Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”
Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.
I’m pretty sure we weren’t buying £2 candles a few years ago. What happened? The manager at Selfridges was right: it’s something to do with well-being. Lighting a scented candle now forms part of a suite of ritualistic wellness behaviours that include home care and mindfulness. Alongside other fragrance devices, it has its own consumer category: “air care”. Our homes have become shrines to ourselves and candles adorn the altar. As the cost of living rises, they also offer an achievable form of indulgence. But still, why candles?
So why dilute the original Rainforest Cafe’s wackiest, most beloved elements? The restaurant chain itself may be in decline, but on a cultural level, it hasn’t gone anywhere. We are, writ large, still obsessed with the Rainforest Cafe. A veritable jungle of animatronic animals, sage talking trees, and volcanoes erupting from between hefty slabs of brownie, it’s come to represent Y2K nostalgia itself — not unlike the decaying suburban malls where the chain made its home, themselves an endangered species. These days, malls are turning to experiential attractions to bring shoppers in, but maybe they’re already working with more than they think. Maybe nostalgia itself is the ultimate experience.
Perhaps we should start with the dumplings themselves, which are, of course, delicious. Worth the trip. Worth planning the trip around. Particularly the soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, which are — you could argue, and I would — the platonic ideal of the form: silky, broth-filled little clouds that explode inside your mouth upon impact. An all-timer of a dumping.
And that, more or less, is the most you will hear about the food made at the wildly popular Taiwanese dumpling chain Din Tai Fung: It’s great, it’s a draw, it’s the reason for everything that follows.
The remainder of our story begins and ends and pretty much exclusively takes place in Glendale, California — a city of close to 200,000 that sits just 10 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
For a very long time, New York City’s LaGuardia Airport felt like the intricately dressed set of an apocalypse film. Spread across its terminals were abandoned check-in stands gone feral, floors damp with discharged moistures, low ceilings looming over dark corridors. Now, near the end of a nine-year, $8 billion rebuild of its main terminals and roadways, LaGuardia has become an unexpected hero for American infrastructural renewal. It is an incredible airport.
That kid had been replaced by someone I no longer recognized—a stranger with vacant eyes and sores hidden beneath thick makeup, thin as a coatrack. Addicted to heroin and fentanyl. At 25.
I still couldn’t believe it. Shea used to be terrified of needles. She used to be a lot of things—a soccer player, a prankster, someone who sang in the shower. Now I didn’t know where she was or who she was with. I expected a pair of stone-faced cops to knock on our door any day. I couldn’t think where we would bury her.
The only thing of Shea’s that I could reach out and touch was her 3-year-old dog, Hank, a 30-pound mutt who was now living with us. I started running with him at the nearby Middlesex Fells Reservation a few times a week after a particularly low point in Shea’s journey.
There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove,
pouring the herbs into the pot,