Trains

Last week, there was an open house for the MIT Model Railroad Club, and I wanted to take Eddie. So I asked him "Do you want to go see some trains?"

"No," he said scornfully. Huh?! I guess he was thinking "I see trains all the time, Papa, get a grip!" He continued "Go library." (Pronounced "whybwerry.")

"But these are little trains!" I told him. Eddie seemed taken with this idea. "Little trains. Little trains," he said. But he still thought he'd rather go to the library.

Well, Papa wanted to see the trains, so that's where we went! We walked over to MIT and across its campus, a good long walk. On the campus, Eddie noticed a really big sculpture and pointed it out. I saw that we could go underneath and said "Do you want to go under it?" Eddie said "No." I thought he was just being knee-jerk negative, so I said "C'mon, let's go under!" But as we got close, Eddie said "No! This way!" and pointed around it. He really meant it—he didn't trust that sculpture.

As soon as we got through the door to the club room, Eddie said "Wow. Wow wow wow. Wow! Wow wow! Wow!" He was totally entranced by the trains. It wasn't a big room, and it was full of tracks with little buildings, people, trees, farms with animals, and so on around it, with six trains running around them. Maybe a dozen other people were there for the open house.

We walked all around the layout. For a while, Eddie sat in a corner watching the trains go around a big loop-de-loop where they change altitude. He was watching intensely, not smiling, when he suddenly announced "Eddie happy."

See? Sometimes Papa knows best.

There was also a big model of the Green building at MIT, a big rectangle of a building with windows in a big grid, and controls so that you could play Tetris with lights in the windows, reproducing a hack that MIT students did with the real-life Green building in the past. Eddie enjoyed pushing the buttons and making the lights move. He was not very good at Tetris, though (his favorite button was the one that makes the shape go straight down.)