All Aboard!

We had a snowfall in Pennsylvania and, as my husband and I drive some of the back roads, I wonder what makes this snowfall seem so unusual.

I’m mystified by the white world around me, and keep asking myself why it seems so right, so comfortable.

Then it comes to me: the perfect stillness and lack of movement make this landscape peaceful and accepting.

The trees, bushes, and shrubs are covered with a thick glaze of snow and ice,

and there is not the slightest breeze to move any bough or branch.

The silence is total;

It reminds me of an artificial winter scene.

And suddenly I am carried back to my childhood and our neighbor’s son, who had an elaborate electric train set up in their basement on a pool table.

I loved this train set and always anticipated the Christmas invitation we would get to visit them.

Mind you, it was not just a train running around a large track, although it was that too.

But it was a veritable community, with miniature houses, people, traffic lights, and even a loading dock with small barrels—contents unknown—that were electronically loaded into a box car when the power was turned on.

And the trees and bushes, covered with artificial snow, looked just like the world we are driving though, lovely though static.

And suddenly, I know why I liked this train set-up so much.

It represented for me security, although containing a certain insularity.

There were no miniature jails, hospices, or hospitals among the houses.

Equally missing were synagogues or mosques (Islam was not part of my world back then), although a steepled church did grace one of the towns on the train‘s route.

Missing from the small human figures scattered over the landscape were all minorities, although a group of people gathered in a village to sing, presumably, Christmas carols.

It was the ideal world of the 1950’s, and I was drawn to its promise of security, even though the price was a certain parochialism.

I now ask myself if our world might be God’s Lionel train set.

Not that I imagine God as a thirteen-year old playing with a toy.

But if the world is an outcropping of divinity, there must be some guiding force.

And although the presence of hospitals, wars, misogyny and racism in our world are constant reminders that we do not live in a utopia,

I believe the power of love is so strong that it can change a flawed Lionel train world into a paradise.

We just have to love each other recklessly, and not count the cost.