Keeping One, Photographing the Rest
He is moving to an apartment in a city in Mexico, and it has no basement.
Picture a man named Mort, 72, with a model railroad that fills most of his basement. He started it forty years ago with his son Peter. There are three mountain tunnels, a small town with a hand-painted church, and more engines and cars than he can list without looking. Mort knows the story behind each one.
He is moving to an apartment in a city in Mexico, and it has no basement. The railroad will not fit.
Mort spent a month not deciding. He ran the trains once a week, on Sunday evenings, and watched the lights on the little town come on. Peter called from three time zones away. "Dad, I'm happy to ship some of it to me. I just don't have room for the whole layout."
Mort heard that the layout would be broken up, and that the hours they had spent on it would go with it.
Then Louise came to visit. She runs the model railroad club at the library, and she had heard about the layout. She stood at the edge of the table with her hands behind her back. Mort ran the trains for her. When the last engine crossed the mountain bridge, she said, "Every Thursday, eight boys and girls come to us and ask whether anyone has a place for them to run a real train."
Mort said nothing. His throat was tight. He had pictured the layout in a dumpster. He had not pictured it with children.
Then he took the first engine, a small green one that Peter had bought with his own savings at age nine, and put it in his coat pocket. That one would come to Mexico.
He and Louise spent a weekend photographing everything. The town, the church, each tunnel and the bridge. On the back of each print he wrote what it showed and one line about it. Peter came for the last day and took the photographs of the bridge himself.
The thing and the feeling
| The thing | The feeling it holds | Where the feeling goes |
|---|---|---|
| The green engine | Peter at nine, with his savings | Mort's coat pocket, then a shelf in Mexico |
| The layout | Forty years of Sundays with his son | Louise's club, running every Thursday |
| The photographs | The town as it looked | An album, with a line about each piece |
The club now meets in the library basement. Mort gets a message from Louise each month with a photograph of the bridge and a child standing next to it. He keeps the green engine on the windowsill and takes it down once a week to look at it.
You could…
- Choose one piece that holds the most, and keep it.
- Photograph the rest with a line on the back about each.
- Ask a club, a school or a neighbor who might run it.
- Send one photograph to the person you built it with.
What do you have a lot of that one piece could stand for? Tell us below how you chose. A reader with a whole shelf and one frame could use your way of choosing.
Tell us in the comments