Trains and Memories

Those who know me a bit know that I am a trains guy. I love to see a narrow-gauge, 2-8-2 Mikado with 36,000 pounds of tractive effort working a 4% grade and I start twitching visibly when I see double-headed action with a photo freight or a rotary. If you need me to translate that last sentence, it shows that there is an entirely separate sub-culture I have been a part of as a child and now as an adult. I was ingesting--"reading" doesn't adequately describe it--the most recent issue of Trains Magazine when a letter to the editor caught my attention. It was from two sisters in Montana who had written Trains to thank them and the many people who had consoled them after losing their dad, a well-loved trains guy. They wrote, "Our dad will never be forgotten. We will remember him every time we see a train or a trolley, hear a pipe organ, or see the moon."

Isn't that a wonderful line? It occurred to me that that's how I would likely be remembered someday among my children. That's not a terrible way to be remembered, either.