Roger Wright – Chicago

The baby from the train that fell from the sky.

The story swirls and entwines with the paths of our three stars. You, me and the child, Annie Beth Morningstar. We couldn’t give her much, but we gave her that name.

Didn’t it all happen sometime around New Year’s?

First, you.

Calling you back across the years to remember the night with me. Winter was howling outside the second floor picture window of the smoky dark club looking out on the baseball stadium. You stood at the bar with a group, drawing the stares of any breathing male.

I was never one to just stare. Even if I had to wait in line. So I simply stood in front of you, saw your eyes register some kind of mystery, and I said, “You are so far out of my league, it would be an honor just for you to tell me to get lost.”

Something faraway shifted the dancing of the winter winds, I saw the smile you thought was hiding in your eyes and then you stared hard enough to see my future. “Anybody with a line that cheesy needs work.” Your laugh was like a river running straight from your soul. “How can I tell you to get lost? You obviously need a lot of help.” We both laughed then, an unspoken promise made.

The rhythm of a late night shifted. We started talking, the crowds thickened, we slid into some kind of dancing. Then your back up against the scratchy exposed brick wall, you looked up, your arms around my neck, “I don’t do stuff like this,” you said. A kiss that made us both forget our names. Then there was no one in that smoky loud room but you and I.

A week later came the accident that choked the whole city with pain. The accident and the baby on the train, Annie Beth Morningstar.

They’re called “El” trains, elevated maybe two stories above the street. Built on a rusty iron superstructure that separated every ray of sun brave enough to shine. They circle the loop of downtown Chicago, rumbling through the sky. Any human being in downtown Chicago looking up at the trains has asked themselves at some point: what if one of those screeching steel monsters were to fall off the track?. . . but no. That could never really happen.

Until it did.

At 5:23 on a rainy gray winter evening, the streets jammed with rivers of people and vehicles, a motorman paused at just the wrong moment – maybe there was a little bit of something he smoked, maybe not – and one car slammed into the back of another train. Two train cars jackknifed in slow motion into the air, wheels leaving tracks. Screams, stopped hearts and terror blanketed souls like sweat as glass shattered, two cars full of people tumbled over the side of the track and smashed on the street forty feet below. Another car, also jammed with terrified commuters, was left hanging.

Dangling horror. The train car pointed down, maybe ten or twelve feet from the hard, cold street, swinging in the winter wind.

Eleven people died hard deaths. The screams of the one hundred and eighty injured filled the night, crushing the heart of the city.

The ambulances started lining up, engines humming, red lights whirring against the steel supports where the one train car still dangled, as if hanging from the sky.

The hospitals ran out of beds, so they started putting people on the psych wards. Had to. No other choice. On the adolescent psych ward where I worked as a counselor, we set up cots in the day room and took five people.

We also took the baby. Larissa the head nurse, having seen everything the street had to dish out, a woman who knew what the word triage meant…even she was stopped by the site of the baby.

We pushed two armchairs together in the nurse’s lounge. There were no cribs. Another one of the old nurses, we called her Aunt Sally, shook her head and said our own Lil Baby Jesus. To which Larissa replied then Baby Jesus is a girl, Sally.

The tiny stranger didn’t seem the least bit scared. Bruised, cut, battered but breathing. Eighteen. Maybe nineteen months, Larissa said. But I tell you people, I did not know that babies could fly. EMT says that she was in one of the cars that bounced off the ground. Nobody made it around her. No one. Just this one little child. As if she could fly.

Later that night, I remember calling you to say I was working a double shift and wouldn’t be home until morning, and telling you the story. You asked me her name, and I said no one knew. That’s when you came up with “Annie Beth Morningstar.” So that’s who she became.

The next morning we had breakfast at Nookie’s. Over the eggs and sausage and coffee, we decided that you’d come visit little Annie with me.

I remember that morning, walking back to your place after breakfast, for love and the only rest we could find.

Late that afternoon, you went in to work with me. Little Annie had been moved to the Prentice Women’s hospital on the other side of the building. But you got to see her. I’ll never forget your face when you first saw her; you looked ready to sit down and start making plans with her.

It took almost a week to find the parents. So we’d go see her every day. The nurses always let us in so we’d sit with her, sing to her, rock her to sleep. Sometimes she’d smile and look at us as if we shared a secret.

For awhile she was just ours.

Then, after Annie, we took a road trip together. Just about the time that we both decided our paths would be charted separately, in different directions after all. But there was our one last trip.

We were on the Outer Banks, camping amid the salty smells and sounds of the ocean, as we drifted off to sleep.

Until it started to rain – I mean rain. The tent collapsed, and we gathered up everything. Soaked to the skin, we ran for the car and started driving through the green forest Carolina night. Bound for your parents’ roof three hours away, singing Beatles’ songs at the top of our lungs. We talked a lot about Annie and you told me something you told me our very first night together, when people tell each other the big things, to see if the little things will work.

Laying there on our backs, both of us spent and sweaty, breathing hard, smiling at the world, you said hey, so you’ll never have a kid. So I don’t have to worry about birth control. Besides, life should hold some mystery. And if you knew the reason for everything there wouldn’t be any mystery!

If you knew the reason for everything, there wouldn’t be any mystery. Like the mysterious survival of Annie Beth Morningstar.

Then, for our three stars, we sang one more Beatles song in the Carolina rain.

One more song for the baby for the baby from the train that fell from the sky.

This story was posted in March 2022. An edited version, Annie Beth Morningstar, made it into my book,  Chicago Street Corner Stories, published in late 2021. Both versions have their merits. If you read both, let me know your thoughts, thanks.

When I hear “don’t be scared of the Corona virus,” it calls to mind my sister Wendy and I, sitting in the dark when we were around eight and ten, watching the movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. We were terrified. And now years later, I have no idea why. Or even what the movie was about. I Just remember we were scared. But if somebody, back then, were to say, “Don’t be scared” that would not have helped. It would not have helped then. Doesn’t help me now. 

Yesterday morning Maria and I are in the library checking books out that she needs for her teaching job. The woman behind the counter is wearing surgical gloves as she coughs into her hand and blows her nose and hands us each book one by one. All while wearing the gloves. Should I be scared? Or even think about the very nice, well intentioned lady who didn’t get the purpose of the gloves? Telling me “don’t be scared” doesn’t help. So, what does help? What’s have I learned so far? What’s the story here? First is the message that we are all in this together. The virus is on every continent but Antarctica. It isn’t stopped by a wall or a travel ban. Second, Facts matter. Even when we factually don’t know much at all. So far, 3 people have been identified as infected in greater Chicago. 2 of the 3 have recovered. Third, credible leadership matters. It’s nice that we only have 3 people identified in Chicago. But put that in context. We also haven’t tested more than a tiny fraction of the population. Unlike South Korea and their drive to test what looks like everyone. Credible leadership means—like my friend Andy Schulkind wrote—not getting stuck in fear. It means planning. It means paying attention to experts. Trusting the scientists. What’s the vision, the unifying picture of hope that all of us citizen leaders can use to take us though all the unknown’s ahead? Perhaps it’s the “Stockdale Paradox.” The ability to hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs at once. What are those two beliefs? First, that we all have a common problem here. And second, that we will find our way to a common solution. We will find our way. Hope remains.

Gray foggy, damp and weirdly warm in Chicago this morning. Christmas coming. The rushing of lesser angels stops cold for a stolen moment and you start missing past times and people you can see, text, email or call up on the phone. Which makes me remember Raspberry Pi.

The idea behind Raspberry Pi is to put the power of computing into everyone’s hands. Literally everyone. In the whole world. This is more like a movement than a foundation and business. Look at their web pages and you’ll see stories and plans like “putting a computer in every school in England.” A proposition which, you figure, would mean that the computers would have to go for around $35 apiece. And they do.

The Raspberry Pi call to action is “teach, learn, make.” There is an old management development cliché that goes “think outside the box.” At Raspberry Pi the more relevant directive would be “Forget the box.”

What I know about Raspberry Pi, and I know relatively little, came from my Dad. And I have no doubt that he knew a lot. With a world class engineering analytical mind recognized at the highest levels of Wall Street, and a heart the size of Lake Michigan, my Dad probably knew as much about the ins and outs of Raspberry Pi than the folks who founded and ran the company. And in the talks with my Dad, just before he passed, he would share his excitement about this computing for everyone idea. Shared it so well that I still get excited thinking about it even though its been years since we talked.

Years since we talked. But it was only last week that I was taking the elevator up to the floor I work on – where a whole lot of engineering goes on. Looking at the advertisement, news and sports scores on the video screen above the elevator buttons. And it flashed for just one tiny golden moment. An ad for Raspberry Pi!

As if my Dad and I were still talking.

And he was saying, “Merry Christmas to All”

Listen. Pete Seeger is singing a song for Mom’s Birthday that’s bigger than all of us. Starts out—“ Come and take a walk with me, thru this green and growing land”

Mom at any age is listening, She hears Seeger sing Phil Ochs’ lyrics,
“Here is a land full of power and glory”
Beauty that words cannot recall”

Mom at this moment resounding with the grace of sunlight
As the calls and texts and shouts of joy from friends, relatives, children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren (Hello Luna and James!) come rushing in from around the world.

And the song sets a course, “Walk through the meadows and the mountains and the sand.
Walk through the valleys and the rivers and the plains
Walk through the sun and walk through the rain.”

Then into memory. From radio station WFMT. Broadcasting from Chicago. Through an eternal News Years Eve. Staying up late with Mom and listening to “The Midnight Special.” Where the lyric goes,

“Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor
Only as free as the padlocked prison door
Only as strong as our love for this land
Only as tall as we stand”

Mom all those years ago took her kids to all the different churches and temples, so each of us could find our own way.
Each of us finding something larger than ourselves.

From Mom across time
Comes a song of wisdom and a sunbeam of love.

“Here is a song full of power and glory
Beauty that words cannot recall!”

A Song for Mom at 90!