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Side track: my father led a fascinating life filled with art photography, furniture making, and French cooking. So why did he spend his final years building toy trains in the attic?

Article Excerpt
It took my sister and me just two hours to demolish my dad's train set. My mother went off to see him at the nursing home, and Julie and I got to work on the attic room. What else did we have to do, waiting for our father to finally die? [paragraph] He'd been dying for a while, losing pieces of his essential self to Parkinson's, first the physical, then the mental. Dementia--F. William Nelson had left the building. He wasn't the man we'd grown up with, and that made it easier to accept his final passing. We'd become accustomed to his disappearing, to finding less and less of him there when we visited. He'd already moved out of the house, never to return, so dismantling his train set didn't seem like aviolation. [paragraph] It had once been an elaborate affair, consuming a great deal of basement real estate, two or three different lines running at different strata around the room, backdrops made of plywood and painted to resemble mountains, a city of plastic buildings, populated by tiny people--laundry ladies, rake-bearing farmers, children at a bus stop--around whom the trains would swoop, synchronized and stylish, lit up and puffing smoke. There was a line from the thirties, one from the forties, one from the fifties, and my father their conductor, a man who'd also moved through those decades, always abreast of the current trends, always, in fact, ahead of those trends.

But over the years, as his mind grew messier, the train set also grew dissipated and odd. It moved to the attic, the backdrops fell away, the little buildings got broken, the three levels were reduced to one. Eventually, all he really did was connect pieces of track and work endlessly to make a single car move. "Fine motor skills,"...

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