::alio!::

Happy Birthday to ME!

One can't help but be a little reflexive when birthdays come around. I feel like, physically, I've aged more in this past year than before. Or maybe 27 is just that magic number where you realize you're not young and elastic anymore.

Do you remember filmstrips? They were like a combination between films and slides and you watched them in class, accompanied by a cassette tape. One of the privileged few who had behaved that day was elected to run the film strip for the class' benefit. You would put the stiff and already cracking plastic coil onto the rod, feed it through to the other, and then spin it through one frame at a time, whenever the tape told you to (usually with an oddly dischordant bell sound).

Because my memory is eidetic, I've got it all in little snapshots, and I feel like that's what's playing on the filmstrip, except that the student in charge of turning the knob is doing so before the cassette tells him so.

One of those memories came to me this morning as I was watching a replay.

It was summer, and we were staying with my grandparents at their cottage near Arnprior. I was very small, so it had to have been the summer of 1985, when we were moving back from England. I would have been three and a half.

This of course was back in the days when trains were still a viable means of shipping goods from one end of the country to another, and so they were always very long when we saw them.

We were on an excursion of some kind - maybe coming back from one, and we got stopped at a crossing. As the train came towards us, moving slowly because it was near a road, my brothers and I got out of the car and started waving at it, because that's what you do with trains. This was an especially good train, because the conductor waved back.

To our surprise, the train did not continue on its way. In fact, it stopped, right across the road. We were the only people waiting, and we were not in a hurry, but we were worried that perhaps the train had broken down.

But no!

The conductor got off the train and went to speak to my parents and grandparents, and the next thing I know I'm in the conductor's arms and my brothers and I are standing in the locomotive's engine room - AND THE TRAIN IS MOVING! I got to pull the chain to make the whistle go, and my brothers quizzed the stoker on how exactly a train worked. He took us as far as the next station, where the grownups were waiting for us, smiling from ear to ear.

It was such a treat, and such a surprise. My mother wanted to write to Via Rail to commend the conductor for being such a nice man, but she knew that he probably would have lost his job if they had found out that he had brought children into the locomotive. And this of course was in the time before strangers were scary, so there were no worries (also, a train can only go on a track, so it's not like we could have been abducted).

That day was definitely a gem, though. When I think back on it, I see fields baked yellow in the sun, and that gold kind of tinges everything about the whole day.

I don't remember everything about the ride, just snapshots: waving at the train, the conductor waving back, the train stopping, and being perched in the crook of the conductor's elbow as I reached up to pull the blue wooden handle of the whistle. But it's enough, and it's one I want to keep as I get older.

In addition to taking stock of my physical being every year, I also like to go through my snapshot memories, running through them one by one in the hopes that they won't be forgotten.

Posted by Ally at March 8, 2009 12:31 PM