Two years ago, I began to remember things that had never happened. I would wake in the morning with these vicious intruders: images and sequences of horrific events, all of them realistic and detailed, all of them entirely false. I knew they weren’t real, but my mind had encoded them as memories, and they felt like memories—traumatic ones at that. I would spend the morning walking through the logic of how they couldn’t be real, proving it to myself over and over again until they gradually faded. Research turned up the cause quickly: insomnia, nights of sleep interrupted repeatedly by my daughter’s prolonged illness, a mind that has always been plagued with particularly realistic nightmares. After a month or so, my daughter improved; we all started sleeping through the night; my insomnia receded, and so did the false memories, but the experience was a haunting one.
A sexy restaurant is one of those things that you can’t really put your finger on, but you know it when you see it. There’s a certain combination of factors — good lighting, a chic crowd, plush seats — that all adds up to a place that oozes sex appeal. But this mood is not the result of some ineffable je ne sais quoi, it’s the result of dozens of deliberate design choices that restaurant owners are making in order to create a space that feels cozy enough to canoodle with a new (or old!) flame.
Six months ago, I flew to upstate New York to bring my 77-year-old father—suffering from a major depression—back to Colorado to live with us and, hopefully, begin to live again. I took him from the only home he’s ever truly known: Ithaca—or, more specifically, Brooktondale. More accurately yet, a stretch of Landon Road, no more than a quarter mile long, where my father had once lived in a converted barn on thirteen acres of woods my family has possessed since 1864. Just up the hill on Landon Road is the large, white house in which my grandfather was born, and the currant bush from which, when I was young, he picked small, bitter, red berries—the main ingredient of his favorite pie—and dropped them into a tin pail. Coming down the rise, where Landon Road angles into Lounsberry Road, a steep gravel drive leads up to the Quick Cemetery. There, from the ages of six to sixteen, I helped tend the graveyard that bore my family’s name.