At what age do you stop getting cats? Like, when do you realize that you’ll cross the finish line before they will? It’s an egotistical thing to think about, but it’s a responsibility.

I have a recurring dream about Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. But in my dreams it’s never there. It’s in Vienna, or Cartagena. It’s in St. Paul. Or Newburgh. Most recently it was a restaurant in London, which I visited in 1997. I still remember how grey and not-grey it was. How much the food was not bad and was, in fact, memorable. How the British had perfect asses for jeans.

I mention it because age has made me sentimental in a sniveling way. In London a mist arose on all sides of the fabulous Glass House. My Mom and Dad, both older than I am now, but in better health, followed me on my adventure. A host who looked like La Gioconda explained everything about the place—the forest where the wood came from, the island where the bananas came from, and how the mist from the Thames was an essential part of what we were about to experience.

I don’t like the idea of being in love, but I get it. I wish it would just attach itself to someone else. My Mom and Dad were agreeable to every aspect of the Glass House. You could see Big Ben in the smoky glass like a patriarch over a mansion’s fireplace. How long will I have you to hold onto?

When I dream about love I see the trunks of decaying trees and the lichens on tombstones. I think about Garfield without Garfield, basically. A wound in the most wounded summer.

They served us food from a familiar past, but not what I would have expected—my Mom is a really great cook, and when I cook I often feel like I’m gilding the lily. It takes intensity to be yourself. It takes that and so much more that I don’t have. She made creamed beef on toast that was pretty much shit on a shingle. And it rocked. The armies freezing to death for an empire that would either never be or would be in vain and die an undignified death in the salt and snow.

Candy. It was candy from the concession stand at little league in North Middleton, Across the way from Crestview where my brother and I went to elementary school. But it looked so grown up. We weren’t eating , as the chef ideated, corn syrup crap, it was a Proustian memory (of corn syrup crap.) and my parents played along. It was their work world spilling out into a bigger world, and they were polite about my strange advances into the Arctic. When the check arrived my Dad paid, and we walked out into the mist as if heartache was a banality none of us in our suppressions of vacancy would ever have to know.