I used to think nostalgia was a kind of laziness, a soft eraser dragging across what actually happened. But lately it feels closer to practice; an apprenticeship in paying attention to the ruins we inherit and the ones we build without meaning to. Maybe it’s the museum exhibit I haven’t yet visited but keep imagining, the one titled Genealogy of Nostalgia, that has me reconsidering how memory works. I don’t trust nostalgia’s promises, but I trust its persistence: how a memory, cracked and inconvenient, keeps resurfacing like a coin you’re compelled to flip even though the outcome is already inscribed in its metal.

Frank Gehry bought the lot across the street from my childhood home the year after I was born. I had a back yard growing up and a front yard with grass that was replaced with concrete and a basketball hoop once I decided to transform into an athlete (short-lived). But the lot was massive. It could’ve fit my home three times. Once Gehry and his wife, Berta, bought the lot, they put up a chain-link fence around the property. That fence, along with two palm trees and a large Monterey pine, were the only things that occupied the property in my fifteen years of living across from the Gehry lot.

There’s a breeze coming off the water, here at First Encounter Beach. I’ve fled to the Northeast for a vacation on our long summer break. The rest of the summer I’ll spend at my parents’ house in Buffalo.

In the hazy glow of the late ’90s and early 2000s, when dial-up tones filled kitchens and Blockbuster cards still held power, the average American family earned roughly $40,000 to
$50,000 a year. My father made about half of that. It was enough to keep the lights on, stretch dinners into leftovers, and to make Christmas feel bigger than it was.

Imagine a room from which tendrils of opium smoke ascend to scalloped windows and are set adrift over a flourishing garden in the city. The room is low lit, with soft floor cushions on which a seven-foot-tall drag queen, an Odalisque, lies in repose, while painters, philosophers, and poets expatiate around her on history, aesthetics, and performance art. Here, heretics purged from the suburbs find their natural collaborators. They arrive like those at the great crossroads, al-Andalus, or the mythical space of Rafael’s The School of Athens, where Heraclitus, Averroess, Aristotle, and Ptolemy discourse in robes and unroll their scrolls.

I basically skipped the entirety of any independent adult life I may have had when I got married at 19. I came into adulthood right alongside my husband and my eldest daughter, who was born when I was just 23.

I think about the empty nest often. The house is quieter; cleaner, for sure. But it will never be empty, no matter where I live. Our children will never really leave because they occupy prime real estate in the nest of my mind. They are noisy and messy up there in the same way they were noisy and messy in the living room (and every other room) back in the day.

Confident people warned me. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” They meant it as a cautionary tale. They did not mean it to be wonderful. They did not know it was a portable resurrection