Preparing To Say Good-Bye To Our Thomas The Train Coffee Table

For many years, our children’s Thomas the Train play table has served as our sunroom coffee table. At this table, with their toy trains, our kids have logged thousands of imaginary miles. They built bridges. They delivered important cargo. They coupled and uncoupled cars. They ran the trains slow and fast. They helped drive immeasurable commerce across the Island of Sodor.

Events at this table also gave rise to two pictures that never fail to make me smile.

Eight years ago, when we were putting away Christmas, we were unable to locate the Baby Jesus and the Angel Gabriel from our living room Nativity set. We found both of them, eventually, on this table. It appeared they’d been riding the rails. I’ve no idea which of our children did this, and I suspect they don’t remember either.

Two years later, our oldest and our youngest set out to write a play to perform during an upcoming family vacation. I happened to catch them during their creative process.

As a writer, I love this picture more than I can say. Here is our daughter, taking notes and writing things out. There’s our youngest son, contemplating and suggesting what should come next. This is the heart of the creative process.

As a parent, I adore this picture. They’re collaborating. Willingly. Without anyone making them.

And right there is the table. I will never be able to look at this picture and not see it.

But they’ve not written any script there since, and it’s been a few years since any engine has moved along the train table’s rails. The tracks sit empty now. No angel has ever visited again.

I should therefore have been expecting it when my wife mentioned recently that we should start looking for a real coffee table for that space.

But I wasn’t.

I’ll be honest. I am not prepared for how quickly our children seem to be leaving their childhood days behind. This past Christmas, for example, our youngest, the ten-year-old, performed for the last time in the children’s Christmas pageant at church. He’s entering middle school this fall, and he’s aging out of the pageant.

Our middle one, who aged out three years ago, moves to high school this fall, and it seems his middle school years have blown by before I hardly had the chance to ask how things were going.

And this fall our oldest will be a high school senior. Surely it wasn’t that long ago when she was making her own Christmas pageant debut as a sheep, adorned with cotton balls for wool.

We’ve had at least one child in that pageant for fourteen years, but now those days are over. That chapter, like so many from their childhoods, has closed.

I am not ready for this.

Nor am I prepared to be reminded so regularly that other of their chapters have closed, too. This happens particularly when I find myself singing songs from their youngest of days, like the theme songs from what used to be their favorite shows. JoJo’s Circus. Bear in the Big Blue House. The Koala Brothers. Whenever I begin these songs, I hope my children will join me just like they used to do, but they don’t. They have no idea where the songs are even from. I’ll pause at the end of a line, hoping that they will complete the lyric, but they meet me only with silence.

For them, when they outgrew the shows and the chapters closed, the music was lost.

I can’t help but think that when this next chapter closes, when the Thomas the Train table is no more, that I’m going to look at our children’s book bags in the den and picture them gone forever, too. Because that will happen. Their toys will one day be boxed away for good. Bikes will be donated. So many of their childhood treasures will no longer be needed, and they’ll be gone. Not just put away neatly, like we wish they’d be every evening, but gone forever. I can’t help but see so many more pages turning and so many more chapters being finished.

I also can’t help but think of another of the songs that I remember from their childhoods, the theme from Thomas & Friends. It begins, “They’re two, they’re four, they’re six, they’re eight.” I used to believe these words referred to each of the engines’ numbers, but I know better now. These words really describe just how quickly our children age. One day they’re two, but in just one short measure they’re four. Then they’re six. They’re eight. They’re sixteen.

Then they no longer remember any of their favorite songs, and they’re not in the Christmas pageant anymore.

And then, just like that, there is a new coffee table where once something else had been.

I am not ready for any of this, and it breaks my heart that our children are moving on from so many of the things and times that have brought them such joy.

In these times I try to remember something my mother said back when we had just two kids. She’d raised the possibility of her taking our family to Disney World as a Christmas present. Our daughter had just turned five, our son was two-and-a-half, and we were expecting our third child. I was grateful for the offer, but I wondered whether they were still a little too young. And, more importantly, whether they’d even remember it. The third child on the way surely wouldn’t. He or she would still be in the womb during the trip.

My mother, though, said it didn’t matter whether they remembered it. She said we would surely love that time together, and those happy times would forever be a part of who our children are and who they grow to be.

In these days when chapters are closing much too quickly, when our children are moving on from the happy times and treasures that they may not even remember when they’re older, I can only hope that she is right.