Switching Tracks: Trains of Thought

Faulty metaphor for tortuous — and torturous — ruminations

When my son Douglas was three, he began to amass, piece-by-piece — thanks to his ever-indulgent Nana — an extensive (and expensive) wooden railway system.

The components were made by Brio. The painted cars — blue, red, green, and yellow — could be hooked together and book-ended between a purple engine and an orange caboose: clashing colors un-wheeled and dis-ordered. The tracks were natural oak, some straight, some curved, allowing for flexible design of the layout.

There were also Y-shaped pieces that Douglas called “switching tracks” — they allowed for right/left divergence of the train. Douglas would divert his train one way or the other by his whim. He didn’t think about it much in advance — seemed he’d vary the veering randomly to the right or to the left.

I have my own set of switching tracks, have had them for far longer than the thirty-five years Douglas has had his set. I acquired my own long before Douglas was born. I cannot remember ever not being in possession of my switching tracks — more to the point I cannot remember the switching tracks having not been in possession of me.

My “right” track is the track along which self-contented folk live-and-let live. Alas, I too often travel the other track, along which reside the “who-in-her-right-minds,” the “what-were-you-thinkings,” the “when-will-you-ever-learns,” the “why-can’t-you-evers,” and the “how-could-you-haves.”

Though intending to head “right,” I tend to my default, my discomfort zone. Scratch the “dis” — I find perverse comfort in the familiar neighborhood — in the company of my old frenemies: recriminations and ruminations — wherein I reminisce indulgently over old times, and old crimes committed under the influence of thoughtlessness and desperation.

When will I — will I ever? — be granted pardon? Might this pathetic prisoner at least be paroled?

How I long for those all-too-brief furloughs to that superfluous city “The-Past-Is-Past” in the circular county “It-Was-What-It-Was,” where sleeping dogs lie, peacefully — nestled against that right track — whilst their owners cheerfully “move on” to the next nice neighborhood, on the corner of “Nobody’s-Perfect” and “We-All-Make-Mistakes,” in the nearby town of “Stop-Beating-Yourself-Up-Already.”

O, how I wish to dwell there! Forevermore — where self-forgiveness reigns, where I can morph from miserable to forgivable — where I am able at last to forgive my sundry sins of stupidity.

Will I ever trump this tired track whereupon lies my red-raw heart flush with fury at my failings? Or am I self-condemned to replay without respite this untenable hand? — wherein rules my malignant doppelganger: the diamond-hard queen who shall brook no absolution.