When I was a little boy, my father would assemble a huge train table in our living room next to the Christmas tree. The table was easily ten feet wide by ten feet long, and three feet high. In addition to the tiny figures of the villagers, quaint tiny homes and buildings, working street lights, fake trees and assorted trains that adorned the table, crepe paper in a red brick pattern was attached to all sides of the table. The paper ran from the sides of the table all the way down to the carpet, creating the illusion that the table was supported by brick walls all around.
Or from my point of view, the perfect fort wherein I could hide.
The strategy was to sneak underneath the table after my parents had gone to sleep and wait for Santa to place the presents under the tree. I actually made it to my secret hiding place each year, carefully separating the folds of the brick crepe paper back in place behind me so that nothing looked out of place.
And like clock work, every year I would promptly fall asleep before sighting Santa.
So that is the memory, suspended in time for more than forty years, like an image trapped within an icicle that never melts.
The reality is starkly different.
The old house was sold many years ago, the train table dismantled and perhaps rotting in some unknown wood pile, and the assorted engines, passenger cars, and cabooses stored away in bubble wrap for another generation.
Things are different with my wonderful parents as well. Mom passed away in 2022, and Dad is struggling every day in a memory care unit.
Despite all of these life changes, I still hold on to this memory, this specific icicle of time has not yet eluded my grasp.
My attempt to preserve this memory in poetry appears below. The poem is called “Christmas Eve from Under the Train Table” and first appeared in The Hot-Buttered Holidays Issue of Instant Noodles in 2021.
I hope you can find something special in my memory as well.
Happy Holidays,
-R. David Fulcher
CHRISTMAS EVE FROM UNDER THE TRAIN TABLE
There I was,
and there I would remain,
Expectant and curled-up beneath the great trains
which had whistles and steam and a radio tower that lit up.
The trains were sleeping, but my breath replaced their din,
Escaping my lips like an anxious child.
It is not the darkness I fear.
I fear that my mischievous breath will plume forth and collect Itself into a crystal ball,
and then roll out from under the brick-red crepe paper,
a great red marble full of my embarrassment.
The clock clangs midnight.
I can hear my parents through the walls,
their secret laughter like soft explosions
accompanied by the faint swish and whisper of wrapping paper.
Now I can their slippered arrival.
My heart pummels in my chest with incessant fluttering,
sick of this distant observation,
insane with the knowledge that all this espionage is for me.
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 