In training for holidays due to gift

All aboard!
It’s time for a Christmas train ride.
Actually, the time for the train ride was Christmas Day. And it was a trip well worth taking.
This particular ride on the rails had its birth last month — ironically — at a funeral.
I was attending a memorial service for the mother of a couple of old friends and found my Uncle Stu in the pew behind me.
Stu was the youngest of my father’s three brothers. There were also four sisters, making a grand total of eight kids to try to raise on a preacher’s meager salary.
Perhaps because he was the youngest, Stu was also one of my favorite uncles.
My earliest memory of him dates back nearly 60 years. I was maybe six or seven, and Uncle Stu was working that Christmas season at the Sears store in Fort Wayne, the one that’s since been renovated to be Southside High School.
Though Stu was apparently working in the drapery department, my vivid memory is of a visit to the toy department.
Gene Autry was singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and the toy department of Sears was the Land of Oz for a kid my age.
Best of all were the model trains. There was, at least in my rose-colored memory of the moment, a layout worthy of a children’s museum, with multiple trains running on multiple tracks through a landscape of dreams.
Last month, that early memory seemed particularly appropriate.
“I have something for you,” said Uncle Stu before the service began.
I knew that he and my aunt had been down-sizing and were considering a move to town, something more manageable and safer for a couple in their 80s.
I asked what it was, but Uncle Stu was vague about the details.
“Just promise me,” he said, “that if I show up at your door this Christmas with something under my arm, you’ll accept it. Give it a home.”
The service was ready to start, so I quickly agreed.
It was a few days later that I learned of Uncle Stu’s love affair with model trains. For all I know, it started back in the toy department of the Sears store in Fort Wayne.
But for whatever reason, he has — over the years — found himself attracted to toy trains at Christmastime.
What especially got his juices flowing were the sets specifically geared for Christmas morning, the kind you could set up to run around the Christmas tree if you wanted to.
It wasn’t a full-blown, crazy hobbyist outfit that could fill a room. Instead, it was what every kid wanted: A cool locomotive, a few cars, a caboose, a transformer, enough track to make more than one configuration, and a whole bunch of the little accessories like signs and trees and little people that parents tend to step on with their bare feet the day after Christmas.
What I learned from talking with family is that Uncle Stu always thought those train sets were overpriced. And he knew that because of the price, lots of kids who wanted them wouldn’t get them.
So he waited until the post-holiday sales, when the prices plummeted, and that’s when he struck.
And he struck more than once.
Best estimates from Uncle Stu’s family is that he had, at one time, as many as seven of these Christmas train sets, some with Christmas themes to the train, some with clever names aimed at reaching a mass market.
Now, I had been an HO train kid. Every boy in America has been an HO train kid at some point in his life, even if it’s just a yearning and never comes to fruition. In my case, plans for a big layout never came about. But in one box or another in our attic you’ll find an engine and a train station.
And one year — in an act of complete self-indulgence — I bought a little N gauge, self-contained layout, telling my wife it was for the kids when, of course, it was for me.
Just the same, the HO train days seemed to be behind me. I’m a grandfather these days. I carry a Medicare card in my wallet.
But I had given my word. So when Uncle Stu’s Cannonball Express arrived in my office, I couldn’t refuse it.
Stu explained that one piece was missing. The set featured a self-powered handcar, and someone had wanted that piece so much they had broken through the cellophane and stolen it. As a result, he said, he got the set for a song.
And it’s all there, all 130-plus pieces. It’s been run a few times, but it was in the box, ready for Christmas morning and a 65-year-old boy who was ready to say, “All aboard!”[[In-content Ad]]