Charity Trains

The very first chapter books I read on my own were Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories. The ancient-looking volumes belonged my Grandma and her siblings when they were kids and had that delicious old book smell and yellowed pages softened from use. Though the doctrine of the Christian morality tales never really stuck with me, I didn't escape entirely from their influence.

I distinctly remember reading one particular tale. It centered around the predictable poor-but-jovial family gearing up to celebrate Christmas. They didn't have any presents, but they shared love and a faith in God, so off they went to church on Christmas Eve. The story sets up that the little boy protagonist is a nice, selfless kid, unconcerned about his lack of presents under the tree and uncomplainingly helping out with his tiny baby sister. His angelic-like state is heightened to the point of puke-worthy as he is overjoyed when his aunt and uncle give him some mundane, practical gift, and he is gracious and overjoyed, thinking it the climax of his Christmas.

The details are a little fuzzy at this point, but the families are all gathered in the church, and after the typical Jesusy stuff, the preacher turns to the kids and unveils a tree of gifts. The toys and fancy clothes astound the poor kids into a grateful oblivion, and the protagonist boy eyes a snazzy toy train. It is the only selfish want he expresses throughout the whole story. There is some random method of allowing the kids to select a gift from the tree. For some reason that also escapes me, the boy sacrifices his train to get a coat for his sister or lets some other even poorer boy get the train. I don't know; the reason doesn't even matter.

The point was, I was incredibly disappointed for the boy. Since he was bent on refusing to show actual human emotion, I felt it for him. I think he eventually gets a train (from the benevolent preacher who saw what was going on), but the crushing disappointment quite powerful. Upon my many re-readings of the collection, I always skipped that story to avoid having to feel that way all over again.

Even at my young age, I looked around at the vast array of toys surrounding me and felt horribly guilty about not giving them to orphans.

Every time I see a charity, especially around the holidays, I feel a pang of guilt for not being like the little boy with that damn train. For Christmas my seventh grade year, I acquired two crisp 100 dollar bills. We were having a fundraiser at school for victims of the tsunami, and I tried to sneak one of the bills to school to donate. My mother caught me and prohibited the altruistic action. "But Mom," I protested, "I will still have a hundred dollars left!" Really, I was thinking of the boy and the train.

Maybe it's the profound affect of the first chapter book I read independently (and foreshadowing of the importance books would always play in my life), or the power of Uncle Arthur's storytelling (doubtful), or the simple moral at the heart of it all. Either way, I want every little boy to have his train.

This basic motivation keeps me gravitating towards a career with some non-prophet organization. What better way to spend my life than assuaging that guilt developed so young? Maybe the story affected me so powerfully because helping people is what I'm meant to do. I don't really believe in fate, but I do believe in predisposition. Maybe good ole Uncle Arthur was onto something.