Jon Carroll’s column today is about train whistles. I absolutely love train whistles, although I can’t say why. I can remember being up late at night working on various books, and hearing a train whistle far in the distance. It really is an incredibly lonesome sound, and is so particularly for me, because I have to be quiet to hear it. If I’m watching TV, or playing a game, there’s too much noise to hear the trains, but when I was silently working on those books, I could hear them every time. Writing books is really lonely work.