Metro Pulse/Cover/The Best Metro Pulse Christmas Ever

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Tradition begone... until the inner Proust erupts

Om Christmas Tree
How do Buddhists celebrate Christmas? Meditatively.

The Ghost of Christmas Past
A stage show leads to the true spirit of the holiday

How a boy and his dad celebrated their railroad past...and present

by Barry Henderson

I was 8, It was winter, and it wasn't yet Thanksgiving. It was already a bad winter, with a dirty snow cover and a west wind that bit right through my Ike jacket. The cat, our "Fig," had disappeared, leaving my 3-year-old sister devastated. I had been yelled at in school for the first time, so loud I lifted my desk lid and hid behind it red-faced, the teacher so angry she shook harder by accident than the finger she was shaking at me on purpose.

It was Ruth McMillan who yelled at me. She could really lay one on. I'd been clowning for the back rows of her third-grade class, not quietly enough. I was showing off; she had to do it. She had mellowed a lot since she taught mom and dad in the fourth grade thirty years before, so I didn't get hit with a geography book the way Mick Dinsmore did when my dad ducked when she threw it from her desk when all he said when she recited page after page of homework was, "Well, Jeeeezusss Christ." He'd thought he was going to whisper it to Mick, but it came out loud and clear. She didn't say a thing then, just slung her World Geography sidearm with major-league accuracy. Luckily, Dad anticipated the peg. He wasn't embarrassed; he was quick. Mick went home and like as not got a whipping for the black eye without being asked to explain. Small-town justice was swift and sure then and, sometimes, unjust.

I slogged home through the grimy slush, which leaked inside my black rubber boots through the cracks at the bends behind the toes. I looked both ways and crossed the double tracks of the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the pride of our little town of Hebron. Besides being the lifeline of the people who lived there (Hebron was a flag stop, meaning if you waved a flag or a flashlight, by law and to the great chagrin of engineers and conductors, passenger trains had to stop to let you board), it formed the ruler's edge of steel rails that separated the town itself and its thousand souls from the informal suburb of 100 known as Snake Flat, where mom was born and I was antsily being raised.

We lived, literally, "across the tracks" in the most condescended-toward sense of the expression. We of that end of town were, for reasons I have yet to learn, wildly proud of the "other-side-of-the-tracks" distinction. Maybe it was because at least we had a distinction. Small-town life, for all its glorious intimacies and fidelities, is cursed, or blessed, or something, with an everyday sameness in which three shades of gray can seem a marvel.

Toes wrinkled with wet and bleached blue-white with freeze, ears and nose reddened til they felt like they were burning in the chill wind, I trudged toward the little house on Bates Street, where mom would shake her head and rub my feet and pack them into dry socks. But feet weren't on my mind and neither were mom or supper or school or friends or baseball, which was never out of season then.

All I could think of was that electric train. I'd asked for one last Christmas and, I think, the Christmas before and the one before that. It was all I remember wanting from the time I could think to ask. It would mirror the rambling freights and speeding passenger trains that shook our windows a dozen times a day and at least that often at night.

My first Christmas gift had been a telegraph key from my granddad, mom's father, a union railroader who threw switches for the Pennsy until he retired from that and coon-hunting and orchard-tending and racing old hulks of automobiles. He'd have got me my train, except his retirement was pretty meager and his health was on the slide, and besides, he had never been known to give a child a toy. That key and its Morse code pad was meant for me, the yearling male, to grow to use in a job of work, it was pretty well understood.

Now I was old enough to play along the tracks, where we scrabbled up coal and coal dust for the neighbors (we had fuel-oil heat), and cut wild asparagus and chunked an occasional rock at an open box-car door or left a penny to be flattened on a rail to a slick, quarter-sized oval by wheels taller than I. Mostly I just watched and listened.

The shrills and chushing and squeals and clacking and the mind-shaking vibration put me in an awe I never outgrew. Steam trains shortly departed. The whole town lined the curbs around the Main Street crossing to watch the last chuffing locomotive pass through, blowing the crossing with a mournful finality as it headed into Chicago where, legend has it, the engineer lashed the whistle's lanyard down, letting his boiler empty of steam in a scream that lasted many minutes inside Union Station. With the fading of sweet coal smoke went that feeling of awe, dissolved in a pall of acrid diesel fumes one night like the receding glow from a brakeman's lantern on a high-balling caboose.

The great, black steamers were still the way of locomotion as of '49, though, and I wanted my own model, one whose speed I could control and whose whistle I could yank and whose stack I could stuff with the brilliant little pills that gave off the white mock-smoke of a well-stoked firebox. I longed for those with a longing that is unforgettable. I was asking, I knew, in vain.

I was sure my dad, too, was in no position to pop for a train set. I wanted a Lionel, and, with track and transformer, the freight train I wanted would run $30, maybe $40, a kid's fortune to us in 1949, when my dad had just been able to afford his first post-war car, trading the '41 Olds and about $300 for a used '48 DeSoto. He was on the road for an insurance company, was paying for the car out of expenses, and had just bought a new house, a tiny one but one of the first two completed in town after WWII. Dad had dubbed it "the plastic house," because of the materials, such as the composition-tile floors, that were just coming on the market. We weren't broke, but we sure weren't heeled high either.

I knew there was no real S. Claus. Heck, I'd known it already a couple years, since Delbert Patrick had sent me home bawling from the first grade in only very temporary denial of the news. Then there was the cat, which I was supposed to take care of and watch out for...gone. Then there was being yelled at by Miss McMillan. She didn't tell my folks about it, but my dad's sister, Aunt Lois, did. She was the town's only first-grade teacher, as Ruth was the only third-grade teacher. They talked, you know, and my aunt ratted me out. It did not look good for the Lionel wish this year.

I didn't know what else to put on my list. There was nothing reasonable that I wanted. So I just kept on dreaming of the train. There were only a very few in town, mostly the property of those we thought of as too well off to worry about. If I could get my own, besides satisfying my desire, I would render Herbie McMahon, the other semi-spoiled kid in Snake Flat, prostrate with envy. That was not an unpleasant prospect to me. My sister, who was bright-eyed and beautiful and got loads of the attention from family that I used to have all to myself, was also just getting old enough to be jealous of a brother with his own train. That, too, would feel about right to me.

But the wind went on howling and spitting snow, and we stuffed ourselves with the T'giving and its week of leftovers, and then the days of December shortened, and the whole mood of an oppressed and repressed and depressed third-grader darkened with each day of the receding year, until the night of Dec. 24 fell.

I went to my bed, the modern, convertible "studio couch" in the room I shared with my dad's insurance papers and desk and filing cabinet. And I slept the sleep of the doomed-and-don't-care. For a few hours. Then I heard it. It was pitch dark, my door was uncharacteristically closed, and I could tell it was a long time yet until dawn, but I was hearing a clickety, rattledy sound I knew had to be a dream. I crawled quietly down to the floor to make certain I was really awake. Yep. Cold tile. Frayed scatter rug. All real. So was I hearing things? Yeah, buddy! I couldn't tell if it was a Lionel or a Marx or an American Flyer. But I knew what was cruising the living room. And I knew it wasn't there waiting for my sister or my mom.

I don't know what time that was, but it seemed an awful long night to lay awake through. No possibility of just grinning the grin of the soon-to-be-satiated and nodding off until morning. I just lay there wide-eyed and waiting, until light broke yellow against the east blind, and I knew I was authorized to rise. I hadn't heard anyone in hours, no voices, no little noises, nothing.

But when I charged out of my door and whirled around the hall into the living room, they were all there. Sister Pam, cuddling a new stuffed cat, mom sipping coffee, and dad on his knees by the 120-watt, killer transformer, finger on the whistle button and grinning with pride or happiness or both. I didn't ask. I stared wide-eyed and still a bit unbelieving, at engine No. 2143 and its six drive wheels and its cab with all the miniature pipes and levers and the fire-door and the perfectly replicated couplings and its P.R.R. tender and the Lehigh Valley gondola and the AT&SF box car with its sliding doors and the Pure Oil tank car and the Pennsy caboose. I don't believe I cried, but if I had I wouldn't have noticed.

Dad ran the train around its 5-foot oval, passed the little block signal and the crossing markers and the transformer itself, throttle half open. He fed it smoke pills, whistled the crossing, sped it up and slowed it to a crawl. It was mine, and I hadn't touched it. I could still barely move. I doubt I had yet blinked. Everyone in that Christmas morning room was so pleased with my pleasure, even my baby sister, that I was hurt by my own prior feelings, those that now seemed so greedy and selfish and inappropriate.

Once dad got done playing with the train set—which was quite a good while, but which was natural, because his own father and grandfather and his best friend, mom's brother, had been railroadmen, and he'd always wanted his own train himself—I sat down at the controls and reveled until, I guess, about dark. I sure don't remember a Christmas dinner or even any candy or treats or other gifts that day. I must have gone to dad's mom's for more Christmas, but the feel of that throttle lever is all I can recall from the Christmas of '49, my biggest ever, I guess. Oh, I got a pea-coat, too.

It was shortly after the new year, when my friends had all seen and toyed with my perfect train, that I started to think about the next Christmas, nearly 12 long months away. With no apologies to Jean Shepherd, the fabled short-story writer and author of A Christmas Story, who grew up around Hammond, less than 40 miles away from Hebron and about a dozen years before me, my mind and heart, and, I guess, my whole fiber, were beginning to focus on that next great gift of the time and place—the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. The one with the saddle ring and the leather thong and the lariat engraving on its stock.

Next Christmas seemed forever away then, and it almost was. It was Christmas '51 before I cranked the lever and heard the pffunt of my own Daisy, its tiny projectile arcing into the half-open door of a boxcar that groaned in its trucks as it chucked and shunked its way on past me and the boys of Hoosier winter along the busy, steam-driven main line of the old, revered Pennsy.