Friday, December 25, 2009

Model Train

I won an electric train in a store drawing when I was 7 years old.  What a train: a black, green and red American Flyer steam engine with working drive wheels, real puffs of smoke and three long yellow passenger cars.  Dad set it up each Christmas and I spent hours watching it clack around the living room carpet on journeys out of town, across the great plains, up into the Rockies.  Then each January my dad, a detail-minded rather fussy accountant, sorted the tracks, oiled the engine and wrapped each car in newspaper for storage.  When I lost the instructions, he carefully sketched the entire layout on a piece of his office stationery, labeled each track and trestle number and applied a wide piece of masking tape to the end of a sturdy box where he wrote, Electric Train.  Jeez, Dad, can I go outside now?

By my teens I was done with the train, the box stayed in the attic and with each passing year it slid deeper into the dark, behind the sleds, my high school yearbooks, my college motorcycle helmet.  My parents split up, and Mom got the house.  One holiday during graduate school I asked Mom, “Do you know where that box with the train is?” “Oh,” she said, “I’m pretty sure your dad sold that after you moved out.” He sold it?  What a jerk.  And that joined all the other sins we mortared up around his memory to keep us united in our resentment.  I had wanted to give the train to my own boy some Christmas.

Years passed.  I married and was blessed, to my surprise, with two girls.  Dad passed through town a few times during retirement road trips.  Hi, Dad, yeah I’m fine.  Say hello to your granddaughters.  He did try, but I kept him at a distance.  Then he died, January, 2001.  I thought about the train a lot, especially around Christmas.  “That was a great train,” I’d tell my daughters.  But they were off to sleepovers, then ballet, and volleyball.

Then last fall, I’m up in Minnesota helping my mom sell the house.  “Oh Jeff,” she said from the kitchen, “the movers asked if you wanted to keep that train box.” I flew out to the pile of old boxes at the curb.  One had a piece of wide masking tape that read, Electric Train.  Inside I found neat bundles of train tracks but no cars, no engine, no wires.  That jerk.  I jammed the box into my car between the yearbooks and mom’s wedding china.

On Christmas eve, I’m back home eying the train box sitting in my den.  Maybe I can sell the metal tracks on eBay, I thought.  I pulled the tracks out.  Only a yellowed newspaper from 1968 remained in the box, folded on the bottom.  When I picked it up to read the headlines I noticed a piece of sturdy cardboard had been cut to cover the bottom of the oddly-heavy, empty box.  No way, I thought.

I lifted the false bottom out and there they were, carefully wrapped in newspaper, three yellow passenger cars and the well-oiled green and red locomotive.  It’s all here!  But I had no idea how to assemble it.  Unless… Back in the box, waiting patiently for 40 years, lay a manila business envelope clasped by a fussy accountant.  Inside, the single sheet of letterhead paper, with the bold script of my father’s hand showing me once again how it all went together.

Just then I notice my teenage daughter has been watching me from the doorway.  Uh oh.  “Dad, what are you doing?” she says.  “Ah, this is my train,” I said.  “From when I was a boy.” She looked at me, then the train.  Then she said quietly, “Can I play too?”

And here we are.  A father, a daughter, and a grandfather.  Who once was lost, but now is found.

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on December 25, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, December 18, 2009

Farewell, Old Car

It sure was easy to donate our aging car to WVPE, using the Car Talk web site. We filled out a simple web form, signed the car title, and mailed it off. In a few days a tow truck came to relieve us of the relic that had been dripping oil all over the driveway. Not to mention the car’s occasional demonic impulse to electronically lock and unlock its doors fifty or sixty times a minute.  I was very happy to remove the license plate, cancel the insurance, and send it on its way.  What could be simpler, and any proceeds go to our favorite radio station. My apology to WVPE, however, for not donating a posher vehicle.  Maybe next time!

I felt a little bad for the old beater, though, seeing it hoisted up by the nose and driven away forever. What an indignity for the little green station wagon that had served us well for 172,000 miles. For old times sake, I snapped one last picture. Farewell, you tin box, you.  We’ll always have the memories.

It true – unless the repair bills have been driving you to the poorhouse, you might feel a little tug of nostalgia when you send a car off like that. There are so many stories, for one thing. There were the used car salesmen who inadvertently convinced us to buy a brand new car – one gem of a fellow said he wouldn’t reduce the sticker price because of a cracked windshield. Instead, I should just buy his car as is, then wait six months and report the damage to my insurance company. Then there was the charming new car salesman who told me nobody was making station wagons any more, even though the dealership next door to his had some nice ones right there on the lot. If you’d like to meet these two fine fellows yourself, they can be found at – oh, maybe I better not say where they work.

But the good stories take place after you slip away from the salesmen and start down the road in your shiny new cocoon. We love Weko Beach, and our station wagon was never quite free of Lake Michigan sand. It handled itself equally well on the steep mountain roads of Colorado and the mean streets of Chicago. The kids have memories of books on tape that were so good that we didn’t want to get out of the car, and places we visited from Ontario to Utah that were so cool we didn’t want to get back in. And in mid-December each year, we would drive five miles out of town to a little tree farm.  The proprietor would walk out of his house and hand us a saw and wave us back into the field.  I’d call one of the kids over to sit on my lap and she’d steer the car down the grassy lane beside the evergreen trees.  Once we had the perfect tree bungeed to the roof, the other kid would steer us back up the lane to the house. We’d pay and be on our way, mud on the flaps and pine tar on our hands and Christmas in our heads.

I’ve never figured out how we Americans ended up with so little public transportation and so many cars. You have to guess that some powerful lobbyists were at work in Washington somewhere along the way. But we love our cars and place them near the center of our lives. Maybe we don’t roll the windows down in summer anymore, but we still dig piling up those highway miles, AC chilling and iPod setting the mood as we inspect the broad landscapes that link one French fry-laden rest stop to another all the way across this great land of ours.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on December 18, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Commerce • Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, December 11, 2009

Pollyanna Grows Despondent

As a pre-adolescent, I loved Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna stories. There was what I viewed as the wonderful movie with the truly bee-you-ti-ful Haley Mills, but first there had been Eleanor’s terrific 1913 and 1915 books. So terrific, in fact that they spawned spin-offs by other authors, the most recent being published in 1997. In my mind, Pollyanna rocked! She had little adversities that she overcame with intelligence and pluck, all the while maintaining a positive outlook through playing what she called “The Glad Game.” No matter how rotten the conditions, Pollyanna could find something about which to be glad. But, in a way that I could easily identify with, she also had a streak of not exactly naughtiness, but what I preferred to characterize as free-thinking. Altogether, I found her quite admirable.

Not to be obscure, I’ll tell you right up front, generally, according to my amused co-workers, I grew up to become a Pollyanna figure. They maintain that I absorbed those positive, plucky characteristics. Until recently, no matter how dark the components, I usually could find a bright, or at least darkly humorous, outlook in any situation. Not so anymore though, I am too besieged! The season of comfort and joy aside, this Pollyanna is growing despondent; the “Glad Game” is getting more and more difficult to maintain.

Yeah, my Pollyanna side tells me, just like most of us here in the United States, I have a pretty good life compared to folks in much of the world, but – and it’s a mighty big but – my increasingly evident darker side is telling me that things aren’t all that glad-making.

Some of the issues that are weighing me down:

*My local government is trying to destroy my neighborhood by building a drag-strip roadway on the perimeter.
*My state government has cast me into perpetual morning darkness. (As Longfellow said in “Evangeline,” “Darkness of slumber and death, forever sinking and sinking.”)
*My Federal government for years has imposed psychologically and financially draining things that are impacting me today and will drag on into the future to haunt my grandchildren.

One at time, I can deal with things like this, but governments are placing layer-on-layer of un-gladness on me. They’re piling-on and wherever the referee is, a penalty doesn’t seem to be being imposed. This is why this Pollyanna, who doesn’t much cotton to being a whiner, is growing despondent.

At a recent lecture on “Successful Aging,” we aging attendees were told that usefulness and a flexible attitude were important to good late-life years. Stress-resistance through a sense of control and avoiding feelings of helplessness also were recommended. Sensible suggestions, I’m sure, but difficult to implement feeling useful and non-rigid when I’m suffering 1000 pinpricks! I don’t have enough hands to hold all of the hurts. Circumstances are forcing this Pollyanna to morph into a junior Andy Rooney, just crabbing, wagging my finger and feeling my eyebrows wave in the breeze of hot air emanating from my very un-glad rantings. Ain’t nothing here to make me glad!

So, how to get back that former glad-self feeling?

Dumbing down as an option? “Ain’t got no brains, ain’t got no headaches,” my friend Patsy says. Should I just become oblivious to the doings of government? Stop listening to NPR and reading the news?

Engage in social activism as an option? Maybe, but I’m not 20 anymore. I might not have enough years of life left to see my causes come to fruition. But, then again, I might. That old pluck and “free-thinking” might just snap into service and provide that recommended feeling of usefulness.

Not so long ago, my fortune cookie advised: “Hope is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” How appropriate to my circumstance! The sort of message that makes a little smile push its way through the pinched-mouth look that I’ve been wearing lately. Now there’s something to make a Pollyanna glad!

Broadcast by Jeanette Saddler Taylor on December 11, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Books & Films • Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • News & Editorial • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random pick from more than 400 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- More essays by April

Jeff Nixa -- Model Train / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- Farewell, Old Car / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Pollyanna Grows Despondent / More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather

David James -- The Family Dogs / More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth

Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan