Recently, I drove up to my daughter’s house in Portland, Maine, to deliver several boxes of stuff. This was one of a series of acts of divestment I’ve performed this year. Last summer I sold my outboard motor – a really nice, really good 10 horse-power Honda four-stroke – but I realized I really didn’t use it that much anymore, and it was getting harder and harder to lug around.
I’ve also given away a number of tools that I had duplicates of, several pairs of shoes I’d rarely, if ever, worn, and even a few books – though that last was not easy.
There are many reasons to divest oneself of stuff. Realizing that you never will use it. Realizing that it’s broken and you’ll never fix it. Or simply that it’s taking up too much space. But the stuff I recently took to Portland was more complicated than these other divestment, for in those boxes was something that had a great deal of meaning for me. They contained a complete vintage "O" gauge Lionel train set that I was first given for Christmas in 1948. My father built a wooden platform for it, and each year “Santa” would bring me a special addition to the set: an automatic unloading milk car, a barrel loader, an uncoupling switch, a new and more powerful transformer, an illuminated plastic train station with an outside staircase that a little plastic stationmaster would descend as the train rushed by. There was also a plastic farm with plastic animals, a plastic horse ranch with plastic cowboys and plastic Indians, and an entire town proudly emblazoned with the identity of “PLASTICVILLE.” For a few weeks each year my childhood was scented with the heady aroma of ozone as the heavy metal engine picked up its power from the electrified track, and, when we switched off the room lights, my younger brother and I thrilled to the mysterious sight of the locomotive charging around and around the oval track in complete darkness, its Cyclopean headlight piercing the sudden night.
When I became an adolescent I put away these childish trains, but years later opened them up again for my own children, who stared in wonder at these relics from an earlier age as the faithful engine and its train of cars raced around the track that circled our annual Christmas trees.
In time, though, these children, too, outgrew the allure of model trains and back they went into their boxes. Occasionally I had taken them out again to perform for neighborhood kids, and over the past few years, when my daughter and her family visited for the holidays, I have resurrected the set again for my granddaughter Coco, now age six. This year, however, Coco and her parents are spending their first Christmas in their own home in Portland, and I realized it was time, not just to share childhood memories with a new generation, but to let them go. Coco has now reached the age I was when I was first given the train set. Her father Santee is an automobile technician and seems not only pleased, but excited at the prospect of setting it up. It feels as if I am placing my childhood train set, now nearly seventy years old, in good, younger hands. Not only did it seem right to let my train set go, but, in the end, it was surprisingly painless. I guess the art of divestment gets easier and easier with time.
