NO TRAINS FOR THE BIRTHDAY BOY

My husband’s birthday is next week, and for the first time in years I have no clue what to buy for him.

In the past, for just about every special occasion I can remember, I have bought him model-train stuff because model trains were his passion. As a result, he ended up with enough miniature buildings, people, animals, trees and vehicles to fill a real town.

Unfortunately, Barbie’s Dream House had more space in it to set up a model train layout than the place where we used to live. So everything train-related ended up being exiled to either our shed or storage unit.

When we finally moved into a larger house, however, I made certain my husband had a nice big room just for his trains, complete with a huge table to set them up on. I figured he’d be so excited to finally have a train room, something he’d whined about for years, he’d be setting up his trains and miniature campground, airport, amusement park and factories before we even unpacked.

Well, we’ve been in the new house 14 months now and all he’s done is set up a small circle of track, a bridge, and a train which, when he ran it, smashed into the supports of the aforementioned bridge and derailed. The train is still lying in a heap on the table.

“So what do you want for your birthday?” I asked him the other day.

“Well, there’s this miniature fire department I want for my train layout and also a hot-dog wagon. Oh, and I’ll also need a sidewalk to put the hot-dog wagon on.”

“You haven’t even set up the police station, movie theater or Kentucky Fried Chicken yet,” I said. “Why do you even want more train stuff?”

“Because my town needs a fire department and a hot-dog stand!” he said. “What kind of town doesn’t have those?”

To be honest, I’ve been wondering all along what kind of town possibly could have everything he’s gathered for his. I mean, he has a miniature replica of the White House, complete with tiny figures of the Obamas; a small facsimile of Mount Rushmore, a tiny nudist colony, a gold mine and even a herd of Indian elephants.

Visions of elephants stampeding and trampling nudists or gold miners, or even worse, the First Family, really have made me question his master plan.

Still, I would be thrilled to see him set up anything on his train table. I wouldn’t care if he had the elephants climbing Mount Rushmore or Obama dangling from Lincoln’s nose. Anything would be better than nothing.

I’m not the only one who’s impatient for my husband to start setting up his train layout. Every time my Aunt Doris comes to visit, she eagerly asks him, “Well? Have you done anything in the train room yet?”

When my husband says he hasn’t, she usually frowns and says, “I really want to see that town set up before I die, you know…and I’m in my 80s and not getting any younger, so you’d better hurry up!”

She called the other night and again asked if he’d set up anything. When I said no, she said, “Tell him I’m willing to accept anything – a tree, a shrub…anything! I’m getting desperate to see any progress at all!”

She’s not the only one who’s getting desperate. I have tried everything short of tossing my husband’s favorite food (bacon cheeseburgers) into that train room just to get him to go in there and stay for a while, but nothing has worked. You’d think the room was filled with toxic waste, the way he avoids it.

His excuses for not pursuing his hobby have ranged from “I’m too tired,” to “I’m not in the mood,” to “I don’t really know how to set up the trains so they won’t crash again.”

So I refuse to buy him anything train-oriented for his birthday – not until he actually shows some enthusiasm for the 10,000 train items he already has lying around gathering dust.

And if he doesn’t go into the room and start setting up his train layout soon, I think I just might end up taking matters into my own hands and doing it for him.

I wonder if the tiny little nudists might enjoy joining President Obama for a ride on a miniature roller coaster?

SHOVELING IS FOR THE BIRDS

I can barely move today. My arms feel like two sacks of wet cement, my bad knee is throbbing and my back feels as if will snap in half if I so much as sneeze. Why? Because I spent all day yesterday shoveling snow.

Fortunately, we hire someone to plow our airport runway of a driveway, which costs the equivalent of a couple weeks’ worth of groceries, otherwise, I’d start shoveling in January and not finish until July. But the “etcetera” shoveling is still my job.

One part of the etcetera shoveling, for example, is a path out to my bird feeder, which happens to be about 35 feet from the back door. And once I reach the feeder, I also shovel an area underneath it so I can throw down some food for my ground feeders – two gigantic ravens, two mourning doves, four crows and 97,000 squawking blue jays.

Last night, however, when the wind was howling, the temperatures were Siberian, and I was curled up on the sofa, sipping hot tea while wrapped in my Snuggie, the thought of shoveling a path to the bird feeder was the farthest thing from my mind.

That is, until my husband spoke.

“Your poor birds must be really cold and hungry tonight,” he said. “I heard that they have to shiver to keep warm and it burns up thousands of calories, so they need to make sure they eat at least twice their weight in food every day to make up for it.”

“Well, they’re going to just have to shiver for a while longer,” I said, taking a sip of tea. “I’m staying right here on the sofa.”

He gave me a look that made me feel as if I’d just committed a crime worthy of the death sentence. “Think of all those poor, shivering creatures depending on you to feed them. How would you like to be in their shoes?”

“Birds don’t wear shoes,” I muttered.

“Well, I hope you can live with yourself when you go out there tomorrow and see a bunch of stiff little bird feet sticking up out of the snow.”

I tried to ignore his words, but as the night wore on, I felt more and more guilty. It wasn’t as if I’d spent the day idle. Not at all. I’d spent it doing some more “etcetera” shoveling in the form of a path to our underground propane tank, mainly because my contract with the propane company specified that I had to keep the area clear at all times or face a firing squad.

Unburying the tank was nearly impossible, however, because the guy who’d plowed our driveway pushed all of the snow into a towering six-foot banking directly in front of the only access to it. It took me over an hour just to make a dent in the snow bank.

At one point, I actually felt kind of scared. I was standing there shoveling, with a six-foot wall of snow on each side of me, and the thought suddenly occurred to me that if those walls caved in and buried me, my husband, who was napping, probably wouldn’t find me again until the spring thaw. And knowing him, that’s probably when he’d first start realizing I was missing.

During my quest to reach the gas tank, I made a horrifying discovery. My rock wall, my precious rock wall that I’d spent all summer constructing, rock by rock, inch by inch, had been destroyed by the plow truck, and now was just a bunch of loose rocks peppering the snow bank. Even worse, the bright orange poles I’d staked in front of the wall to protect if from the plow, were sticking out of the banking like porcupine quills.

I came inside feeling really upset, which was the precise reason why I didn’t want to hear the word “shoveling” again for at least another 20 years.

But there I was at 10 p.m., with icicles hanging from my nostrils and my teeth chattering like castanets, shoveling a path to the bird feeder.

The snow was so deep, the area I shoveled for the ground feeders looked as if it were 20 feet below sea level. The poor birds were going to have to dive into the pit to get their food.

When my red-faced, wet-clothed body finally returned to the warmth of the house, I said to my husband, “You’d think that for all of the effort I put into feeding the birds, I’d attract something really special out there, like a cardinal or a purple finch…or a peacock!”

“Or a partridge in a pear tree?” he asked, chuckling.

The next morning, when I looked out the window at the feeder, I had to laugh. All I could see were birds swan-diving into “the pit” and disappearing. Now and then, one would jump up and down and I’d see the top of its head, or it would fly up like a fish jumping out of the ocean.

“Look! There’s a cardinal!” my husband said, pointing.

As I ran back to the window, he said, “Aw, you won’t see him now. He’s in the pit.”

I’ve always wanted to see a bright red cardinal (somewhere other than on a Christmas card) so I waited for the bird to emerge, but it never did. Determined, I grabbed my coat and went out there to check the pit myself. About 25 squawking blue jays flew up at me. I nearly needed CPR.

I glanced at the kitchen window. I could see my husband standing there, laughing.

I think I should pour syrup on him, roll him in birdseed and tie him to the tree where the feeder is.