I find myself these days recalling not so much moments as spaces. The layout of my grandparents’ house, my other grandparents’ apartment, libraries from childhood in Brooklyn and adolescence in NJ, college buildings. It must be that so much time spent in one place is making me travel in my head to others.
I recognize that bus, which I saw in the Berkshires some years ago. It was surrounded by hippie-esque types and their children. And I recognize this bus too, which I saw a couple of years ago, parked at an orchard in downstate Illinois. They belong to a group now in the news.
A college exam, in beautiful ditto purple. Readers of a certain age will immediately flash back to classroom “handouts,” still warm and slightly damp in the early morning, an exotic aroma rising from the paper.
Peter Funt: “And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories. It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?”
Writing from memory, I had “The stone’s in the midst of it all.” That’s how I’ve had the line in my head since I was an undergrad. But no. Yeats’s poem reads, “The stone’s in the midst of all.”