On a cold, late October morning, I was heading for the first
time from my home in Forest Hills to Port Jefferson by the Long Island
Railroad. I was filled with great anxiety, for I was rushing to my
mother, who lay in an ICU unit of a small hospital there with an un-diagnosed
condition. Also, I was distressed, as I always am when traveling anywhere
for the first time, about the possibility of taking the wrong connecting
train and thus landing up lost, as I did every night in my dreams. But a
stranger on the platform in Forest Hills eased my fear.
"Don't worry!" she said reassuringly.
"At Jamaica Station there's a lady who can direct you to the right
train. She sits inside a little booth at the end of one of the
platforms. Just find the Lady at Jamaica Station and you'll be fine!
"
I did, and she looked as if she might be Mrs. Claus with her
round, kindly face, dancing eyes and cheeks rouged apparently only by robust
health and the cold.
"You want Track #10, dear, " she informed me with
great cheer. "But ... you've got a 25-minute
wait." I shivered visibly and she quickly added, pointing,
"There's a glass-enclosed seating area at the end of this platform."
"Thanks!" I
said with sincere gratitude. I hadn't gone more than a few paces in the
direction in which she'd pointed when her sonorous voice could be heard again,
this time crying out for all Jamaica to hear: "Track #8 for Ronkonkoma ...
ALL AB-OOOOOOOOARD!"
It was the sustained
utterance of the last two words that made me stop dead in my own tracks.
For at the sound of them I was hurtled back, back, back through the tunnel of
Time until I was my four-year old self. And it was not to one of the
fabled railways of yesteryear that this phrase took me. No, no, it was to
Christmas morning of 1953, in the small apartment where we lived above the
men's furnishings store that was the family business.
On the floor of the hallway, my parents had managed
during the magical preceding night to set up their holiday gift to my brother
Steve: Lionel electric trains that sat upon a large loop of track that
encircled The Station House -- the beginnings of what would evolve over the
ensuing years into the miniature town of Plasticville, eventually growing to
cover half the basement of new house. By then there would be a
hospital, post office, school, diner and other buildings, all under-lit by
strategically placed miniscule light bulbs so that down in the basement on
dark, wintry nights, the town would twinkle with imagined life.
Steve would be in control at the transformer causing the trains to zoom across
bridges and through tunnels at electrifying speeds (there would be many
derailments as my brother became a more zealous conductor). But I took
charge of the town's inner, emotional life, inventing dialogue and interior
monologues for the pair of young skaters who glided across the real ice of the
plastic pond (for I'd filled it with water and placed in our freezer well
before the hour we descended to what I was beginning to think of our "real
home"), for the elderly couple who sat in their long winter coats on a
bench and watched the young skaters, indeed for all the plastic folk of
Plasticville. But all this was still in the imaginable future.
At this moment there is only a loop of track with a train
encircling the town's centerpiece: The Station. I stare in wonderment of
what lies before me and then to the amused faces of my parents and Steve.
Steve's arrival was the first miracle of my young childhood, a startling and
unexpected gift -- for I thought he'd been ordered for me -- who would soon
become my best and boon companion. My first sight of the Lionel trains affects
me the way my first sight of Steve did. For like him, they are an
unimagined, unheralded miracle, full of heavenly promise. Looking at
Steve -- who it must now be said is only a year and a half old -- I think that
he simply does not possess the mental preparedness to recognize this thing's
qualities. But I do.
Atop The Station is a green button that begs to
be pressed. "Can I?" I ask, looking at my parents, my finger poised
on the button.
Of course!" says my mother, her buttercup-yellow hair still long and
curling round her beaming face. I look to my dad, standing beside her,
and he nods concurrence.
I press the green button and a male voice booms throughout the apartment:
"Philadelphia, Newark and New York ... ALL AB-OOOOOOARD!"
I am transfixed, enchanted in that intense, all-consuming way that only poets
and small children and the characters in fairy tales can be. For it seems
to my young ears that the voice uttering this phrase is filled with boundless
enthusiasm for the journeys to be taken my the invisible, hurrying
passengers in our hallway. Though he is not specifically saying so, he is
also wishing them godspeed and wonderful adventures on their travels, inviting
them to travel with a full heart, whatever their destination. I pressed
that button countless times over the succeeding years, and always this was the
message I received.
I stood on the platform of Jamaica Station and lived again these long-forgotten
moments. And then over the next 25 minutes, I heard the open-sesame
phrase again and again. The voice of the Lady of Jamaica Station, like
that of the mysterious, unseen man who dwelled inside the Plasticville Station
House, was unvaryingly buoyant, and always she uttered those two words "ALL
AB-OOOOOARD!" with a special note of inspiriting gusto.
My time at Jamaica Station, which I had feared would be wasted with only dread
for a companion, was intstead filled with that joyful sound, as it would be
during my stopovers here in the weeks to come.
We lost my mother near Thanksgiving. With her loss came an end to my
pilgrimages by rail to eastern Long Island, and also an end to the world as I
knew it for more than half a century. The weeks surrounding her passing
were one of the worst times in my life. But isn't it a marvel that even
the worst of times can bestow upon us unexpected gifts of their own? For
the gift of a brief respite from anxiety and fear, and for those glimpses of my
family as they were in the days of my earliest memory, I thank the Lady of
Jamaica Station, she with the dancing eyes and burnished cheeks who continually
sings out her joyful benediction: "All AB-OOOORD!" Thus may all
of our life journeys be blessed!
Maxine F.
