Trolley Car

Trolley Car, photograph
by Herbert S. Pendergraft

I've never ridden one of San Francisco's cable cars,
the last ones still in operation on the globe,
I only know that when I saw the photo
that my father took so long ago when stationed there, I wanted it because the cable car was number 5-2-2, a number of significance to those who love a certain boy with freckles and red hair who joined us on that date in '84. May twenty-second, special dayto all who love him still and even more, who miss him always and who always will, until the clouds roll back and we are all outside of time. The photograph has captured time as well,
a moment when the car was boarding long ago.
Its stops are clearly marked but hold no interest,
while a snapshot of the fashions of the day are quaint
enough, the ladies with their hair up, older ones in hats.
It's California but it must be chilly with the coats.
There's not a single person looking over at the freckled man
with red hair taking photographs. Why would they?
They're not famous, simply traveling from A to B for this
or that, the 522 a means to quite ordinary end. Amazed,
they'd be if they could know that decades hence,
a melancholy mother would be peering at the
picture of their backs, as car upon the tracks stood still
just long enough for her father-in-the-Navy to consider
scene quite suitable for trying out the camera he had bought.
Their names are unimportant, their lives mean nothing
to her as she focuses on 5-2-2, remembering it well.
Remembering the boy she birthed that day, whose face
now looks upon her only from the wall. And too, she hopes,
from heaven's gates where all those angel kisses which
she told him were the explanation for the freckles
may mean something else entirely,
or maybe not.



(c) Ellen Gillette, 2013