cold mountain air

I must have been something like five or six. It was so long ago that I can’t really remember any specific details about my dad’s co-worker/friend Gary.
I’m guessing I must have met him when we lived in Corpus Christi a long long time ago and I remember only two things about him:
1. He had a coffin as a coffee table in his living room and I would always sit there and ask if I could open it and he said no because id wake the person up inside.
2. He had a gigantic train set in his garage.

Something inside of me has this longing to build something really great and extremely meticulous that would take a bunch of planning but would be absolutely magnificent when I finished.

I’ve attempted this once and day dreamed about it twice.

I guess it was 8th and 9th grade that I was really into building models. I had a whole routine I would go through. I’d get my mom to take me to Hollywood Video and I’d pick out a movie from the classic movies section (this is where I my James Cagney phase got its start but that’s a whole other story). Id come home and wait for everyone to finish eating and go to bed and then Id pull the coffee table close and spend hours building model airplanes while watching old movies.

I think I built something in the area of ten planes. I started with small ones because I was afraid of building and messing up a large one, and I eventually worked my way up to the larger ones. My whole vision for this was to hang all of my models from my ceiling in my room. I’d stage air battles and lay in bed, right before I drifted off to sleep and imagine explosions and little miniature pilots floating down on parachutes.

Of course I got bored and moved on but I continued to daydream about my future projects.

I think I wrote a blog about this one on Roll With the Punch but I had always dreamed of buying a bunch of those packets of glow in the dark stars one summer. I’d get online and study pictures of the real night sky, how God made it, not like the Houston night sky where only a few stars are visible on the clearest of nights. I wanted to stare at the sky somehow. I had this whole fantasy in my mind (and believe me I knew this part was never going to happen). I imagined that I would have to build a scaffold like Michelangelo to reach the top of my ceiling and I’d be stuck lying on my back sticking pieces of sticky tack on the back of stars. It would take me all summer and on the last day of summer, as the first signs of fall could be felt outside, I’d open my window and let a nice cool breeze come in. Id put my hands behind my head and lie on my bed, imagining that the stars I had put on my ceiling were real. I’d even feel a little tingle of excitement when I found a constellation. “There’s Orion!” I’d say in a whisper. “You know they call him ‘the hunter’. See his belt? There, just to the right, is ursa major, ‘the great bear’.”

These past few weeks, for some reason, I have been thinking about Mr. Gary’s train set. I remember he had tunnels, a forest, and a little train station with small people waiting for the train; the conductor frozen with his lantern out looking down the track. I imagine that if I were to build a train set my town would be named Wellsville, snuggled in the cold mountain air of Vermont where sweaters are always worn, even in summer. It would look like autumn all year round and Id have a huge mountain range with a tunnel that was dynamited through years ago. You’d be able to stick your head down to eye level with the tunnel and watch the light of the train get larger and larger as it chugs its way along. Id have a time table with arrival and departure times and I would have to wake up every morning to make sure to start the train so it would be known as being the most reliable and on time train ever.

The last run of the train would leave at 11 o’ clock sharp. It’s the night train and only a few people would be on it. They’d all have little pull out beds to sleep on. Not all would sleep though. A few of the guys would stay up all night playing billiards in one of the cars and their girlfriends would be sitting in the corner talking and drinking tea. Then there is this guy standing on the platform of the caboose in the very back of the train. His head tilted up as he tries to find Orion in the clear mountain sky.