Running to resume a beloved journey, before dementia takes everything
When I was a child, my father, who had left the country only a few times, told me about the trip he took to Europe with his parents when he was 14, in 1966. He told me how Nonie loved the immaculate Swiss streets and the flowerbeds that sparkled with flowers; the fireplace in the house on the hill outside Lugano, where his father was born, with ingenious alcoves on either side for hanging clothes or warming bread; the palpable poverty of the house in Pozzuoli, a town just outside Naples, where Nonie’s aunt had lined the walls with newspaper for better insulation. Every so often, my father would get out his projector and show me his Kodachrome slides.As an adult, I spent years telling him that he and I should do the trip again—or at least a short version where we’d go to Switzerland and Ita...