Sunday, September 25, 2011

Black Steam Engines

I have bad news. The thing you love most in this world, black steam engines... they are obsolete.


No one uses black steam engines anymore. In this country, they had a good 100 plus year run, but were replaced by diesel engines in the 1950s, which are faster and more powerful and easier to fix. In general, the electric motor and internal combustion engine have taken over jobs done by steam engines.


I think you are on the cusp of understanding this terrible fact. The other day we were watching YouTube videos of what else? Black steam engines. National Geographic has this series about black steam engines in India - their history, and how they have been phased out. The videos are full of sad music and artistic shots of steam engines puffing through the fog, goats being herded over the tracks, and village stations marked only by banyan trees and I admit, the first time I saw it I got misty eyed, because it really is tragic that these beautiful engines are destined for the scrap yards, to be forgotten by the world like old discarded toys.


Sooner or later you will realize: The age of steam is over. Even in the small villages of India where women still wash their clothes in the river, children carry bundles of sticks on their backs, and men use oxen to plough things, they have moved on. Is there anywhere left, save the island of Sodor, where steam engines are still the norm? Maybe China, the video tells us, but the tone implies that it's only a matter of time before China too caves to economic realities and leaves their black steam engines behind.


I don't know how to tell you. You constantly ask me train questions. Yesterday we were driving home from New Jersey when a freight train passed us by. "Black steam engine!" you shouted. The road curved away before we saw the end of the train, so you asked, "Mommy, did that train have a red caboose?" and I told you it did. Because all the trains in your stories do, and so they really ought to in real life. But the truth is that computers now do the jobs of cabooses and the men who stood watch in their cupolas, so they too are obsolete.


Sometimes it makes me mad. Why can't someone update our children's stories for the world that we actually live in? Why are we still reading kids entire series of books devoted to farm animals, when most American children will never step foot on a farm? And if they ever do, they are sure to be sorely disappointed.


The other day we were at Fairway, sitting outside eating bagels, contemplating the rusted out trolley cars that have been abandoned there since the 1920s, like we do every week. Someone locked up their bike on the tracks and you asked him to please move it, because the train would go soon. Another little boy came along with his father and sat with us. He was clearly being raised by a pack of realists, because he started telling us that the train was broke, and old, and wouldn't go, because it had crashed. You told him he was wrong, and the train was not broke, and had not crashed. You made train noises and shouted "all aboard!" and told him the train would be leaving soon. The debate raged on, in the insufferable way debates do between preschoolers, neither of you giving any ground, each of you becoming further entrenched in your own point of view.


I was proud of you. For believing in the trolley, and defending it. Just because it hadn't moved in 90 years didn't mean it wouldn't start moving any minute now, or didn't travel the tracks regularly, when no one was watching. I remember reading about a group of philosophers who argued that just because the sun rose every morning, that didn't mean it would rise the following morning. In fact, they believed the opposite: that *because* the sun had risen every previous morning, it was certain that it wouldn't rise the next. These people were proven wrong every single day, yet they still believed. That kind of faith has always impressed me.


Also, you held your own in a debate with a kid that had to be at least four.


So I shelved my plans to write a children's book called, "Really Useful Engines: Trains that Actually Move Stuff in the Year 2000." Because you've got the rest of your life to grow up and get disillusioned. To realize that the world is run on mechanisms infinitely more complex than steam engines, and full of gray areas and endlessly qualified answers. There's no rush. Let's stay here as long as we can.

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