First Christmas Without My Father

At Christmas each year my father produced the same ornament anew, unlayering countless dusty-blue tissues, from an old shoe-box lettered in black: Public Shoe Company. This , he said, was his father's. It was a P-47 Thunderbolt with fraying tape across its wings. And what I remember is not my father's face, nor the care he must have taken, nor the timbre of his voice, but the way the thin wing-tape contained several narrow spines of string, for strength. My father's Lionels arrived today. My mother had no use for them anymore, she wrote. And with that she had boxed the old three-railed silver tracks, the straights, the curves, and the switches, and the individually wrapped interlocking rail-cars. My father's trolley was there too, the type that lights up from inside, casting shadows of men reading the daily news with grim, morning faces, beneath worn, checked homburgs. She'd send the village later, she wrote, and had marked the box in black: FRAGILE.