A man came to our house this morning to look at the trains that the boys have cast off. He stood on our porch and stood and stood, waiting for me to reduce the price...
For years my boys played with little else. Gordon, Thomas, James, Henry and all their locomotive consorts were on their tongues, the way children of missionaries must know the characters in the bible.
Shortly before Miles, our eldest, turned 2 my parents bought him a train set and my father and husband assembled the table, after which I lovingly set up the tracks and we waited for Miles to play. We waited with the hushed silence of parents anticipating some great developmental leap on the part of their child. But at two, Miles didn't yet know what to do with them.
The train table stood in his room, a beacon of things to come. As he got closer to 3 he spent more and more time at his trains, but still they derailed too easily and he needed constant supervision to play with them or he'd be reduced to tears and shrieks of frustration within seconds.
Enter Thomas the Tank Engine.
About the time he started nursery school we let him watch Thomas on TV, and the stories captivated Miles, as they do so many boys and girls. Once he had those stories and their characters in his little mind his play with the trains literally took off. Over the next two and a half years Miles played with them constantly and collected them train by train. He'd sit at the kitchen table pouring over the Thomas catalog with longing.
Seeing Miles's fascination, Alec loved them well before his second birthday. He would yank the tracks out from under trains like a little earthquake, the tracks that Miles or I had artfully set up. If frustration were a commodity that we could have sold, we'd be rich as Croesus. The boys would bicker over who got to play with James, or Diesel 10. To remedy this situation we or my parents would buy another James, but it was never enough. Even then, the boys would fight over the one thing that they didn't both possess--whatever that was.
Time passed. The train table lost a leg from all the rough and tumble. Miles started first grade. There were other more exciting toys. Though Alec was still in his prime Thomas playing years, Miles minced no words in telling Alec that Thomas was for babies. And of course Alec believed him. The trains sat and sat--sad extras from the movie Toy Story.
I got pregnant with Dahlia and serious nesting set in. We finished the basement to have extra playspace, but the trains just seemed to be in the way. So I dumped them unceremoniously in a mass grave of a Rubbermaid container and put them in a closet under the basement stairs. It was my hope that I could bring them out in a blizzard for a great day of play. And I did, but the boys were bored with them. They chose to make snow angels and play Wii instead. Then I knew that Thomas's day had come and gone in our house.
When I placed an ad on Craig's list, I was not expecting the overwhelming response I received. I got over 20 emails from people expressing interest--new members of the Thomas cult, wanting all the religious paraphernalia I possessed. Or just parents hoping to make their little darlings happy without paying full price.
...so the man stood and stood on our porch. But I didn't come down in price. I didn't have to. There were others lined up to buy them if he didn't. The man knew this. He pulled a wad of clean bills from his chinos and counted them off. "This will be a christmas present for my little boy," he said. A christmas present in July.
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