December 2018

The Christmas Train. I’ve used the expression for years to describe the onslaught of holiday activity—the decorating, shopping, teacher gifts, holiday concerts, and church activities bearing down on the season like an 80-ton locomotive. You’re either on it or you’re not. The best place to be is, of course, in front of it so as not to get mowed down.
Somedays I move so quickly I forget my teeth. When they are not in my head they live in a little dish on the kitchen window sill. Other women, rings and such. For me, body parts. Bill doesn’t like seeing them there when he washes the dishes. Perhaps he is weirded out by a piece of me there. Outside my body. Need I remind him that I have three other “pieces” of me on the outside—walking the planet?

And anyway, I’m not the only one. For some weeks a good third of William’s (adult) tooth occupied the kitchen counter in a sandwich baggie. Snapped off when he fell in the hallway at school. Treacherous conditions, walking from lunch to class. I was sorry to see something deemed “adult” in the boy go and stumped as to WHAT exactly the “Fairy” brings on such occasions.…The $118 dentist bill, perhaps?

This year I meet the real train, in Ashland VA, bearing our daughter home from school and a I put her back on it. Will presses pennies thin as your thumbnail. Then he goes for more. The last time we met the Northwest Regional at this picture-postcard of a station, there was surprisingly loud “clackety clack” as it rumbled over the change he had laid on the track and hissed to a stop on my 36 cents. Then it dispensed precious cargo to me: college girl come home.

College girl is happier than she is ever been in her life. Or so she tells me. She got in one year ago today, in fact. Come to find out she is not holed up in her room watching Netflix and wishing life would just go away, but taking classes, LOVING classes and the teachers, navigating the city bus system to get places, baking in the dorm kitchen, making a whole floor of friends, and paying attention. She does not walk or talk like one thinned and effaced by her social media culture, but keeps life real, bawling like a baby to leave her camp friends–and coming home for them, not us. The other thing which gave her great joy (and made me bawl like a baby) was shaving her head. That made (some?) sense in the searing heat of summer when she worked the kitchen at Camp, long days in 90-degree heat but now, on her pincushion peach fuzz of a scalp, the snow sticks and she looks…well, COLD. I put her on the train early on a gray Sunday morning to go back for her exams and pray hard that it will outrun the storm just beginning to spill from the sky. Flake by flake… prayer by prayer… O lord, let this train safely reach its destination….

The Christmas train will make other stops before it arrives. Right across the tracks in Ashland lies Randolph Macon College, where Sophie will swim on Tuesday night, probably in a relay and probably freestyle, her strongest stroke. After four years I have gotten used to this weekly event, remembered not to wear a turtleneck onto the 90-degree pool deck, gotten excited to time heats, get wet and go deaf with all the enclosed screaming. This Saturday, the “Hanover Hawk Invitational,” where the first year I thought our coach must be out of his mind. Who “invites” twenty teams to swim against each other in an all-day massively volunteer-led swim meet involving baked goods and hours timing on deck in flip flops the Saturday before Christmas??! You can literally see ol’ Amtrak scream by outside, reminding you of all that is unwrapped, undecorated, undone… an Invitation??! To what, INSANITY?? No thanks. Regrets here. Otherwise detained.

She has other strokes, my Sophie girl. Right now, she is like to sink under the weight of schoolwork and expectations of her junior year, and I do find her in her room watching Office reruns on her phone and wishing it would all go away. Our “college” trips have involved more hiking in the Shenandoah than setting foot on the schools there we went to see. I do believe we are going to circle this one a few times before we lay down on it. Eager to be on the go, she was our trusty travelling photographer on our grand trip to France this summer. Loosely paraded as a graduation and 18th birthday gift for Daughter #1, who am I kidding? It was a thinly-disguised glory tour for mommy, rekindling memories of living and riding the rails there three decades ago, and an unprecedented boost to Daughter #2’s Instagram story. Sophie’s best stroke? Freedom! She LOVES to drive the little green car, zipping all over Richmond as if this chapter is behind us and she is somehow, magically transported to a time of educated, emancipated young adulthood involving post-worthy outings with friends, mani-pedis and gallons of Starbucks. And every time that little green car pulls out the drive I pray, O Lord let this train reach its destination.

Where else will it stop, my seasonal express? The middle school, for a band concert which has indeed taken our home by storm. Boy, 12. Speed largely outpacing maturity at this stage; his designs on life overpower his commitment and all of it slightly ahead of good judgement. Chief questions at this stage: how fast can it go and does it burn? And yet, his strongest note to this very day? Sweetness, helpfulness, and sensitivity to the underlying strains of life you can still hear if you pause to listen. He hears it, I can tell. And he will answer it back with his recent passion and pursuit: a tenor saxophone, his true first love. Didn’t quite sleep with it the way he has a new skateboard, roller blades and even new shoes when he was (much) younger. But I find him polishing it, studying its parts as he takes it out of the case or puts it away, and he is always happy to tutor you, to point out its intricacies and unexpected manipulations: you would not think, by pressing here that such a sound would come from there. William, I could say the same about parenting. Or life, for that matter, my boy. You would not think…..

The instrument: He has never forgotten it, lost it, or damaged it looking for the mysteries of the universe; he practices without being asked and with such intent that I for a single moment wish to wave a wand and turn the instrument into school work. Ah, how much further down the track we would be then. Then I come to my senses and realize that this is life’s work, eminently so much more important than school work, and we ARE already further down the track. So we jam to bands I’ve never heard of (Lucky Chops??), to sounds that are alien after seven years of stringed orchestra—and very quickly becoming my best friends, pink hair and all. We have drawn the line on hair dye for 7th grade, but did I mention that Will’s hair is longer than his sister’s? And his brand-new tooth just beams when he smiles. Over him at night I pray the prayer of every parent: O Lord, please carry this little train safely home.

Bus driver Bill, with all of his teeth and almost none of his hair, has been given one of the most sordid jobs in the county. Not only is it 45 minutes away at 5:30 in the morning, but his most recent “temp” post is one whose driver quit mid-run. Right there on the side of the road, simply refused to drive those kids another foot. On his first day, when Bill tried to extricate the child he had determined to be the chief offender—a spitting first-grader—she threw her body on the floor and clamped herself to the seat posts until Bill could radio transportation to authorize the parent to board the bus and remove her so the bus of other lucky young ‘uns could proceed to the school. At which point the child shot out from under the seat headed for the emergency exit at the rear of the bus. Apparently, Bill had to assist in carrying a squalling, kicking six-year-old upside down off the bus while visions of lawsuits danced in his head. On day two he attempts the same with the brother. Another week he’ll have them dusting off their halos to be seated, clutch their backpacks and singing carols—making his post obsolete.

Many days I feel like doing just that, making a mad dash for the emergency exit (sans kicking and screaming). I want to wave that big ol’ train on by. Some years, I confess I have balked getting on it at all. Miss it entirely. I have wanted to let the whole thing go thundering past and, with the last blast step quietly off the platform and make my quiet, creeping, undone way home. Today, I am good with the train. I will get on it for a few more rides, before my post is obsolete. And smiling with 21 of my original 32, I will wave and wish you the happiest of Christmases.

Please, O Lord, let this train safely reach its final destination.

JOYEUX NOEL!!