Unexpected Gifts

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.