Kato

No, not the “faithful valet” of the Green Hornet, a radio series in the mid-thirties, before my time. The humorous  reminiscence of this is that after December 7, 1941, Kato, who was previously of Japanese lineage now became the Hornet’s “faithful valet,” and later on morphed into being Korean. Kato is a Japanese model train set, in this case n scale, a size smaller than HO. Lionel and the German Marklin are standard bearers of model trains. I have had a romance with trains since I was a young child. I “owned,” or thought I owned my Lionel train set in the early fifties. My two uncles, Bernie and Seymour, would buy me a milk car, caboose, a different car each Christmas. Eventually I had a lovely set to play with. If I had “owned” it I am sure I would have kept it up to this day and it would be a collectable, for the Lionel cast iron engine had a gravitas to it, the passenger trains delightful and substantial to the eye. The trains had “heft.”

Unfortunately my father asked, most likely with my mother’s knowledge, to give up the train set so that he could sell it and have additional monies to pay for my bar mitzvah. I acquiesced, although I had no idea what was being asked of me, stone that I was at the time. I imagine today that the set went for fifty or sixty dollars and I imagine if my father had asked my two uncles for help it all could have been avoided. The trains are no longer unfinished business of my childhood. They are a memory and so after six decades I have decided to buy a small set for my old age. Trains have emotional freight (pun intended) for me.

If I had that old Lionel set, I would leave it to my son as a memento; he might get some pleasure as to having this Kato set from my dotage given to him after I am gone. Yet I have given him over the years two 35mm cameras that I used while photographing the family as he grew up. In my eyes, they are more of a dramatic importance, considering all those familial images through the metaphoric eye of the camera. At 73 I often think of what I will leave behind of material importance for loved ones, although what I leave in terms of memories is of so much more worth. I can control somewhat the tangible, but not the ephemeral memories in another’s mind.

For weeks I perused model railroad magazines, which was fun, condensed it all down to a different train set, Atlas, and at the last moment went for a Kato train set that was brand new, a starter set, a simple oval, with a Santa Fe engine, passenger cars and an observation deck car. While I was honing in on this set, searching through ebay for kits to populate my new choice — a silo, a barn, cars, all in n scale, I came across a standing modular bench of plywood and pine for the train set. It was 2 by 4, for n-scale is diminutive and I wanted a set in a corner of one room. The kit had to be assembled and all I had to do was buy foam board (4 by 8) and have it cut into four top pieces of 2 by 4. I have yet to glue one board to the table top with what they call “foam friendly”glue and then I lay the tracks, mount the trains and off I go.

When the table arrived I saw it was beyond my capacity. My mind was confused by the instructions, my skills were lessened by what I perceived was way over my head. I experienced fear.However, my wife is a diy person of a high order. And she put together the table to my pleasure, and I was taken by her capacities. I enjoyed watching her use a power drill with quickness and skill. All beyond me. While doing this she disarmed me by asking if she could play with these trains as well. Of course. Join me, my kindred spirit. Let us do this together. Kato had won her over. Recently on a plane trip to Chicago, up high, the sunlight came through her window and faceted upon her bracelets which were laced with Swarovksi faux rhinestones. The plastic ceiling above and the area about her seat lit up into starry constellations and Jane reveled in all this.  She is delighted about little pleasures in life and there is the wondrous child in this, and so I sensed all this in her wanting to play with these moving cameos we call trains.

Psychologically there is a degree of dominance, power and control when you sit down with a train set. And as one imagines all kinds of events and happenings as these diminutive trains do their elliptical orbit, I feel the train set provides the child in all of us the rare, the very rare sense of dominion, of control of something in our lives and perhaps that is why we adore them so. And they never question our control, they either fall off the track, stop suddenly or fail to brake. We are their deities, who set things straight.

What excited Jane was the realization after she went to You Tube and  rail fan sites, that trains sets could have themes. When I was growing up the train set was put on the floor, lovingly  appareled with what devices one had and with a built-in whistle and a white tablet the size of an aspirin put into the engine’s top funnel, smoke was given off. I can still smell that deliciously acrid odor, like the oil on wheels moving on tracks. Nowadays much time is devoted to the scenes that incorporate the trains — Southwest, maritime locations, urban, northern tier of the States and so on. I have chosen to create a Southwest theme, a barn, a mesa, a bridge, here and there a mountain range, all of this to be done slowly, leisurely, for one never completes a train set, one only goes along for the ride, imagination the engineer.  The repetitiveness of a simple Kato train doing its elliptical orbit will suffice for me, for it is soothing in a peculiar way, at least to me. Round and Round.