Making tracks

At the end of February, desperate to get away from an apartment with a collapsing ceiling and non-functioning light fixtures in two rooms, I rented a room from my step-sister.
So far, it’s working out pretty well. The rent is a lot cheaper, getting to work is easier and I don’t have to worry about getting hit on the head by falling chunks of plaster. It’s pretty much good news all around.
The new living arrangement also means I share the house with a dog, a semi-dopey black lab mix named Sophie, and my 4-year-old nephew, Mackinley, whose mother would probably not appreciate it if I described him as dopey. I don’t think even semi-dopey would go over very well.
I like both Sophie and Mackinley a lot — honestly, I’d missed living in a house with a dog — but both present certain challenges I’m not used to dealing with.
Sophie is probably a little easier to deal with. She can be a little pushy, and some of my clothes are more covered with dog hair than they have been in years. But if she ever gets to be too big a nuisance I can always let her outside to run around in the yard for a while. My step-sister made it very clear after the first time that is not an acceptable solution with her son. In my defense, it was only raining a little that day.
Living with a 4-year-old has introduced me to skills I never realized would be so important in day-to-day life. I’m still developing the ability to step around toys on the floor, for example, but it’s getting better. With Mackinley, that mostly means threading my way around the large, elaborate train tracks he sets up in the living room.
Mackinley is crazy about trains. He loves Thomas the Tank Engine, a children’s series with surprisingly bad animation and creepy trains that think for themselves yet still for some reason have people driving them. In the time I have lived there he has watched his Thomas movie (specifically, Thomas and Friends: Making Tracks to Great Destinations, a name I know only because that’s how Mackinley refers to it every single time he mentions the movie) more times than I have seen any movie in my life.
Spend any amount of time around him and there is a good chance you will be asked — although “asked” might be too mild a word for this particular circumstance; instructed is maybe better — to “play trains.” Mostly, this means working on the track while Mackinley runs his Thomas toys back and forth. Mistakes made while playing trains — there are more ways to mess up than you might expect — bring swift and fierce corrections.
Playing trains with my nephew also frequently means being witness to terrible tragedies. In the weeks I have shared a house with him I have seen enough plane and train crashes to occupy the front page of USA Today for months. Although, for all the collisions and collapses, there seems to be very little loss of life. Even the plane full of kids that crashed into the ocean one day seemed to be having a fine time living underwater. If Mackinley weren’t too young for it, I’d suspect he had actually crash-landed a plane full of Snorks, the deep-sea Smurfs rip-off that had their own cartoon for a while when I was a kid.
It’s a good thing, I guess, because there seemed to be discouragingly little interest in mounting a rescue effort.
Living with Mackinley has also broadened my music knowledge, albeit very slightly. Thanks to my nephew, I now have two songs — I have no idea what they’re called, but one is about clocks and the other one is about broccoli — permanently burned into my mind. That kind of thing can happen when you listen to the same song about 20 times a night. From time to time I’ll find myself sitting at my desk and singing — usually in my head, thankfully, “No, don’t give me that broccoli.” It’s a little unsettling.
This new living arrangement takes some getting used to, I’ll admit. On the bright side,though, I’m better than ever at putting together train tracks.