she acknowledged the explanation of our lateness as legitimate. It was a chilly ride back to Ann Arbor.
