The weight of these

I don't know why toys from a bygone era interest me, as a subject. I have always been a fan of history. I like to know what forces were at work when an item came into being. Toys made from steel, like the locomotive pictured here, were produced during the industrial revolution, undoubtedly in an era when some segment of society had enough disposable income to lavish gifts upon their children.

But I also think that these items carry the energies of their owners with them. That just beyond the escape of rational understanding, there is an unbidden understanding in which I can tell about every person whoever touched or cared for this toy, as is I have just seen them holding it. It has a preternatural history of its own. When I see or touch them myself, I wonder about those who held it before and what might have become of them.

In that wondering, the items are not so much objects of steel or historical artifacts, they become part of a rich and fluid drama in time about human happiness and discovery or maybe loss and sadness, about love expressed and reciprocated between parent and child or favor bought and sold. To hold these items is to feel the weight of these, not in pounds and ounces, but in lives that have come and gone.