Every Christmas when I was small Dad would get out his American Flyer train set. I was permitted to participate to an extent, but Dad made it clear to me that this was no mere toy. The train was special, and I was not allowed to touch it without his supervision. Watching Dad tinker with this ancient set, a relic of his own childhood, I felt like a witness to a sacred rite. I know now that I was being initiated into a kind of fraternal order, one that only other train lovers can understand. 

Throughout my 20s and 30s I had train dreams. I don’t remember the specifics, but they were always good dreams. In my sleep I would be riding a train and having to transfer several times to reach my destination. Or I would get off a train and be surprised to find myself in a completely different country — a hidden land between the places I knew. I still have a train dream from time to time, but it’s not the almost nightly occurrence it used to be. I don’t know why trains were planted so deeply in my unconscious, but let’s blame Dad. Living in Japan in my early 20s probably sealed the deal. 

When my parents and brother Sam visited me there in 1998, I had fun guiding them around the country by rail. This was before everything was digitized, and I prided myself on my ability to duck into a railway station, skim through the giant timetables, and quickly find the right routes and connections. Naturally Dad was fascinated by the high-speed bullet trains, or Shinkansen as they’re called in Japanese.

“So, to get to Kyoto, we would take the Shick’ssen, right?” he would ask, the word tumbling out of his mouth as quickly and quietly as the train itself. Dad had the annoying (or endearing?) habit of mumbling foreign words quickly, probably in an effort to sound like a linguistic insider.  

“Right, Dad. But it’s the Shinkansen,” I said in the know-it-all tone I’d perfected at 23. “Three syllables: shin-kan-sen.” 

“That’s what I said.” 

Throughout the trip, Dad continued to pepper his speech with various Japanese words, each time delivered in the same quiet mumble — a performance that never failed to send Sam and me into fits of giggles.

After looping back to Tokyo on the aforementioned Shinkansen, we rode the subway to a high-end department store and perused the toy department. It had, as it turned out, a sizable collection of train sets. Dad spotted a model Shinkansen train and flagged down a clerk. Using me as his translator, Dad asked the clerk if the train was made in China because, if it was, he wasn’t interested. The clerk, swelling with national pride, assured Dad that the set was most definitely produced in Japan. And then, with the flourish of a pen that Dad would recount for decades, the clerk proceeded to mark down the price.

Dad has been gone almost three months now. The pain of his absence is still with me each day, but some of these memories are starting to emerge from wherever it is we stash them. I’ve been spending time in Dad’s man cave of a garage, helping Mom figure out what to do with the accumulated artifacts of a life well lived. His entire train collection is here, as is a vintage poster I gave him of the “L” train from when I lived in Chicago. There are miniature trees, cars, houses, whole villages. Dad even kept the route diagram for the rail lines of northern Kyushu that I’d given him. A Japan Rail employee had offered me one on my way home from work when they were changing them out in the train cars. 

Here in the garage it’s hard to separate the memories from the objects they seem to adhere to, but I’m trying to make that separation. Trying to remind myself that ultimately it’s the memories that matter, not the stuff. 

When we rode the Shinkansen, the rice fields whizzed by us so quickly they melted into a blur of green. Whooshing through a tunnel, all would go black, the air pressure in the train car ticking up for a moment. For a man like my dad who had spent his whole professional career in quality control, the smooth ride, the precise timetable, the carefully wrapped bento boxes from the cart… it was all a dream come true. And looking at his face reflected in the window of the train, I caught a glimpse of my dad as a boy — a boy enjoying the ride of his life.