I used to think a garage was for parking your car inside. Silly me! Now I know it is to hold all the ever-increasing amount of stuff we accumulate in America. It’s the stuff that won’t fit in the 12’ x 20’ Storage locker space we rent each month to hold the stuff that we feel guilty about tossing because grandma loved it so much and it reminds us of her, or it cost so much, or we might use some day in the next century perhaps. Then there are people like me who have a model train set in their garage. Most people who have this disease manage to control it (with serious medication I believe) and so the train set only comes out at Christmas to run around the bottom of the Christmas tree. Unfortunately, I am not one of those types, and my train is a chronic disease unresponsive to either medication or psychotherapy. I’ve had it since I was age ten. It’s not contagious, and it’s a mystery how it is transmitted. Inoculations to immunize don’t seem to work, though high exposure to video games seems to blunt its ability to infect the modern generation... My train layout has been moved sixteen times. It started as a 4’ x 8’ plywood sheet layout, and at one later point shrank to just two shelves in my bookcase. Unfortunately, like crabgrass, it grows rapidly in the right weather and space conditions. Mine eventually topped out at filling a 30’ x 25’ basement from wall to wall. Then came another move (sigh!)
Every time the sixteen moves happened, the train layout had to be chopped up to bite size transportable chunks of various shapes and dimensions. Things got smashed and had to be rebuilt. Each time it found its new habitat, the train layout parts had to be rearranged to fit the space allowed. Sections had to be chopped up, tracks re-laid to meet up properly, and elevations had to be matched hopefully so that trains weren’t suddenly expected to almost levitate vertically. All that resulted in some ‘interesting’ radius and grade challenges. Trains that could be pulled by one engine often required four to make it to the top of a climb now. Often scenery sections never joined with a section they had been adjacent to in the past and they rarely lined up like they had before either. It was kind of like putting two different puzzles together or playing musical chairs, and often there were whole layout sections that got tossed in the dumpster because there was absolutely nowhere they could still fit as a result of their new home’s available space. Funny thing about all this is that it reminded me of life in a way. I often had challenges from situational changes, probably just like most other people did. Old wives left and I had to be a single father, new wives came along and I had to relearn what marriage was like, houses got changed, jobs got changed, even states got changed, and all the while I got older and more tired, but I still had to make it all work! I really got annoyed by constant change, and yet I found myself doing it even when I wasn’t forced to by someone else. I had to work to adjust to the new situations and function effectively and productively, and it just never seemed to end. Each time it seemed it was harder and took longer to put the things of life back together. “Life is like a bowl of cherries,” “Life is Hard,” “That’s Life,” “Life Sucks,” “You Only Get One Life,” “Life is Good,” “Life is Short,” I thought I’d heard them all… But “Life is like a model railroad?” I’ve never heard anyone make that comparison.
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Greg
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