The title comes from a favorite saying from a long-time reader back in the day, and I recalled it for a couple of reasons.
First, I learned that a favorite coffee house I used to frequent as a med student had shuttered back in 2022. It was a place where Robin Williams had once been spotted grabbing a pick me up after visiting a nearby comics store (I never saw him, although at a favorite crepe place across the street I once spotted Winona Ryder, in town for a film, an arrestingly beautiful pixie that made me lose the power of speech).
This was the place where I spent countless afternoons writing letters on what was then considered a state of the art PC laptop to a friend from my high school years - to this day my only reliable lifelong correspondence, if somewhat interrupted by child-rearing.
High ceilings, visible pipes and exposed beams, slightly industrial vibe. When I think back, it was not a particularly distinctive decor. It was a place where slender female baristas provided caffeinated solace from a particularly lonely time in life - the clinical rotation years when, schedule offset from my classmates in such a way that we seldom made social plans together, there was ample time alone with my thoughts.
A professor from med school whom I still call every month or two used to have an annual spiritual practice that took him to a Trappist monastery where he retreated for a week spent in silent contemplation.
This coffee shop was the closest I came to a comparable practice, and there's sadness in seeing a site that represents a vulnerable stage of my life vanish.
The second prompt is exciting news: my eldest, a high school senior, has committed to my alma mater for next year.
My wife, who feels every hurt and every victory twice as intensely as the kid experiencing it, is elated (it is also her alma mater). Her feet have not touched the ground since the acceptance arrived, the eventual commitment by our kid a foregone conclusion in her mind.
Last autumn, I attended my 30 year college reunion. My wife and I walked through campus recounting memories of time spent in now-demolished libraries, paper fights at movie screenings and brief brushes with classmates who would go onto notoriety, fame, and footnotes in history.
(As an example, one good-natured acquaintance who used to make out very publicly with a girlfriend on the outdoor wooden table at the campus coffee house would be forgotten for years, until I read about his bizarre death having been exiled from a cult in the Arizona desert decades later).
But I digress.
As we explored campus, we realized it was no longer our campus. The true mark that a place is no longer your home - that you've found a dentist and barber in another geography (I cut my own hair, so I'll stick to exclusively the former criterion), has been true for many years.
The ownership of a place overlayed on a physical layout that only partly reflects those memories is a dissonance that you can overlook only until someone else close to you attaches their more current claims to memories of the place.
That's going to happen when my former college becomes my daughter's university. I look forward to hearing her tell her own story and introduce us to the memories she is yet to make.
I write this as she and I sit side by side in a local coffee house, and there's a defninite thrill to intertwining my past with her future.