I sit on my front porch swing on a hot July Saturday afternoon. It reminds me of the way I used to feel in the summers of my youth, when it was too damn hot to do anything fun. None of the boys wanted to play baseball in that heat and by the middle of July, we were bored with the community swimming pool too.

I was brought up in a small town in the very house where I continue to reside. My Daddy purchased this tiny three-bedroom clapboard home just before the start of the second world war. He got it cheap too, owing to the fact that the front of the house faces the old Southern Railway tracks. You might say the tracks are right across the street, although they are about 40 feet from the road.

Used to be there was a train station sitting there too. A pretty busy one after the war considering that Brodies Crossing has always been a small town. Our United States Senator back then was from our town. As the chairman of the senate’s transportation committee, he twisted a few arms and we became a freight hub. A year later he persuaded the president of the Southern Railway to have the Dixieland Special, which ran from Memphis to Atlanta and back, make two stops per day.

All that came to an end in the early Sixties when airplanes and cars just killed passenger train travel. Not long after that, the abandoned train station caught fire and burned to the ground. A homeless old man and his wife, who took shelter in the station most nights, died in the fire. Only one freight train runs through here now. It’s just a switcher pushing five or six cars a few towns over where they can join the main assembly of cars to be pulled by a real road locomotive.

Still, in the railroad’s glory years, when I was growing up, I used to sit out on this very porch to wait for the big diesel engines that that pulled The Special, with its long line of polished emerald green, passenger cars. I would stand about three feet from the track and wave to the people in those cars. Some would wave back too.

I used to imagine how one day I would be one of those well-dressed passengers, people from places like New Orleans, Little Rock and of course, Nashville and Memphis; going east on important business to Atlanta or even Charleston.

At four o’clock the train from Atlanta would come through on its way to Memphis. One afternoon I saw a fellow whose face I had seen many times in the movie theatre. It was Clark Gable, my mother’s hero ever since she saw Gone with the Wind. I ran through the house and into the kitchen to get her, pulling on her apron. I begged her to come out onto the porch so she could see Mr. Gable in the flesh. But she refused. She didn’t believe me. She threatened to give me a whipping if I didn’t stop making up stories about people I saw on the train.

She had a point, I guess. I might have been mistaken when I told her that Vice-President Nixon was standing on the platform the summer before. This time though, I was determined to prove I was right. I would get Clark Gable’s autograph. He was drinking from a Coke bottle when I approached him. The train was about to leave. “Can I have your autograph, Mr. Gable?” I asked.

He laughed. I noticed he had shaved his mustache, probably for his next picture.  He pulled out a scrap of paper from his coat pocket and carefully wrote his name. “How do you spell Gable kid?” he asked and laughed again. Then he climbed aboard the train where a woman shook her head at him. Nodding in my direction, she spoke to him “You did it again, didn’t you!”

I showed the autograph to my mother who just rolled her eyes and said, “Why don’t you go out and wait for the five o’clock freight? That one’s from Atlanta too. Vivian Leigh might be on that train.”   

I never did get to meet Miss Leigh and I never rode the Dixieland Special. I have been to Atlanta once by car and made it to Memphis twice, but only on the bus. Lately I find that swinging on the porch puts me to sleep. Some afternoons, especially in the hot summer, I dream about the Dixieland Special. I can hear the diesel engine’s horn, signaling its arrival. And in my dreams I’m always standing on the platform. Suitcase in hand, I’m ready to board and meet my true destiny.