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
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