Connie Schultz
WASHINGTON — When my brother was a boy, he loved to leave pennies on the railroad tracks up the street from our house and wait for the freight train to flatten them as it zoomed by.
This scared my mother to death. I don’t know that she ever found a flattened penny in the pocket of his jeans or heard it rattling around in the clothes dryer. More likely, she got regular dispatches from the neighborhood gossips reporting for duty.
Every so often, I’d hear her yell his name and order him to stand in front of her — “Right this minute, Mister” — for a lecture about the violent death awaiting him at the tracks.