The Silver Fountain: A Granddaughter’s Dream

I have passed on my fascination with trains to at least one of my granddaughters. She, in her enterprising way, has taken on the renovation of a small abandoned train station in the town where she lives, adding to it this dining car she discovered sitting on the tracks miles away. It is called The Silver Fountain and although the interior of the lounge car as pictured here has been destroyed, the beautiful silver car survives with its Tiffany door and a few other period details. Not able to afford to replace the destroyed wooden interior, she will use less expensive material but still aims to bring back some of the car’s lost elegance.

With her usual determination, she’s bought The Silver Fountain for a song and arranged for its transportation via truck and hoist to her small train station where she plans to have it installed, renovated and opened as a cafe. It will be part of her project that she hopes will eventually include a community garden, a pop-up drive-in movie theatre and various small booths or boutiques.

It’s an ambitious project that is going to cost her more than she originally estimated—ambitious projects always do—but she is way ahead of where I was in my mid-twenties. It was only after I found my home in the feminist movement of the 1970’s that I freed myself from at least some of the bounds of self-doubt, claimed my money and used it to fund the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Women’s Project in New York and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture at Duke University.

None of my grandchildren have at this point adopted my politics but this may be a question of time; historically, young women are to some degree favored by the world around them and only begin to perceive discrimination when they are older.

But this early enterprise on the part of my young granddaughters—another is a lawyer working on social justice cases as part of a New York firm, a third is embarking on a career as a painter via prestigious art school—gives me hope that the world has actually changed. These young women were not undermined by the lack of family support and the discrimination that made my debut as a writer so difficult; none of them faces the criticism I endured in what was then the largely white male world of mainstream publishing. And they have not made early marriages or embarked on having children although one of my grandsons is already anticipating grandchildren with a pleasure only slightly marred by my reminder that children have to come first. Yet I do understand why the relative ease of being a grandfather might be more appealing than the drastic demands of being a father.

And so the world does move on and The Silver Fountain is for me a symbol of that progress and that hope.

In My Family train Amtrak