Coming Home - Christmas Story

The train had left the town he lived in at 9:42 a.m. and would arrive at his so-called home town at 4:36 p.m. on the same day. It was about 11:30 a.m. when the conductor asked for the ticket the third time. Fred gave it to him with a smile on his face. The conductor was an elderly man with short grey hair and a mustache. He probably didn’t remember who had been on the train before and who hadn’t. Fred didn’t mind. He calculated how often the conductor would pass him saying “Your ticket, please” during the rest of the trip: 11 times. Fred laughed softly. Nothing would be able to change his mood today. He was just happy. He was coming home. For Christmas.

Fred had not been at home at all for the past 2 years, hadn’t seen any of his relatives and now they’d all be together: his parents, his little sister Sophie and his two older brothers Charlie and Frank, his Aunt Ann and Uncle Joseph and their daughter Lillian, his godmother Mary and even his Grandfather George. The fact that his Granddad would join them seemed to be slightly weird to Fred. George spoke as little as possible since Grandma Josephine had died 5 years ago. Sometimes he wouldn’t even say hello to his children or grandchildren and he had avoided contact with them as much as possible. But nevertheless Fred was happy that he would come, almost sure that there was a reason of any kind, maybe even magical, a last goodbye from Grandma, which had made his Granddad change his mind and rejoin the family. With a weak smile he thought about his Grandmother. “She was magical”, he said to himself. There was no other way of saying it. Every time he had seen her she would look at him and say: “My dear boy, you’re so alike to my brother. He used to tell wonderful stories, but he died in the war and unless you tell us the stories, we will never hear them again.” He would then ask her, how he should tell a story that he had never heard before and why she didn’t tell him more about those stories since she obviously knew them, but she would simply shake her head and say:”No, my boy. I’m not a storyteller. You are. Just look at the flames in the fireplace. They’ll tell you a story. Or listen to cars passing or clocks ticking. Everything will tell you their story if you ask them gently.” He had never understood what she had meant by that. Fred had indeed watched the fire burning for hours and hours but the flames had never told him a story. “Maybe you’re not old enough yet”, Grandma Josephine had said to that. Now Fred was 22 years old. Perhaps he was old enough now. “I’ll try it again, Grandma” he said, closed his eyes and listened to the constant noise of the train, listened to the train’s story.


The story began in Chicago on a grey Saturday morning in March… 
“Your ticket, please”, said the conductor. Fred smiled and handed it to him, still wondering about the story. His Granddad would be the first one to hear it, of course.