The holidays are a time of joy and grief and family and tradition
Credit: Newsday/Michael Dobie
The old train still captivates.
I see it multiple times a day these days, just sitting on the track, waiting. Its mission: circle the Christmas tree.
And as it sits quietly, there's a temptation to think it's just a train, but it's not. It — and its mission — are much more than that.
It was my father's train back in the '70s. He assembled it in the basement with my youngest brother long after I had left for college. And at some point, after years of good fun, it was boxed up and put away.
A little more than a decade ago, I claimed it and set it up around our Christmas tree, and when my first grandson was 4, we set it up together. We used to wear our engineer's caps but he's 12 now so the caps stay in the bin with the extra pieces of track. But the other elements of what's become ritual remain.
This year, he largely assembled the layout himself — snapping the track together, aligning the oval around the base of the tree, carefully unwrapping the ancient Lionel engine and the cars it pulls, linking them together, securing the tiny red-and-silver presents in the gray flatbeds and the green boxcar, adding the red caboose, attaching the power source, putting a couple drops of liquid smoke in the engine's smokestack, then pulling up the throttle to bring it to life.
We ran the train recently for the two newest family members, my 10-month-old granddaughter and 6-month-old grandson, and they were mesmerized — by the movement, the classic train noise, the smoke coming from the engine's stack, the way the train disappeared around the back of the tree and reemerged from the other side. And I saw in their fascination the same rapt attention my 12-year-old grandson had shown a decade earlier.
That's what the holiday season is about. Family and tradition. The things we do and with whom we do them. They might change, slowly, through the years, but the general continuity is assuring.
Holidays are the cocoons that shield us, that warm us and comfort us, that ward off at least for a time the unpleasantness that lurks outside. But holidays also are complex, the new arrivals balanced by our memories of those we've lost, joy and grief mingled in a stew of emotions that tugs at both ends of one's heartstrings.
This holiday season marks the first anniversary of the far-too-soon death of my wife's sister, a death that still reverberates deeply. That's the way it is with the good ones, the spirited ones, the kind ones. I'm not sure when the reverberations will end, if ever, but I'm hoping they will someday bring more comfort from having known her than pain from having lost her.
It's a familiar feeling, after the departures of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, but it never gets easier. You see them in the dishes you use and the foods you eat, you hear their voices around the table, you remember how they sang that song and how they reveled in the children. And then you see those children, unaware of their redemptive role in this canvas of life but delivering healing all the same.
The holidays are filled with these spirits, light and dark, living and dead, jostling for our attention. And we do our best to lay them down, side by side, and make our measure of peace.
It can be a confounding time of year, the way it ratchets us between past, present, and future. The way it makes us look backward and forward, inside and out, as we try to find what we seek.
In a way, we are all like the train. We venture out and run our route, then come back home. And all is well, and then we venture out again.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
