If you forget something, how can it still be a memory? Perhaps the term “half-remembered memory” would be more logical. Then again, is there really any greater “logic” about memories that are more completely remembered than others buried deeply within misty clouds?
What has prompted this strange reflection? The recollection of a railroad trip. It was a trip from someplace I really can’t recall to a destination about which I am equally unsure. The train-ride, itself, is the prompt for the memory.
It was a Pullman sleeping car. I remember that the facing seats I occupied when awake were somehow joined together to form a bed for the evening hours, thanks to the efforts of the attending porter. I don’t recall if the arrangement was part of a compartment. I seem to envision curtains separating the sleeping section from the aisle and another curtained sleeping area on the opposite side.
I remember watching the dark countryside and occasional bright streetlights passing by the window, and seeing the station platforms when the train stopped, and I pulled back the window curtain. So, it must not have been an upper berth I was using. On the other hand, I do not remember much more about the experience, itself. For instance, how did I change into pajamas before getting into bed? There must not have been any place to stand. Did I accomplish the task while sitting on the bed, itself? Getting dressed in the morning must have been very awkward.
And where was I going? And why? And where did I start?
I know I never road an overnight train between Ohio and Ithaca. I always drove the New York Throughway from one place to the other. Besides, why would I have been in a sleeping car if that had been the route for this excursion? It would have been much too short a journey for a sleeper.
I also know it was not for a trip between Oregon and Washington, D.C. I made my first airplane ride for that occasion. When we lived in the area of Bethesda, Maryland, and I worked for the federal government, all of my travel was out of the National Airport (now called the Reagan National Airport.)
Life in Amherst introduced me to Peter Pan, the bus system used throughout New England. I often rode with Tinker Bell to Bradley Field in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
Logic would, therefore, suggest that my strange nighttime train was from Hanover, New Hampshire. Actually, it would have been White River Junction, which was the only place large enough to have public transportation out of the region.
My destination, tucked in some corner of my memory, might have been Louisville, Kentucky, the home of the University of Louisville School of Medicine. I vaguely recall I applied for a professional position there, near the completion of my postdoctoral work at Dartmouth Med. The results of the trip were so non-apparent that the surrounding events have made no permanent impact on my memory. In response to a job application, I probably gave a seminar presentation of my research, the usual requisite for an academic appointment at the time. No doubt the Biochemistry faculty in Louisville were unimpressed with whatever they heard and saw from me.
Getting a teaching position at the college level was not easy at the time. I really did not want to venture back to the Academic Auction block I had mounted when seeking that postdoctoral position at Dartmouth. Most opportunities resulted from word-of-mouth with friends and colleagues. Lucile Smith, my mentor at the time, favored my going to Amsterdam in The Netherlands, with her friend, E.C. (Bill) Slater, an internationally known biochemist. Karen and I thought a lot about the value of undertaking European postdoctoral research for my career development, but when I mentioned the possibility to my mother, she strongly suggested that her death would have been imminent, had I made that choice. In the long run, she found Oregon more acceptable, at 2500 miles, than The Netherlands, at 4000 miles.
So, we went to the Pacific Northwest for two years. The outcome of my life would have been very different if my employment locations had been different. The path from Ohio to New York, New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Amherst and, finally, Houston has been an exciting one. Perhaps, if the choices had been slightly different, I would have a deeper memory of that Pullman sleeper from somewhere to somewhere else. Instead, it remains a half-forgotten memory.