To catch a reflection of a mountain in the window as the sun sets reminds me of so many people who have come and gone. Lone Mountain North, a man who runs to the top of mountains. The train stops and I watch as a woman, with curly blonde/grey hair greets a man and two barefoot boys below the age of five. She is their grandmother. The man is her son. The train moves along. When I was a child, and then a teen I would visit my Dad and his wife, at the time, in San Francisco. My Mom and her boyfriend, at the time, would drive me to the train station in San Jose and I, with my weekend bag and CD collection would jump from the backseat of the car and make my way to the ticket counter. I was always a bit afraid on the train, worried for my safety, feeling alone but I loved to watch life pass by. It wasn’t the life that you normally see. The life that you see from a train window are the edge cases. No one wants to live with a train in their backyard however it's cheaper. If you don’t have a home, a tent along the train tracks might be all you have. I watched those people. I saw their backyards and their front yards – is their grass green? Many junk yards, machines, stacks of cars, corrugated metal, workshops, fences and graffiti. I loved the graffiti. The art, the words, the poetry and color. I would keep a notebook and write down the words I saw on the walls. Sayings and obscure names, drawings and characters, gangs. It’s all still here and I certainly am glad that from a young age I learned to appreciate the tracks, the life that exists on the other side of them.