The other day, my four-year-old son was pondering God’s house.
“What kind of furniture do you think God has?” he asked.
Then, before I could answer, he asked, “What do you think God has in his basement?”
Basements, for my son, are places full of promise. Basements are where projects are started and real tools are used. Daddy often retreats to our basement, for hours on end, where he makes wonderful sounds of destruction. Except that he’s not destructing – he’s creating. Or rather recreating. In our basement, Daddy is building a mock-up of a Via Rail passenger car.
What woman in her right mind allows this to happen? A basement could be many things to a family of four like ours: a large rec room, a comfortable spare room or two for guests, an exercise area. When we bought this house, the basement had been set up as a two-bedroom apartment. My husband took to destroying the kitchen right away to make room for his workshop. Friends still look at me in wonder: You mean you gave up your Passover kitchen?
While we were house hunting, all my husband was interested in was the basement. I would evaluate kitchens, bedroom sizes, family-room configurations, all the while holding my breath as he made his way downstairs. With this house, he came back up triumphant. “Yes! It has nine-foot ceilings!” Apparently the correct height for a subterranean railcar.
I am married to a self-described rail nut. Trains are his life. Literally. He had been pursuing a PhD in art history when he abandoned his studies to start a business manufacturing model trains. He has been known to spend his day crawling beneath real steam generators to get the precise measurements of pipes. His models are known within the modelling community for their details and accuracy.
Our basement includes plans for a model railroad. Once he finishes the train car, he will be modelling the Kingston subdivision – the CN mainline that runs from downtown Toronto to Montreal. Specifically, he will be modelling the line between Toronto and Brockville, Ont., as it was in late autumn, 1980. There will be a lot of brown.
In the meantime, the back of the basement is slowly being converted into one of Via’s finest coaches as it looked 30 years ago. It’s blue and yellow and includes the vestibule area, luggage rack and four pairs of seats.
My husband has been collecting bits and pieces of old trains for years now. Pairs of train seats sit lined up, off to the side, waiting to be bolted down. There are rusted metal doors in my garage. One time, he spent a half-hour debating with me the merits of a luggage rack. The other day he got excited about vents.
I have trained (no pun intended) myself not to care about basements. But the truth is I do. I go to other people’s homes and I am in envy. Their basements could be unfinished or cluttered high with generations of storage. Big-screen TVs or no TVs. Toys or bare cement floors. Like my son, I see potential. But while he is fantasizing about Union Station, I see a rec room.
Mostly, I see a space where my children can go when they’re cooped up and it’s the middle of winter and it’s too cold to send them outside. I see a space where I could close the door without being concerned they will injure themselves with the mitre saw. Or injure the train car, for that matter.
But as much as I envy those spaces, losing my basement does not mean as much to me as pursuing this ambition does to my husband. Does that make me a pushover? Possibly. I am convinced that when people come back upstairs after getting a tour of our basement and tell me that I am “patient,” they are just being polite.
If there’s one thing I have learned from my husband, it’s that one should not measure one’s happiness by other people’s values. Having this project gives him immense pleasure. It fuels my four-year-old’s imagination and makes him believe that in every house, there is something spectacular happening beneath the surface.
And when I go down there and see the walls coming up, the rounded, metal roof being laid – almost every bit done by my husband’s own two hands – I can’t help but be impressed. And yes, proud.
So, after some contemplation, my son and I imagined that God has a pretty decent house with space for lots of guests. And surely, if our basement could hold a train car, then God must have the most amazing model railroad anyone has ever seen.
Sidura Ludwig lives in Thornhill, Ont.
