My father drove us—my mother, older brother and me—to the station early Friday morning on his way to work. He was a small-town, general practice lawyer, and I knew he was going to court because he wore a suit and tie. The three of us were going to Brooklyn on the Long Island Railroad from our home in Huntington, a small farming and fishing community, forty miles from New York City. It was 1952.

My brother and I went as close to the tracks as we dared. We bent forward, turned our heads left, toward the east from where the train came. The first thing we saw—and shouted: “I see it”—was the sun-like light glaring from the front of the black steam locomotive. It was magic to us when that light suddenly became the whole engine. We could now see it advancing upon us. And suddenly again, it was there. We jumped back.

The locomotive’s pistons halted, the wheels whistled to a stop. The engine hissed out a cloud of steam. Lost in it for a second, we were secure in our mother’s hands. The steam cleared. We boarded the train to Brooklyn, going back in time to Russia in 1900, to Rogachov, near Minsk; to Odessa and its Jewish gangsters; to Kishinev in Bessarabia, the places my grandparents brought with them when they came to Ellis Island. We were going to a place where my grandparents and aunts spoke Yiddish, where they ate borscht, flanken and rye bread, where there were samovars they had carried with them from home because they would drink tea in Brooklyn as they always had before. We were going back to the house my mother grew up in, the house President Roosevelt saved from foreclosure; where sister Sarah took her life when her lover left her, where Uncle Hymie lay in bed with ALS; the house where Papa was happy only on holidays.

Back to Brooklyn from where we could easily get to Manhattan with aunts and cousins. There we saw romantic musicals, Gilbert and Sullivan, and plays about heroes fighting for justice. At the Museum of Natural History we stood and gazed at dinosaur and mammoth skeletons, watched with heads thrown back the magic dome of the planetarium, and visited my favorite place of all, the museum store, to get a science thing to wonder about back on Long Island. The grown-ups took us to restaurants following our afternoon adventures: Chinese, Italian, Hungarian, even French, once in a while. We tasted wine.

On Sunday, my father drove to Brooklyn to visit and bring us back in the evening to Huntington: to school buses and friends, potato fields and bike paths, fishing, ice skating ponds, and road houses; and a vanload of unpacked luggage in cerebral attics.