PITTSBURGH — For as long as I can remember, my father had a model train set on a platform in our home. From the middle of our living room floor in our old house on Colby Street to the game room of the house he designed and built on Chapin Street in 1972, a modest model train set was always part of our lives. For my father — as with most enthusiasts, I suspect — his love of model trains is bound up with the skills it demands of him.
He thrives on the challenge of construction and operation, along with the electronic and engineering skills needed whenever something goes amiss. I suspect tinkering with the trains as a kid lit a spark that eventually led him to a career as an engineer. What’s more, nothing is more satisfying to a father, grandfather or great-grandfather than having your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren tug at your sleeve and plead for more time watching you take your old trains for another trip around the track.
That connectivity can be taken for granted, however. Which is what happened with my father — and the rest of us — until that model train touchstone was suddenly lost. All it took was one gust of wind.
Last February, my father — Ron Zito — decided to put up a 20-foot flagpole on a wintry morning. But when the wind kicked up, my father and the flagpole went for a short but wild ride — think Mary Poppins and her umbrella — which ended with him on his back on the cement driveway with the flagpole still in his hands. His back.
