The Station That Did Not Move

What memory keeps

When I think of the journeys that ran through childhood and university, I remember the old station, the palace beside it, newspapers and aftershave, and the smell of pretzel, cumin and salt. Friends and family belong to the journey as much as the train does. These details survive with a precision that the timetable has not.

The danger is to mistake the vividness of a memory for a complete description of an era. What I remember warmly may have been ordinary to someone else, or difficult in ways I did not yet understand.

Two views of the same platform

Nostalgia edits. So does the present. One can make the past look innocent; the other can make it look merely backward. Neither gives the people who lived there much room to be complicated.

I prefer to ask what the station allowed me to imagine at different ages. Once, the journey pointed towards graduation as though graduation would settle everything. Later, the same destination looked more like a departure point. The station did not have to move for the meaning to change.

A question to carry

Belonging may include the ability to return without demanding that a place confirm our memory of it. We can be grateful for what it gave us and curious about what we failed to notice. What would somebody who travelled beside us remember differently?