Watching my kids stand and smile in the same places I did at their ages make me emotional too.
So much of my childhood memories are in Saudi Arabia, which makes it impossible.
But last summer we got to all go back and see the house my dad grew up in.
I can’t remember a summer I wasn’t at my grandmother’s house visiting or at my uncle’s house around the corner playing with cousins.
Standing in that humid air beside the wet grass makes the past flicker.
My dad was a teenager there and my daughter is now almost a teenager too.
I don’t have anything good to say about the quickness of life right now.
In 2009, my youngest daughter, Carrie, went to London for a short visit. She called me from Hampstead to ask me the exact address where I had lived, and then an hour later she e-mailed me a photo of herself, twenty years old, as I had been, standing in front of No. 3 Carlingford Road. A chill went through me; it was like looking at a photo of a time traveler who arrived where her mother had begun, with all the beauty, circumspection, and grace that I had longed for, and strained to glimpse. Today, I can’t sit on a beach and look at the moon without realizing that my life is more than half over, and that the same moon that reproaches me now with my unlived dreams once drew me across the ocean with mysterious promises. My life was changed utterly by my six months in London. I often think that perhaps I didn’t stay long enough, but I’ve forgiven Dad for making me come home. It makes my heart swell just to think of it.
