ISSUE THREE:
TWO NEW HORIZONS
When I was about ten years old, I wanted a model train set more than anything, so my mom bought it for me for Christmas that year. An old door screwed to two saw horses served as the platform for what would be my world in miniature, a microcosmic city to house my new locomotive and its cheap cars. And for several months, I tried to make the makeshift table into the setting I could see perfectly in my head: mountain ranges, a small town in between, maybe a river or lake thrown in for good measure. It would no doubt turn out to be a utopia, and so I set out bending old wire hangers and laying papier-mache.
Fast forward a year and envision an abandoned and dusty landscape of half-built mountains and broken railroad tracks, of plastic model houses and a few scattered train cars lying on end. I had given up. As it turned out, building a model railroad layout required immense amounts of skill and patience, of which I possessed neither. The table sat in the corner of my mom’s basement for a few years until she decided she wanted to build a storage closet there, so reluctantly—despite my waning interest and obvious lack of skill, no matter how many model railroading magazines I read—I took down the table and packed up the train set.
Shortly before I moved to Arizona three years ago, I helped clean out my mom’s house. I sifted through thirty years’ worth of National Geographic back issues, went about sorting the nostalgic memorabilia from the half-nostalgic junk, and lugged random bits of nothing from three decades of my family’s presence in the old house that had recently hit the market. As you might expect, I found the old train set packed up in boxes up in the attic, wrapped in tissue paper and sleeping an awkward, neglected sort of hibernation.
As I took each car out of its cocoon of tissue paper and dust, twirled them in my hands and replaced them, I thought about the excitement I’d felt when I had first wrapped my fingers around them years ago. I thought about how I had tried to acquire the skill and patience to make the layout exactly what I wanted it to be, and how I had failed to do so. For a moment, it struck me as no more than a simple disappointment a small boy had felt years ago, one from which he had moved on just as quickly as the idea had come. But then I got to thinking about what that whole process had felt like back then, how I had been strangely conscious of my inability to commit to a hobby I so strongly desired to be good at.
The funny thing about it wasn’t the fact that I didn’t have the patience or skill; the real funny part about it was how that sort of impatience never became a theme in my life. The model train was the only hobby I ever attempted that I didn’t stick through to the end when I decided I was either very good at what I was doing, or that I had no real interest in it to begin with. Looking back on it now, committing to such a time-consuming and meticulous pursuit strikes me as a near impossible task for a ten year-old, and yet the disappointment lingers still to this day. Why could I not commit to learning about the trains? I have since done so with guitars, with bicycles, with words, with teaching, and still those miniature locomotives and fake plastic trees occasionally jump into my mind and taunt me.
It was with this memory in mind that I presented the Commitment theme to this month’s collaborators, Jolene Monheim and Marshall Dury. You won’t see any photos of model trains or poems about locomotives (although, coincidentally, Dury does mention “railroad track back muscles’ in his poem Can You Hear Us From Where You Are?), but instead you will find a far more eloquent portrayal of a concept we all grapple with at some point in our lives. When do you sign that contract? When do you walk down the aisle, and who do you walk with? Is the university right for me, or should I go with the state college? Which Tonka truck or Barbie doll do I want to stick with for playtime? How is it that my dog loves me unconditionally even when I don’t?
In the following pages, Monheim and Dury have captured the essence of that nervousness, that disappointment, that joy, and that near-giddy energy that comes along with commitment to a single person, ideal, or moment. The often tenuous relationship between decision-making and contentment seems somehow softer, more manageable and exciting through Monheim’s lens and Dury’s pen, and so I welcome you to allow them to explain the idea better than I can here in this introduction.
So hop off my train and into Monheim and Dury’s world. What they have constructed in the following pages spells it out much clearer than any dank basement railroad ever could.
--Dan Cavallari, Editor
< back next >
