I recently told my son a bedtime story, the latest chapter in a wildly popular epic featuring the adventures of space trains that travel the universe on tracks built by a magical, track-laying machine.

In the other night’s installment of “The Exploits of Space Train,” our hero encounters a hungry star in need of a hot meal. Space Train, as it turns out, had a special kitchen in his dining car and cooked up some star cinnamon rolls, star chicken nuggets, star ditalini pasta — you know, every star’s favorite foods — for the star to eat.

The little star eventually was sated, and Space Train and the rest of his space train family returned home, now hungry themselves, for their own meal.

“And they sat down to dinner, and ate their delicious food and talked about their day. The end,” I concluded, satisfied that I’d once again thrilled and delighted my audience.

“Sat down?” my son said, giving me a suspicious look. “Mama, trains can’t sit down.”

So, in the story about anthropomorphic trains with the exact same names and relative maturity levels as the members of our household, traveling through space on magically laid tracks, cooking star food for hungry stars, the big hangup was “trains can’t sit down.”

But you know what? He’s right. Trains can’t sit down.

We are who we are, and if we’re trains, we travel on tracks, and we don’t sit in chairs because we don’t have butts.

If, on the other hand, we’re crotchety 83-year-old former Northwestern University lecturer with a history of cheesing people off just for the thrill of it, we can’t write essays in the Wall Street Journal without being obnoxious. The aforementioned lecturer, by the way, is Joseph Epstein, or as I’m assuming he’d be fine being called, Jo-Jo.

Jo-Jo’s most recently published opinion is that Dr. Jill Biden, the president-elect’s wife and the holder of such title courtesy of a doctorate in education, should not refer to herself, or allow others to refer to her, as a “doctor,” a name he says should be reserved for those who deliver children.

He thinks it’s “fraudulent” and “comic” that anyone who has not slaved over a hot uterus should call herself a doctor, and I guess maybe he’s a little right that there should be a special title for people whose job it is to usher new humans into the world, but until we have that title, OB-GYNs are going to have to make do with one shared by people who write dissertations on education, like the future first lady did.

Jo-Jo also didn’t like the name of Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation, which he dismisses in the essay as “unpromising” — so unpromising, apparently, that he can’t tell us whether he thinks it’s any good because he appears not to have read it.

But Jo-Jo’s latest rant is just J.J.B.J.J., Jo-Jo Being Jo-Jo, and we have to remember this is the same guy who used the n-word while wishing all gay people off the face of the earth. This is the same guy who described female scholars with a word more appropriately used (to say nothing of less hurtful) describing structures that prevent flooding. He’s the same guy who urged both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to thank affirmative action for their achievements.

Jo-Jo is simply being himself. You will be frustrated if you expect empathy from someone without it. Jo-Jo is a train, and therefore, he cannot sit down.

Another train busily roaring down the tracks these days is our president, which, as an aside, has me wondering how Jo-Jo comes down on the relative fraudulence and comic nature of someone whose chief qualification was “reality TV show star” being called, in perpetuity, Mr. President.

But I digress. Mr. President Trump seems of late to be devoted to making real all of our worst assumptions about what his behavior would be should he lose the election. He’s being the most Space Train Trump that Space Train Trump could ever be.

Would Trump reject the election’s outcome, citing his rally crowds as evidence of fraud, conveniently ignoring the hundreds of thousands spraying each other with Champagne and literally dancing in the streets at the news of his loss? He would, as it turns out.

What would be Trump’s estimate of the likelihood that Democrats would cheat to install Joe Biden as president while simultaneously tossing away a few safe House seats and control of the Senate? Strong, apparently!

Will Trump have to be removed, bodily, from the White House, and then jet off to Florida, where he will continue to urge his followers and sycophants (there is, in many cases, overlap) to gum up the works of our nation’s machinery, just because he’s a rotten loser? Only time will tell.

But no matter what time it is on the space clock in the space train station, a train is still a train is still a train. And, like all trains, no matter how much you want them to sit down, they can’t.

I’m going to remind myself of that, when I read news that gets me angry, and also when I tell the next story in the ongoing saga of “The Exploits of Space Train.”

Because I’ve learned my lesson: Trains aren’t people, they’re trains. They don’t have butts, and no wishing otherwise will change that.