This document summarizes the complex relationship between the author and her grandfather William and father. It describes how the author's father was estranged from William for most of his life. It also details how the author broke her father's cherished model Christmas train that belonged to William as a child, causing years of guilt. Near the end, the author and her father have an argument where they realize the train had gone missing years ago, and was later found and returned. Though the author and her father become estranged, she finds understanding and meaning in holding onto the few things remaining of their relationship.

1. Hickey 1
Danielle B. Hickey
Professor Daryl Morazzini
Intermediate Nonfiction Writing Workshop (ENG-341)
31 May 2015
Lost and Found
His name was William, which is my father’s middle name; he had a coarse-haired,
almond-shaped birthmark on the outer side of his left shin, which he passed on to his youngest
son, and also to me, his youngest grandchild; and he owned a model Christmas train, which at
some point would become my father’s. These are three of the few things I know about William
Hickey, which admittedly isn’t a lot to know about one’s grandfather.
My father and William were estranged most of my father’s life, and eventually what my
father did not want to know about William would become what I would not get to know about
William. William never had time for my father, and they were never close; ultimately William
would build a new family with a new son to grow close to. He wanted nothing to do with my
father until he lay dying, at which point my father would want nothing to do with him. My
father did not attend the funeral.
He did, however, never fail to set up William’s model train the moment we broke out the
Christmas decorations each year. My father clicked the tracks together into the familiar circle
route while I watched, transfixed. He always put the utmost care and precision into his projects,
from the needy vehicles that came and went like fostered children to the bookshelf he built
around the radiator in my childhood bedroom. I didn’t ask why my father so loved his train if he
so hated the man who gave it to him, and he didn’t say. Spending time with my father very
seldom involved speaking with him, and the annual train ritual was no exception.

2. Hickey 2
My role in setting up the Christmas train involved smoothing down the tree skirt, train
packaging set aside, both of us awaiting my father’s arrival home and the rare gift of his
attention. I upheld my tree skirt duties for years until one fateful day I fell onto the train and
broke it. The train cars were painted metal, tough, but the plastic couplings that connected them
broke easily under my weight. I pressed the unlinked cars together to hide the fracture, but
quickly broke down, tearfully regaling my mother what had transpired.
My father hushed my sobs when he learned what I had done, but still I ached with guilt
and shame. He couldn’t fix the broken coupling, so the train was packed away, where it would
remain for many Christmases to come. Every year following I see the brown paper bag strewn
with smiling, happy teddy bears that housed the remnants of my monumental misstep, but I
never smile back.
The first and only time my father mentioned the train after I’d broken it, I am fifteen. My
parents had been divorced for years and my mother and I had long since moved out of my
childhood home. My father remained, along with a number of my childhood keepsakes: the
Barbie dolls my best friend and I had painstakingly styled for days before packing away; the fifty
plus Bailey School Kids books that I had read religiously in elementary school; middle school
Honor Roll certificates I had studied so hard to earn. I cry when he tells me they were ruined by
rainwater.
“That roof never leaked!” I assert with as much aggression as one can when drowning in
her own tears. “Not in eleven years!”
My father insists it did, and the refuse was too far damaged to save.
When I can breathe enough to speak, I lower my voice and accuse, “I trusted you to keep
them safe for me.”

3. Hickey 3
My father’s eyes spark in a way I had never seen before. He was always the picture of
reservation, a brooder like me. I stiffened at the sight of him impassioned.
“Like I did?” he suggests, referring to the years my mother and I spent in my childhood
home without him.
“You didn’t have anything you cared about.” I picture the meager belongings my father
had left behind: clothes from the nineties, mostly t-shirts from motorcycle rallies; gifts from
holidays past, stuffed bears, pocket-knives and –watches and –pens; nothing sentimental to be
found.
“My dad’s train?” he offers, incredulous.
My head rolls back and my eyes close, years of guilt and shame boiling to the surface.
“Oh, come on,” I manage weakly, smiling through my misery. “I didn’t mean to break it—”
“I don’t care that it’s broken!” He raises his voice to me for the first time. “No one
knows where it is! It’s gone.” Like me, he’s smiling, but his grin is vicious. His cheeks are
pinched as if he’s in pain; he is. So am I.
I didn’t know the train was missing; I thought he’d taken it when he’d gone. Instead of
saying where I’d seen it last, I say the worst thing because I’m hurting, too.
“You didn’t even like him,” I say of William in between indignant sniffs. My father
huffs back at me, says nothing like he always does when his father comes up in conversation.
We didn’t talk anymore then, and within a year we don’t talk anymore at all. I find out
later from my mother that my uncle had found the train in its teddy bear bag when he was
helping us prepare to move. It had been set aside like it had always been, presumably to be sold,
so my uncle took it home. When he found out my father had been missing it, he gave it back.
My father took it wordlessly, thankless and without hearing an explanation.

4. Hickey 4
My father and I are estranged but I don’t hate him; it wouldn’t hurt if I hated him. I don’t
have him anymore, so I hold close what I have left of him: a birthday message, a love of long
hair, an understanding of why he held onto William’s train all those years.
Sometimes when we lose things, we find something, too.