19 hours Ago
A little more than 20 years ago, I found out I was having a boy. My side of the family just didn’t have boys. I called my mom.
“Well. ..
. It’ll be alright.” Very comforting.
My sister, however, was over the moon. She is the tomboy of the family. She had (OK, still has) a marble collection.
She had Matchbox cars. She preferred to play with the plastic Army men and dinosaurs over my dolls. She’d been preparing her entire life for this boy, and now as a grown-up aunt, on the day he was born she pledged her marble collection to him (to be received at an age in the future when he’d be less inclined to eat them).
We didn’t impose gender-specific toys — his sister helped by using him as a makeup model on more than one occasion. He loved them all (not so much the makeup), but what he was most attracted to was that thing that often hits boys in the heart and stays with them for life: Trains. Boy, did he love trains.
My mom at one point lived close to the tracks in Las Cruces, and this kid was like a big-eared German shepherd who could hear a moth land on the screen door: If there was a train within a mile radius, he would grab his grandmother’s hand, pull her down the road so that he could, with his little hand over his eyes to shield the sun, watch the train clack by in the distance. And like the eras of Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch Kids, the kids who grew up during peak Thomas the Tank Engine times might as well have joined a cult. We watched the show, bought the merch, and scoured hobby shops like our lives depended on getting the new Percy the Small Engine.
We showed up for Day Out With Thomas events, when the famous tank would roll into our local park, decked out to look like Shining Time Station. We hit our parental peak when we hosted his train-themed birthday party, and honestly, that kid has yet to achieve that level of unbridled glee, except for the time he sat in the cockpit of a simulated Star Wars X-wing Starfighter (I think?) and donned the yellow-visored head gear (the internet tells me that’s called a Rebel Pilot Helmet, and I’m about to top out on these references so no Letters to the Editor on this). But it was his love of trains that pushed us as a family to experience some things, like the time we took the Grand Canyon Railway, a trip that requires no seatbelts or carseats and allows children to stand freely to watch the world go by, much like they did in the Old West.
Santa Fe is lucky to have its own little tourist spur, the Sky Railway, where people who grew up loving trains still love trains and want others to experience the joys of riding on trains. See this issue’s “ A Moveable Peace ” (page 24), which not only offers a little sliver of train joy but also a slice of Santa Fe’s talented performers and speakers. One evening last summer, my sister and I took a Sky Railway excursion.
While a DJ spun Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day,” I sipped a glass of wine on the open-air car and took in a completely different view of our city. As though someone had turned on an orange light, the setting sun covered all of us in a summer glow. The wind lifted my hair and I looked over at my sister, who was positively smitten by the joys of the moment — and, of course, by her love of trains.
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