Side Tracked

After months of begging and pleading and a half dozen letters to Santa asking for a Lionel train set, my brother got his wish.  By mid January, he had lost all interest in it and it lay piled up and abandoned in a corner of his closet, gathering dust.  One fine spring night, my daddy packed up all the pieces and took them to the basement, intending to sort them out and give the whole works away to Goodwill, where as my mother remarked a little bitterly, it might find its way to a grateful child - but somewhere along the way, he had a change of heart and ended up spending weeks and then months designing and building a model city for the train to run through.  The entire affair was mounted on a wooden platform supported by sawhorses and to my mother's dismay, when complete it took up better than half the basement - but even she had to admit it was impressive.  There were roads and bridges, trees and tunnels, streetlights and storefronts, all made of plastic and paper mache.  Railroad track wound up, down, and through it all and the train - locomotive, boxcars, flatcars and caboose - steamed cheerfully along its path.  I remember he used black thread for wires, painstakingly woven from one telephone pole to the next, and fluffs of cotton for snow, but mostly I remember the clear mountain lake on the outskirts of town - smooth as glass when the train wasn't running, ice blue and clear - made from Aqua Velva.  Even as a child I realized it was a masterful achievement and my usually modest daddy swelled with pride when he showed it off.


At some point, my mother wearied of the obstacle course she had to run to navigate her way to the washing machine and dryer and she decreed that the train had to go.  My daddy slowly and carefully un-built it all, packing each piece in tissue paper and boxing it up.  I never knew whether it made its way to Goodwill or storage, maybe with Nana's delicate and carefully maintained Christmas village, he never said.


I was long gone by the time the house was sold and I never knew what happened to the material things with the exception of what ended up transported to the lake.   We lose and leave behind the trappings as we move through life, we give up old habits and learn new ones. We have to in order to grow and and progress.    Life doesn't stand still for the good parts or the bad.


For a little while, all the bells and whistles of the Lionel train set consumed our evenings.  Its construction taught us the value of craft and workmanship, of dedication and finishing what you started, of persistence and keeping promises you make to yourself.  Then it taught us that everything has its time.  And finally it taught us that things are only things - they won't help you to heaven or keep you warm at night and you can't measure a life in terms of what you accumulate in possessions.


Sometimes in the stillness of the morning when I hear a distant train whistle, I think of my daddy, that Lionel train set and the city he built for it.  Until then, I'd never thought he'd been proud of anything except his children.