Nostalgia in New York

I ought to mention more about my trip to New York than just how awful the traveling part was. Here's what I wrote about it in the rough draft of the book I'm working on:

Soon after I started writing this book, I visited my paternal grandparents for the first time in over a decade. (First I had to realize that I was an adult and I could plan a trip across the country on my own, and then I had to save up the money, which certainly wasn’t going to happen while I worked for Kelly Education and ate from the food pantry.) In addition to the passage of time itself, I’d undergone a faith transition, an existential crisis, and my first drug trip, which all may have influenced my perspective. Almost every item in their house, in their yard, or in their garage flooded me with nostalgia, either because I remembered it or because it represented part of their eighty-plus years of life – or even longer, in the case of items handed down from their long-deceased parents. They aren’t wealthy, but they’ve accumulated more stuff than I can ever dream of owning. Thanks, boomers. (My grandparents are a little older than boomers, so they’re excused.)

My grandfather talked a lot about the past. He talked about his childhood, about the people he worked with at his jobs, about what the neighborhood used to look like and what used to be where. I can only imagine how much the changes he’s seen since 1937 have blown his mind. My grandmother, a bit younger, was a teenage girl in the late 1950s and therefore part of Elvis Presley’s main target demographic, and that blows my mind. I kept looking at their wedding photos on the mantel and marveling that they’d been young once and had complete lives and identities apart from being my grandparents. I didn’t exist yet, at least not in my current form, and they didn’t even imagine me. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head.

Close quote. I thought I had more than that. Oops.

I was also blown away by how green and full of life it was compared to Utah. I think I mentioned that last week. Frankly, in terms of beauty, it kicks Utah's ass. It rained almost every day, and hailed one day.

The humidity started to make me physically ill by the end of my stay, but for the most part it was a worthwhile tradeoff for temperatures ten to twenty degrees lower than I'd grown accustomed to. Getting back to my nostalgia and stuff, I obsessively snooped all over the place and opened every drawer or cabinet I could find. In the bathroom, I immediately recognized the black-and-white photograph of a leaning outhouse in the woods that hangs behind the toilet, but then in the corner on a little shelf, behind a dusty vase full of fake flowers, I was surprised to notice a couple of smaller photographs. I pulled them out.

Outhouse at Dream Lake on last legs!

I was like, "Who the heck are those kids?" And then I looked at the back.

Bryan - 9, Christine - 7, Christopher - 3, Emily - 3 1/2. 1996, Dream Lake

Whaaat?

I can't believe I didn't recognize my own cousins. Of course, I haven't seen them in over a decade. I don't remember how long it's been since I've seen Emily. At the time this picture was taken, she was my best friend. Now she's cut off contact with this entire side of her family. Ah, life. The past slips away forever.