When childhood enthusiasm gave way to the longer legs and awkwardness of adolescence, Henry Junior stopped jumping up and down and enticing passengers to wave. He stopped running from one end of the yard to the other. He stopped counting. Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and simply watched. He knew the southbound started in Chicago, went through St. Louis to the south, and ended somewhere in Texas, which seemed like a foreign country he would probably never visit.  The train he watched in the evening was the northbound. It had already made the 28-hour journey from Texas and was on its final few stops before its destination. Chicago was only a few hours by car, but he’d never been there. It too might as well have been a foreign country.

As he moved through his teen years, watching the train each evening darkened his mood. The self-doubts and angst that come naturally with that time in life mingled with his boredom with Bowman, with his parents, with everything. With himself.

And who was he? Ask anyone and they would have said, “That Henry Junior, he’s a good boy.” But he knew what that meant. “That Henry Junior, he never makes trouble. He’s nice and he does what’s asked of him.” As a child, he heard that as praise. Now he hated it. He was a solid “B” student. He worked hard enough to not fall below that. Lower grades would get unwanted attention, but it didn’t seem worth it to strive for more. He was second string on the Bears, Bowman High School’s basketball team, not because he liked basketball, but because he was just good enough, and that made it an expectation.

During his afternoons and summers of high school, he worked at the tire shop, the business his dad had built from scratch. Early on he loved the odd jobs that gave him a sense of being part of place inhabited by men, doing men’s things. He liked getting to listen in on the customer’s stories about farming, and trucks, and the Chicago Bears. But it had turned into a minimum wage chore of doing what he was told. His dad and all the customers ceased being interesting. They were now just old and boring and going nowhere. He did not want that future, yet he knew what was coming. No one had said it out loud, but he knew he would be expected to take over the shop once his dad was no longer able to manage. No one had bothered to ask his opinion or get his agreement. They just expected him to dutifully step up.

That was it. He did all the right things at school, at home, at work, at church, and he was bored. That mixture of developmental angst and situational stuckness turned dark and thick within him. He was mad, but didn’t know it. Duty demanded that he ignore the anger. It was unbecoming of a “good boy,” so he dismissed it. He developed a balancing act. He knew he was bored. He knew he did not want to become his father or the customers. He knew he was tired of being dutiful. He knew. He knew. But he continued. His sense of who he was supposed to be did not allow him to see a choice, so he kept these competing needs all perfectly partitioned in his head. He recognized the boredom and the feeling of being stuck, and he was all too familiar with his sense of duty, but he could not acknowledge that those were forces pulling in opposite directions. He was so accustomed to the juggling, that it was no longer juggling. It simply was the way it was.

But in the evenings, while standing and watching the train, the opposing forces betrayed themselves in his body. Watching the train he clenched his fists inside his coat pockets. His eyes filled to the brim, to overflowing. He didn’t cry, he just dripped tears down an expressionless face. He was glad the train was moving fast and he welcomed the shortened days of winter with its early darkness. No one could see the tears that on the coldest of nights froze on his cheeks. His stomach tightened as the boredom turned to an anger that did not have a name. His mind raced at the speed of the train with thoughts that had no words. He continued to show up every evening, to stand perfectly still, to watch. He had to. If he didn’t, he knew something inside him would simply stop.

On a perfectly clear and crisp evening during his junior year in Bowman High School, Henry Junior decided to leave. As the engine blew by, the thought perfectly filled the space left by his exhaled breath. It wasn’t an idea of consider. It was a decision fully formed by the time he recognized it. The decision did not include a plan, but by the time the red lights had disappeared, he knew he could no longer live in that house, with those two people, in this town. His parents had become strangers to him, old people who never changed.  He simply could not continue to work in his fathers tire business, one day becoming the manager, then the owner.  That was everyone else’s plan, not his. He could not. As simple as that. Henry Junior did not know what else was down the track, but he knew just as surely as he knew the train schedule that he would leave as soon as he finished high school.