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TRAINS AT ALMOST CHRISTMAS



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I don’t know why, but like so many other young boys Sam loves trains. It seems a real gender difference: I don’t remember Sonja being a train junkie, and I’ve seen few girls at the train exhibits Sam and I have visited. Frankly I think it has something to do with power and strength.

If that’s true, power has grabbed this boy. Last year we visited the MTA train 'museum'at Grand Central Station, which has a nice little three tier layout. The museum is really a souvenir store, but Sam spent over an hour watching this train. This year, he spent almost two hours, and didn’t want to leave, even when his grappa was bored out of his skull and wished for a shot of my namesake drink…

Thomas The Tank Engine started it all, I think. He watched the videos, loved the books, could name all the engines, knew their personalities, and liked them all. Even the scary and angry 'Diesel Ten’. Currently that one seems to be his favorite, and he carries it with him frequently on our trips. We visited the giant Toys R Us in Times Square a few Fridays ago (the one with the ferris wheel inside) and pawed through the Thomas stuff. They had a lovely train layout in the store that Sam and other kids could play with. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera that day, so I couldn’t take a photo of something that fascinated me: there were a bunch of kids playing with the trains, and around the edges, sitting in chairs and chatting with each other, were a number of women who were clearly not the mothers of these children. They were the nannies. A real NYC moment- nannies spending the afternoon with other nannies while their little charges played in a consumer playground. I was quite surprised until I stopped to realize that this was exactly what I was doing…

Back in September, Mary discovered a treasure trove of Thomas goodies on Craig’s list (an internet swap sheet), for a remarkably low price. Oh yes. We traveled out to Queens to pick it up. The Dad had a hard time parting with it. His boy had “outgrown” Thomas, but Dad had not. But he reluctantly parted with it all, after lovingly describing each engine, and each type of track. And there were lots of engines, and lots of track. Got home, laid it out, and realized that it consumed our apartment. Oh, what the hell. We weren’t doing anything with those parts of the floor anyway. It decreased the cat’s choice of places to lie down, but she made do. Sam was quite pleased with it all. At the same time, I learned something about kids his age: it was too much for him. He couldn’t take it all in, and quickly focused on very small parts of the layout, and on the individual cars. I love watching that boy find his limits, his interests, and his comfort level with the world around him. Never ceases to amaze me. Needless to say, I made significant changes, made it much smaller, and made him happy.

Wait’ll he gets back from Croatia. He’ll discover the hundreds of feet of Thomas track, and we’ll be happily doomed to having our entire apartment be a train set. I can’t wait (and I don’t even particularly like trains).



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So knowing that we will come back to the train ‘museum’ when he returns, it made the visit last week particularly poignant. I do love seeing the pleasure in his little body when he watches those trains go by.

At night we went to see the windows at Macy's. The window displays attract folks from all over the world, and are pretty nice. We didn’t do the SC thing this year: if you remember my description of last year (it’s in the archives: click on the ‘archives’ link at the upper right hand corner of this screen), it was a freaky experience, and not something I wanted to repeat (actually that’s a bit of a lie- the animatronic animals you see while waiting in the long line, this year Sesame Street characters, are fun. So maybe we’ll do that part, and skip SC. But I digress. The windows along one side of Macy’s are the traditional Night Before Christmas layouts (Sam preferred his pretzel). In the front windows were scenes from The Polar Express. Not sure I like the idea of movie companies stocking the windows with their products, but I know that Macy’s needs the money. For Sam, it was just great. The trains were three dimensional and huge.

Finally, before Sam leaves, I am bound and determined to get him to the most famous train layout in NYC. It’s an annual fixture at the Botanical Gardens, and has a number of Manhattan buildings, all made of pine cones, sticks and leaves... I want him to remember this city in just that way...