For the holidays (yes, I said "the holidays") my three year-old son received, among other things, a train set.  He's been saying for almost a year now that when he grows up he wants to be a train conductor.  He is our first child, and I, in my ignorance assumed that, a) he wouldn't be using the phrase "when I grow up I want to be..." until he was at least seven or eight, and b) once he did start saying it the noun at the end of the sentence would change more regularly than the temperature in Chicago.

Like many kids his age he already has some toy trains, small wooden rectangles painted in bright colors that can be pushed along slotted "tracks," but this is different.   This set is not only bigger, it's powered, the trains trundling along grooved tracks, whistling and tooting and climbing up relatively steep inclines, and it's also remote controlled.

The set, as any smart company will do, is expandable, with multiple sets of characters, cars and seasonal (as well as holiday) themed sub sets that can be added to expand for miles, beyond what most cities probably have as actual public transit.  

I watched him all weekend as he pushed the throttle back and forth, stopping to load and unload the cargo car with miniature bundles of logs and crates, stopping at the station (whispering to himself, "All aboard," and " An inbound train, toward the Loop, will be arriving shortly"), then moving along to continue its trek.

He sat cross-legged outside the loop of track, watching as if from a distance.  He laid on his belly, his legs bent at the knees, his feet casually bouncing off the rug.  He moved to the center of the loop, the train circling him in Lilliputian fashion.  All of this he did over the course of hours, without a hint of self consciousness; which is as it should be.

Nothing could have made me happier. 

Then I started reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and he fucked it all up. 

In many ways there's nothing new here: domestic instability, a wife who finds sex with her husband boring, obstinate teenagers who devastate their parents, wannabe rock stars coming up short of their dreams.  But Franzen (love him or hate him) being the talented writer he is, makes me want to punch him in the face.

Doubtless, these aren't people he's writing about, but "people" - types and archetypes.  His deconstruction (dismantling?) of the "American dream" is neither new to me nor is it original in its conceit (the literary kind, not the egomaniac kind).  I know that life is hard (my father had to escape Nazis in Poland when he was four years-old), if not impossible (24,000 children will starve to death today). I don't look at the world through a lens tinted (positively or negatively) by religious ideologies so I don't expect salvation or damnation.

It's my own fault.  I should have put the book down after the first paragraph when we learn that our protagonists were "not quiet right." (But seriously, who could stop reading at that point?) So I soldiered on, absorbing blow after blow of domestic discord, familial flailing, marital malignancy, until...well, what?  Until I look at my wife, two kids and pure-breed Gordon Setter (HOLY SHIT! When did all that happen?) and tell myself that will never be us (NEVER!)  Wonder when the rot will set in. Remind myself repeatedly that it's just a novel, it's just a made-up story.

It's raining as I write (more rainy than raining) and the temperature is just above freezing.  I'm at work (though only pretending to work).  The mood here is somewhere between ambivalent and hostile (depending on the person and the amount of coffee/sugar they've consumed).  My wife just sent me a text; our son said:

"Oh, what a perfect day for playing with trains."

I couldn't make this up if I wanted to.