She said, Dad, the moon is coming home with us

It is 8:15 as I begin to write this. By now, derspatchel and I had planned to be getting off the Amtrak Downeaster and meeting schreibergasse for late dinner somewhere in Portland. Instead, because the Red Line was a cluster of flail and failure and the taxi we caught from Kendall turned out at the last moment not to have understood the difference between North and South Stations, we missed our train by the grand total of two minutes and had to convert our tickets into a bus two hours later, which we are at least now on. In the intervening time, Rob took me for dinner at his traditional Arisia refuge of Ruth's Chris, so we are also at least now fed. But, man. I appreciate that our travel luck did not run out in a fashion that was fatal to anyone, but I still consider it totally unnecessary.

Portland is my grandparents' city; it is in many ways the city of my childhood. Until I was sixteen, I spent every summer there and most of the major holidays. I learned to swim in the Atlantic, Crescent Beach, Kettle Cove. My grandmother taught me to play skeeball at Old Orchard Beach. When I thought I would still have my bat mitzah at Congregation Bet Ha'am, my grandfather sat with me and went over the Hebrew letters, which he knew first from Yiddish. Breakfast in their house was lox and bagels on blue-and-white china plates, or a bowl of Grape-Nuts, or sometimes kippers that my grandmother fried in the heavy skillet that is drying on Rob's stove now. It had a salt damp smell even in summer and the walls of the guest room were papered with family pictures. A chunk of Venetian glass in the window. Cacti and other succulents in the sunlit alcove by the stairs. The platinum record my uncle produced hung in the hallway between the upstairs bathroom and my grandfather's office, near posters of modern art from the Met. My grandmother died in the spring of 1997 and my grandfather, grief-crazy, sold the house and too many of their possessions, so as not to have to bear a winter alone in that wind-creaking reminder of a home without her. He died in Boston in 2011, Christmas Eve morning. I still dream of that house. I have, twice, in the last month: once ruined, once was it was. But the city stopped being an active part of my life. It wasn't so far from me, but it fell into past. The last time I went back that wasn't for a funeral or an unveiling was in 2009.

So I am going back tonight—later than I had planned, but still going. I will show Rob my ancestral seascape at Two Lights and see how many stores are left on Exchange Street that I used to walk into with my grandmother. He and Schreiber' are determined to introduce me to the milkshakes at Silly's, because they look like an experience. There is a moon the color of warm ivory keeping pace with the bus over the trees. Rob is napping in the seat beside me. Time keeps moving forward. We will bring my grandparents stones from the sea.