This is not a theater review. I will say that Rose Portillo is in the ensemble, and she’s fantastic. Beyond fantastic in the role. Let’s not harbor any illusion that my view of Rose’s performance is unfiltered. I’ve known Rose since we were students at Pomona College. We were in shows together. She spat fire then, just as she does today. She possesses some blend of righteousness and kindness that I’ve always found impressive and endearing. She must have been around 20 then. It’s now half a century later. What happens to us over half a century?

Among other things, we break limbs. I mean, our own, not others, one would hope. Rose performed with one foot wrapped in a cast and she rolled around the stage in some portable device on wheels. The production is an ensemble piece, highly choreographed by Zoe Lesser. So while the rest of the cast was executing dance moves with precision, there sat Rose, in her device, her face sardonic while she waved the wrapped foot to and fro, like a Mexican Lucille Ball.

What happens to us over half a century?

Rose Portillo in “O: A Rhapsody in Divorce” (Photo by Mallury Patrick)

Before I met Rose at Pomona College, when I was probably 17, though I’m not certain of this, I took the Amtrak “Southwest Limited” from Pomona to L.A. Union Station. There was no Metrolink train network then.

Once a day that Amtrak train rolled through, having come all the way from Chicago. I am certain that I was living in Claremont at the time and that I took the train from Pomona (there was no Claremont station then) to visit my girlfriend. We’d met in junior high (there was no “middle school” then) and we started dating in high school. She lived in L.A. on Orange Drive, the same street, four houses up the block from where I lived before my family up and moved to Claremont, at the edge of the county.

I also remember with certainty that this was my first experience of an American train, accompanied by pangs of nostalgia for train travel in the UK where I grew up. The train tracks were owned by the Atchinson Topeka Santa Fe Rail Line, and they permitted Amtrak to ride those rails when their freight trains were not using them. On one of these journeys, our passenger train pulled into a siding to allow a freight train to pass.

She picked me up at Union Station. There was no Red Line or B or D Line subway. Just the ironically named Southern California Rapid Transit District fleet of hopeless buses, bullets that dribbled out of gun barrels, always arriving late.

I recall purchasing my train ticket from the Santa Fe Depot in Pomona, some 15 minutes before train was due to arrive. It was cash. I had no credit card. There was no Internet to buy a ticket online, no cellphones to store a digital ticket. No QR codes to verify anything. There was, however, a slightly bored, polite clerk, in an Amtrak uniform, parked behind a glass window, who, for a $12.50 return-trip ticket, handed me a small stack of three rectangular papers, glued together at one end. The front was light card stock, like airline tickets of that time, containing the relevant travel information and proof of purchase. Behind the card was a sheet of carbon paper, it floated against the card stock like a piece of tissue. Behind the carbon paper was a duplicate copy of the ticket, on a similarly wispy sheet, but white, almost translucent. On the train, the conductor would tear out this wisp as proof of something or other: That all was in order. All had been accounted for. A fixed certainty.

I recall peering down the tracks as the train approached Pomona. Nothing like the UK trains. No, this beast was two or three levels high, a long, massive dinosaur-snake slithering down the tracks. I was soon sitting in a cushioned seat on an upper level when it started to roll west. Slowly. Cotton valances on the windows. Dust smeared across the glass. It never seemed to attain great speed, perhaps this was simply perception because of my elevation. But I recall how smooth it was. It glided as though floating on silk. I do recall, with certainty, the excitement of seeing familiar landscapes from this oh-so-unfamiliar vantage. The streets I had driven. Oh, to be now looking down from above those streets that adjoined fields of dried grass, wild sunflowers holding their own in the heat. The stucco bungalows. The back yards with plastic pools and bicycles, and dusty cars. The graveyards of those same cars after they’d expired, stacked one on the next, statues of dented steel and worn rubber. It was all exotic and thrilling. Over fifty years ago.

What happens to us across half a century?

On Sunday, this week, after transferring from the Metrolink train to the light rail at the Pomona Station, I disembarked in Highland Park and strode up Avenue 56 passing Victorian homes with multiple cars parked in cement driveways, goth-attired kids sporting large headphones. A pair of Black men in sports gear. I walked past a middle school, cutting over to Avenue 54 and its high school, and completing the 20 minute hike at York, which houses the theater complex.

The thing is, I lived in Highland Park for a year, well over a decade ago, and on Sunday I found myself crossing Almada Street, maybe a quarter a mile from where I had lived. I had never before walked these streets but I had driven them. And I understood, looking west along Almada, that the home I had lived in, with its spacious garden that I’d planted with corn, and tomatoes, and sunflowers, was nearby, at the top of that hill.

It was late afternoon when the light rail train home deposited me in Pomona, where I had over an hour to grab a bite before transferring to the Metrolink, back to San Bernardino and the Arrow Line to Redlands.

Walking out towards Garey Avenue, I passed a now decrepit building that I remember well. It was the Santa Fe Depot, where’d I’d bought my train ticket 50 years ago, The stucco façade is worn for wear, dirt-smeared, cobwebs on the locks. It’s now owned by the city of Pomona.

What happens over half a century is that the past keeps crashing in, uninvited.

On the eastbound Metrolink, I read from Charles Frazier’s historical novel, “Thirteen Moons,” a passage spoken by an 80-year-old narrator, recalling his foster father from the 1830s, a Cherokee named Bear:

“I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled by some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.

“But I was always word smitten. Always reading a book or writing in a journal. . . I have periods where everything I ever encountered – grass and trees, music, the taste of food, the way people move, the miracle of colors, even my own worn thoughts – seem luminous and razor cut in clarity, exactly like the whole world seemed to me at 17.”

O: A Rhapsody in Divorce is being performed at Outside In Theatre in Highland Park through June 15. https://outsideintheatre.org/o-a-rhapsody-in-divorce/