We never got the train to go for more than few inches, and this became my memory from that Christmas. A train that wouldn’t start. Hopes deconstructed before they truly got in motion. There’s a lesson in that, I’m sure. In the look my father stole at my grandmother for buying this foolish thing. In my grandmother looking away from us both. In seeing the afternoon not through a blur of motion on the track, but the blur of kid tears over nothing.
Midnight We celebrated New Year’s at our grandmother’s house, those years we were old enough to stay up until midnight, but young enough not to get invited to parties. Those years our parents spent the night out at the casino, we poured sodas and juices into our grandmother’s crystal punch bowl, we watched the ball drop on TV, we banged sauce pans and stock pots in a wail of metallic noise as if to scream our significance. It went on three, maybe four years. Then my sister was in high school and our New Year’s Party narrowed to two. My grandmother grew wary. I was growing too old. She wondered what fun I might have with an old woman on New Year’s? She suggested we leave the punch bowl, that was so heavy and so difficult to clean, up in storage and took two glass tumblers that she removed from the cupboards at Christmas time for the grownups to drink high balls and screwdrivers. She poured us each a shot of peach Schnapps. Appealing to my sweet tooth, broaching a new frontier. I took a sip. And though it was sweet, almost like syrup, it was not as sugary nor as light as the soda I was used to. I shook my head, tongue tingling, throat feeling wrong. I said no. My grandmother said it was a silly idea. Got ready to pour the Schnapps back in the bottle through a funnel. Then thought better of her arthritic hands and the funnel that’s narrow end was still a little wider than the bottle, and dumped what was left from our glasses down the sink. Dark, sticky, sweet droplets surrounded the drain. All that was left when the clock struck twelve.
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