Fresh memories.

March 3, Dallas.

Ten days in New York, staying at my friend's Kristine in Jersey City to be exact, revisiting nostalgia, the suburbs where her parents live, and where I lived with them for some time over a decade ago, filled with longing in every imaginable form; the diner where we ate, Kris and I, during those months, she at her first job out of college at a company that, she just happened to be commenting with her parents over dinner the Sunday after I arrived this time around, no longer exist in the building I remember, and might not be existing at all anymore, that part of the conversation seems to have been lost in my memory; the route that we took, commercial and sometimes sordid and then vital and always busy as ever, the motley streets of Jersey City, which I remember cold and gray and still were because I always manage to visit in the dead of winter; the train ride into the city.
The ride was an altogether new experience for there was Nicolas, a few days shy of eleven months old, not walking yet, opening his eyes onto the great urb from the enviable vantage point of a stroller. For us it meant cumbersome folding and unfolding of the aforementioned stroller, up and down stairs not meant for anyone other than the fashionable and fast and lithe. The trips were framed by Nicolas' naps, and short. A much-anticipated trip to the Jersey shore felt like little more than driving there, walking down a hundred yards of boardwalk (exactly where, I discovered to my delight afterwards, watching the DVD, the dream episode in the fourth season of The Sopranos was shot,) practically running back to the car the wind was so cold, and driving back.
Short but good, invigorating and fulfilling, as I'd hoped it would be. This was my "vacation" from the 24-hour job of taking care of Dylan and Nicolas, and it had everything I'd wished for: the destination of my dreams, good friends, lots of time to read, see, think. Kris and I have known each other since her junior year at the University of Georgia in Athens, where she was majoring in art history and I an exchange student in the French department teaching beginning French. This was 1989; we've been friends ever since in spite of distances and time and the different worlds we live in.
Earlier today Nicolas and I flew back to Dallas, and left sunny skies and warm temperatures for rain and sleet and a damp cold. Fridman picked us up in one of don Sandro's typical cars, a 1995 Jaguar that has seen better days, and in this case lacks heater and defogger, leaving us to drive through the highways of the city at peak traffic hours as through a fogged-up water mask. This was the second time in his life that I left Dylan, the first only for two days when I had to go to Paris to pick up my visa at the American embassy; he was 13 months old. It was hard leaving him this time around; the trip almost got canceled. At the airport when I came back he saw me and froze, seemingly unsure what to do, then he started to smile, but it was the shadow of a smile, a smile of disbelief, and all my pent-up guilt over leaving him rushed back and slapped me. It lasted forever, that shy impression of a smile. When I finally took him up in my arms he held me tight, hard. These are all my own feelings; his I will never know, the guarded secrets of childhood. I cannot fathom now ever having left him.