Down Home: Playing trains inside an expansive imagination

Every now and then, I imagine I’d be a better granddad if I had a broader range of skills.

Like, for example, engineering. 

The other weekend, Joanna and I drove from our home in Coppell down to Buda to spend a couple of days with our 4-year-old grandson, Ezra. And his mama and daddy, of course.

For ages already, Ezra has loved trains. Or at least he loves the idea of trains. Real trains scare him if we get too close. But he’s fascinated with toy trains.

Most particularly, he enjoys playing with his Thomas the Tank Engine train set. Across the months, he’s added so many pieces they fill two plastic tubs. They’re wooden train cars that run on wooden tracks. The tracks curve and swerve and run up overpasses and down ramps, past a barn and through switchbacks.

Racing trains

Ezra enjoys racing trains pulled by Thomas and his friend Percy. (With 4-year-old boys, everything is a race.) He hauls tiny objects on flat-bed freight cars. He talks about the tracks, and how fast he’s hauling, and where he’s going.

I love Ezra’s train set, because I get a kick out of observing his vivid imagination. We can take a trip and never leave the rug in his living room.

During our last visit, Ezra dreamed up a construction project for us.

“Marvo, I want to build a train track all the way around the table,” he reported. That would be their dining table. And that would require a ton of track.

Ezra helped me sort track. We stacked all the pieces by kind and length—short curves with short curves, long straight-a-ways together, and every other shape and size with its shape and size.

“Well, buddy, I’m not sure if we have enough straight pieces to build the train track all the way around the table,” I told him.

“Yeah, Marvo, I think we do,” Ezra replied. 

“Well, let’s start building and see what happens,” I suggested. “Let’s build the corners first.”

Laying track

He started handing me large curves, and pretty soon, we had four corners laid out. Then we began attaching them with every size of straight track we could find, from skinny one-inchers, to four- and six-inchers. We even added straight track with stuff attached, like the barn.

I crawled back and forth under the table, attaching track as fast as Ezra fetched it and handed it over. Pretty soon, the track ran parallel to the south side of the table, turned north at both corners, stretched about three-quarters of the length of the table, then curved and ran underneath, completing the longest circuit yet for our Thomas the Tank Engine set.

Ezra didn’t seem to mind the track didn’t run all the way around the table. In fact, the section under the table was the best part. It was kind of like the train ran through a huge tunnel in a mountain. 

He cackled as he pulled a train behind Thomas, and I tried pulling a train behind Percy, chasing his train. I had an advantage, because my arms are far longer than Ezra’s. As it turns out, however, 4-year-old boys are much faster crawlers than 58-year-old grandfathers. Soon, he zoomed around a corner and caught me.

If I were an engineer, maybe I would’ve figured out how to connect enough short curves together to lengthen the straight-a-ways and lay the track all the way around the table. But I’m not sure that feat would’ve made any difference in how much fun we had that afternoon.

We didn’t so much lay track on the floor as we spread it inside Ezra’s imagination, where we played until we were too tired to push another train. Thank God for a 4-year-old’s imagination—a perfect playground for a little boy and his ol’ granddad.