PITTSBURGH -- For as long as I can remember, my father had a model train set on a platform in our home. From the middle of our living room floor in our old house on Colby Street to the game room of the house he designed and built on Chapin Street in 1972, a modest model train set was always part of our lives.
For my father -- as with most enthusiasts, I suspect -- his love of model trains is bound up with the skills it demands of him. He thrives on the challenge of construction and operation, along with the electronic and engineering skills needed whenever something goes amiss. I suspect tinkering with the trains as a kid lit a spark that eventually led him to a career as an engineer.
What's more, nothing is more satisfying to a father, grandfather or great-grandfather than having your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren tug at your sleeve and plead for more time watching you take your old trains for another trip around the track.
That connectivity can be taken for granted, however. Which is what happened with my father -- and the rest of us -- until that model train touchstone was suddenly lost.
All it took was one gust of wind.
Last February, my father -- Ron Zito -- decided to put up a 20-foot flagpole on a wintry morning. But when the wind kicked up, my father and the flagpole went for a short but wild ride -- think Mary Poppins and her umbrella -- which ended with him on his back on the cement driveway with the flagpole still in his hands. His back was broken, and he had a nasty knot on his head.
In true Ron Zito fashion, as he was being loaded into the ambulance, he shouted to my kid sister, who was standing in tears in the driveway with my mother, "Pick the flag up off the ground, Heather! I was a Boy Scout, and you never, ever, leave the American flag on the ground."
The spinal surgery was a success, but Dad's model train platform was doomed because of his immobility and an upcoming remodel of the game room where it had been enshrined for 51 years. In those emotional post-op days, he didn't think he'd be able to care for it -- and the contractors needed to move it out of the way.
"Somewhere in that moment, I decided maybe it was time I stopped having a train set," he explained.
It came as a shock last May, as he told me at Sunday dinner that he was getting rid of the platform and the trains, when he offered them to me. I accepted, but he gave me that raised-eyebrow look of doubt that I would ever actually reassemble the thing.
I shared the same doubt, but it was all delivered to my home in September -- and sat in a corner in my garage ever since.
I had plans, but I kept getting tripped up at the thought that this platform and trains -- some of which date back to the '30s and '40s -- deserved much more than a barren two-car garage, and my home didn't have the room to do it justice.
For weeks, I would walk over, look at it, then walk through my house and try to imagine where it could all go. Then, just before Halloween, my father admitted sheepishly that he missed his trains terribly. It had hit him hard when the great-grandchildren asked him to take them to the game room to watch the trains and he had to tell them they were gone.
I'm not quite sure who was more crushed, them or him, but the sadness of both old and young put a knot in my gut. What do they say about not fully appreciating things until they're gone?
On the way home that day, I had a ridiculous idea: What if I built a temporary tiny room in my garage -- just a bit larger than the platform -- and what if I set up the trains just as he had in his home and "gave" them to him as a Christmas present?
Sometimes gifts are not something new and shiny; sometimes the greatest gift can be giving back what someone had given to you.
Endings and Beginnings
Like many things my father grew up cherishing, the house where he grew up on Weirer Street is long gone. In fact, the entire street is gone -- a victim of "progress" when the East Street Valley community was torn up to build a highway so suburban commuters could more easily and quickly get to downtown Pittsburgh.
The steep slope that once guided people off East Street was mostly populated by Italian immigrants with last names like LaGamba, Zito, Ligouri and Piscatelli who moved from the Hill District to live in the "country" on the farthest hills of the North Side.
It was on Weirer Street that my father built his first train set -- also set up in the middle of the living room -- and 77 years later, some of those very same trains are sitting on his platform, a miniature neighborhood of locomotives, bucolic scenery and intricate details like lit-up homes and a twirling merry-go-round, which now graces my home in Westmoreland County.
Everything is the same except the ambitious mural I painted in the background on the temporary walls.
When my father decided to give up his train and platform, he wasn't sure if he'd regain the agility he had always possessed. Once he did regain it, he realized that giving his trains away had taken away a part of his purpose. There isn't a kid who has passed through this family in the past 64 years who hasn't pleaded with Papa to let them watch him with the trains.
It was his superpower. It bridged his childhood with ours, then with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There's not a lot an 86-year-old can have in common with a 3-year-old, but turn that switch on that old train, and a bond forms immediately.
The Greatest Gift
In those trains, my dad had given his family the greatest gift, which was time shared with him and the ability to appreciate not just the magic of the miniature world but the skill and passion that went into it.
Things change. Houses and streets are demolished. Objects and passions are passed along and passed down.
Based on the expressions and enthusiasm of both my son-in-law and my four grandchildren -- all of whom got a sneak peek before the Christmas Eve reveal -- I'm pretty sure the Zito platform will live on with them.
And that is probably the greatest gift I could give my father.