Make it Come to Life : Prologue to a memoir

A view from a train window can kick start a fascinating story. Look what it did for Walt Disney. On a journey from Manhattan to Hollywood in 1928, Walt looked out his window as large towns gave way to wheat and corn fields. And there, under an apple tree, Mickey Mouse showed up. Perhaps Mickey waved a white-gloved hand, or maybe he just smiled. Walt captured him on a sketch pad and the stories began. Walt’s gone now, but his cartoon mouse has traveled all over the world and lives forever.

Although I grew up on trains in Osaka, Japan, my creations weren’t the kinds you sketch, but printed words. I looked out the windows and instead of a mouse, four teens appeared on a boat. They needed an ocean to take them to a remote tropical island where they would get lost, build campfires at night, eat mangos the size of footballs, and have fascinating adventures with the natives. I put them in a rowboat (at age eleven I was not the smartest seafarer which meant neither were my characters) and let a storm fester with just enough wind for their vessel to wash against the shoreline of the island. I named the island Blue Hama (I suppose I didn’t have the knack for good names at age eleven either).

Later, when I had crushes on boys with names like Ethan and Harold, I looked out the window as trains took me to and from school, and saw handsome boys on bicycles near parks where they met pretty girls named Belinda, Camithia, and Sylviana. I bought spiral notebooks at the local stationer’s near my home in Awaji, knowing that each notebook would be the place where a best seller would be brought to life and I’d be rich and famous before I turned twenty.

Each train ride from Awaji to Karasuma—the station closest to my international school—took forty-seven minutes. That’s a lot of time to peer out of windows. In the afternoons, the train was less-crowded and when I got to sit down, I lured my characters, bringing them from outside where they began along the tracks, to inside the pages of my notebooks. I gave them words, obstacles to conquer, and lots of love in their hearts.

If Walt and I had ever crossed paths, or if we’d been seated on the same train, he might have used his pencil to draw me as a kid. Two blond ponytails sticking out from just below my ears, plaid skirt, red tights that bagged around my ankles by the time school got out, and a pair of black patent-leather shoes that were magnets for doggy poop. In my hand would be a yellow number 2 pencil sans an eraser on the end because erasers never last the lifetime of pencils. The pencil would be scratching out my messy words (I had what was known back then as sloppy penmanship) over the lined notebook’s pages, and my ears, although not as prominent as Mickey’s, would be stretched to listen for the conductor’s announcement of my train station.

I spent my childhood on trains. And when I wasn’t on one, I was running to catch one or if I missed it, waiting for the next one on the platform.

Every parent has some story they repeat and repeat, passing it onto their offspring. That’s how those tales of suffering get handed down like certain unwanted family heirlooms: “I had to walk to school in the snow.” “I had to walk up hill in the snow both ways.” “I had to walk in the snow both ways with no shoes.” Mine is: “I had to ride the train to school every day for forty-seven minutes. And that was just one way!” And like any other parent, I’m always subject to the indifferent attitudes my children display when my story is told.

When the Amtrak thundered over the track that day in 1996, I no longer rode the train to school. I was a grown woman of 35 with three of my own children. My middle child, Daniel, aged three, was by my side as we watched the silver cars streaked with red, white, and blue. One after another, after another, racing along, going somewhere. We stood, silent, as one does during the singing of the national anthem or during a prayer. The track was just beyond the slide and swings and the shade of the massive oak tree where we’d had a picnic lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because those are the easiest for moms to make.

The sound of a train has always tugged at the wild hope chord of my heart. A train symbolizes a way toward a happy destination, but more—the actual journey, looking out the window, passing places you’ve never set foot in, capturing vistas that are quaint, majestic, or even spiritual.

Daniel seemed to understand my need for reverence, he paused from playing with Caleb and tickling his baby brother Ben to be captivated with me.

But once the train was out of sight, he left me for the slide. He climbed up the ladder and at the fourth rung, stopped. “Where is the train going?” he asked.

“To the next station.”

But my reply didn’t seem enough for my son. “Where is the next station?”

I know that Moms are supposed to have all the answers, it comes in a kit they hand you at the hospital after delivery, soon after the umbilical cord is cut. Since the park was just miles from the state capital, I offered a guess and said, “Raleigh.”

“The train’s going to Raleigh?”

Why not? “Yeah.”

“Where’s Raleigh?” Daniel asked.

“Oh, about two miles from here.”

Satisfied with my answer, Daniel continued his climb to the top of the slide. From there he lifted a hand from the railing to wave at me. Just as my motherly instincts kicked in, and with them, the familiar phrase that all moms are taught to say, “Be careful!” Daniel said, “Bye, Mommy! I’m going to Raleigh.” And down he slid, his blond hair flying with the speed of an oncoming train. At the base of the slide sat his friend Caleb, whom Daniel managed to only nick with his shoe. “Sorry, Paleb,” Daniel apologized.

Caleb, unalarmed, continued drawing in the sand with two sticks, one in each hand, swirling them around as though stirring a pot of stew.

It was April, a warm and sunny Southern day. Baby Benny played in his stroller, his chubby hands wrapped around a stuffed blue dog, one that Daniel let him borrow. We often came to the IBM Park on clear days because kids and the outdoors are a freeing combination and moms should get away from houses that need cleaning. Everyone is entitled to some kind of liberation. On days when I babysat Caleb so that his mother, Susan, could work on her music duties at our church, he came with us. Susan packed him lunches in brown paper bags—chocolate pudding cups with peel-away lids, fat ham sandwiches, fruit gummies, and homemade cookies.

“You want that? How about this? Paleb, are you gonna eat this?” Daniel would sort through Caleb’s bag, pulling each item out, shaking it in front of his friend’s face, and asking. That which his friend did not want, Daniel, happily indulged.

They tell you in the Mom’s Kit that your children will always prefer the lunch of another child. Something to do with the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, which boils down to other moms are cooler because they know what kids really like. Sometimes, when I encouraged him, Caleb ate his ham sandwiches. Daniel eyed those sandwiches and every bite Caleb took as he solemnly chewed his own peanut butter and jelly. I eyed those sandwiches, too. Mother and son wishing we had a mom like Susan to make us lunch.

About three weeks later, when a train whistle sounded and a freight train clamored past us in the park—oil cars, refrigerated cars, a car with graffiti—Daniel waited until the caboose was only a dot on the landscape. Then, turning to me where I sat on the grass with Benny who was getting sand in between his bare toes, Daniel said, “The train’s going to Raleigh.”

I smiled. “Oh, is it?”

“Yes. Raleigh is the next station.”

Years later—eighteen to be exact—I was seated in my grandma Stubbs’ mauve recliner, one I had inherited after her death. I looked through old photographs, color prints that mark time. It was a parade of matte and glossy visits—Easters with baskets bigger than my children, the Christmas we got the puppy, birthday cakes decorated with thick butter cream icing, our first night in the new house on Monticello—all made their appearances, chronicling the passage of the years. Rachel, Ben and Liz had all walked in and out and back in the new house many times again and again, even the puppy that grew into a senile beagle, made her way through and out the doggie door. But there would be one person who would never walk through the laundry room door inside or out. No one would ever see his smile or hear his laughter. He was gone, and yet he was everywhere. He was in every story we remembered and told.

The afternoon in my living room of remembering gave into the evening. Through the winter stillness, a train whistle sang—low, mellow, permeating the air. I didn’t stand, but my whole being was attentive until the song turned into only a murmur, as I envisioned its journey down the familiar tracks, tracks I could not see, but knew too well.

“Where is it going?”

Oh, Daniel, you know.

“The train’s going to Raleigh.”

And back again. And even beyond. There is so much to be discovered.

The story was already there, I just had to find the best way to make it come to life.