The two black kids on the train smoke dope in the back seats and joke about being shot and killed by the police for being "armed with weed." Everyone looks elsewhere. And he thinks, "What have we done to each other? I can't be the only one wondering."

Driving around with the window down listening to the radio this weekend somehow reminded me of an awkward 17 year-old boy with a shank of black hair and arms too long for his shirts and the afternoon he drove his sister and the French foreign exchange student, Blondine (who was tall and mature and more woman than anything he'd ever been close to and made him shy and hungry all at once) out to the horse track in a 1969 Volvo where they lost all their money on the ponies and then lurched back home in that four door box of a car only to get caught in a passing thunderstorm and the windows wouldn't roll up and the rain came in like great veils of warmth and the wipers couldn't go fast enough and two soaked girls laughed and screamed in the back seat all the way home.

I once knew a girl with an 8-track cassette of Bread's Greatest Hits. She drove a Saab and drank golden beer from plastic cups.