Proof The Bible Is True

I walked into the tag sale, excited to find a treasure. The first table I came upon was full of railroad memorabilia.

 

“Fantastic, aren’t they?” another early bird said, admiring some old Chesapeake and Ohio Railway calendars. “Are you a train buff too?”

 

“Not really,” I said. It was a complicated question. Trains had always been part of my life. My father worked for the Chesapeake and Ohio for most of his life. He wasn’t an engineer or a conductor or even a ticket seller. Daddy had a job few people even knew about: railroad telegraph operator. He relayed messages between the trains and the dispatcher, reporting the departures, arrivals, delays, and deliveries. The man at the table held up a picture of an old steam engine and grinned.

 

“I could write a whole book about the railroad,” he said.

 

Daddy was crazy about the railroad too. Every morning he left for the office in a wool cardigan with patch pockets, carrying a tin lunch box Mom packed for him. Telegraph operators didn’t get to wear a uniform, and Daddy’s “office” was a shack by the train line with an ancient hand-lettered sign that read h-o cabin—whatever that meant. But Daddy was there, every day, on time. He never even took a sick day. He wasn’t always so reliable at home. He couldn’t always give me the support or attention I needed. As an adult I’d come to understand that Daddy had problems he didn’t share with us. He was orphaned as a teenager, had to make it on his own, dropped out of school. But back then, all I knew was, he wasn’t who I needed him to be.

 

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