Herrick Town
I didn’t die at 672 Terrace Drive. I never thought I’d live this long, the funny thing about living one finds out is time’s delusion of elasticity. Your life never feels as long as each day it advances as you expected it should. But a truth as old as time itself is wherever you go, there you are.
I didn’t die at 672 Terrace Drive. I’m days away from turning the age my father was when he had his aneurysm, four days after his birthday. My older siblings have all passed this milestone, outliving Kimball. My younger sister – 11 months younger — Elaine – has not. I was living at home, he was retired – the live-in situation with Donna was on the fritz – my 20s were tragic and disappointing – but I had been promoted to Editor of this trade magazine. I was making a respectable salary. My father and I rarely got along. He had anger issues, was a WWII Marine Corp veteran with untreated PTSD (I know realize) and worked on Wall Street, like his father. He was an only child of divorce, rarely talked about his life, married a catholic and had a big family.
My father and I were getting along better. By the magazine office in Elizabeth there was this model Train store. They had this N-Scale Model Train set that I bought on impulse one Advent, feeling flush and Christmas. Kimball had grown up with model-trains and had an elaborate O Scale trainset in the basement that I only remembered from early childhood. There exists black and white photos of Michael and Kenneth in blue pinstriped engineer caps in the family photo album.
Model Trains – a very imaginative hobby – you create a miniature reflection of the world – assembling plastic kits of buildings, train depots. I originally bought the N-Scale set to put under the Christmas Tree in Paramus. Assembling it was beyond my skills. My father and brothers are real tool-users. The basement had a work-shop, hammers and wrenches on the peg board. I always wanted to be handy. I see the value and the virtue in it. Alas, I never got the knack.
Kimball had that thing together and running the day after I gave up. Christmas used to be a big deal growing up. Except for the time when I was sixteen and taken a hit of four-way windowpane LSD and wound up in the Emergency Room or the time before that when Kimball, Elaine and I in the family’s first and only second car, a VW Beetle, got into a car-totaling accident on Fairview Avenue the day before Christmas Eve, Christmas was a happy time in the Herrick household. By the time of the N-Scale Christmas, a new generation had revived the Christmas tradition.
Adrienne the oldest, had already spawned Anne and Matthew, but within the same year Michael (and Arlene) and Suzanne (and Richard), spawned Steven and Randy (respectively). By the late 1980s, the Christmas energy was back at 672 Terrace – toddlers to buy presents for, a big pile of wrapped gifts under the tree — the N-Scale train rounding Christmas Town beneath the tree a huge hit.
The trains brought my father and I together. I had a stressful job, smoked two packs a day, booze, weed, occasional coke – and this crazy relationship with Donna – and playing with the train eased tension, cleared my mind. Good, clean fun. We decided to build Herrick Town in the basement. My idea. On the counter of this wall-length cabinet at one of the cellar’s finished section, we laid track forming a circular layout, forest section on one end and a train depot with a Town at the other. The stores and such would have names – like Barret Herrick Store – my father’s father who had a Wall Street firm Herrick Securities, were my mother was secretary – or Katz’s Liquor Store – Arlene’s family was in the liquor business – when the kids would visited they could learn about the family while they played with the trains.
So, for a year or so, when I wasn’t working or having drug-and-booze-fueled sex-capades, I was train modeling. Model trains were a popular throughout the 20th century, really soon after electricity came to middle class homes. In the 1980s, many Greatest Generation retirees were train modeling in the basements. Smithsonian Magazine and the New York Times featured articles about it, Frank Sinatra famously had a huge layout in his mansion. My father and I went to this store in Ridgefield Park to buy track and models and spent many hours in the basement with the hobby. I made my first train-song cassette of train songs – lot of Dylan – which I would play on this crappy cassette player down in the basement.
Train modeling is not free. So, a new thing in business reporting were survey articles, you send out surveys, tally up the responses, analyze the data, write articles and forecast. I was the editor and hired Kimball to tally up the surveys of my first time as editor of the project – and only the second survey issue, I’d work on the first and now was in charge.
Basically, this was the Stone Age and the publisher was small and a pathological tightwad. I figured I’d have more control over the project and Kimball wanted to do it. He was good at math. It wasn’t a one page survey, easy tedium. I had an expense account, and it seemed like win-win way to fund Herrick Town development.
While tallying is when he had his aneurysm, Elaine was home with him. He groaned with pain, collapsed on the Kitchen Floor, Elaine called 9-11. Three hours later, he was gone. Four days after his Birthday.
After his funeral, when the family gathered at home, we played with Herrick Town. So, for a couple of weeks, I kept building Herrick Town, but that was just working through grief. That all-encompassing sorrow was new to me back then. Then Donna broke up with me, I had a nervous breakdown, went into psychoanalysis and Therapy, got a better magazine job in NYC and moved to the East Village and never train modeled again, although I kept the Blue Comet. Fate’s sense of humor and irony is as unfathomable as it is unpredictable.
Will I demise like Elaine and not outlive Kimball or be like my other siblings? Is Kimball’s aneurism coming for me in the next week or can I get on with the work of living and writing? Either or, I didn’t die at 672.