“Freight train,” whispered Rebecca, just as the second act of The Lion King was beginning at the Chicago Cadillac Palace Theater.

A day earlier, we had taken Amtrak from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, to Chicago for several days of sightseeing. During dinner at trendy The Gage, recommended by our Palmer House breakfast server, Doris, we talked about ‘passenger’ and ‘whatchamacallit’ trains. Neither of us could retrieve freight until the curtain was raised on a twenty-something Simba.

“Did you thank Marion?” I asked. Marion was the character in It’s a Wonderful Life who would have become an old maid if Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey had drowned saving his brother when he was a kid.

We’re in our mid-seventies with word retrieval challenges, which, my doctor says, is normal. She added,

Your brain is as old as you are. Sometimes it takes her a while to pull that book off the shelf.

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