Coming back to Pennsylvania is a barrage of memories : here's the hotel where your dad lived, the playground where I last saw you before you bicycled naked somewhere the living can't go, my old house with the holes in the wooden floors where my 10-year-old self stuck letters for some future owner.
I recognize everything, though it all seems just outside my grasp. There are "Save Garrett Hill" signs posted on lawns and storefronts throughout Rosemont to, indeed, save "G-Hill," a little neighborhood that prided itself on being one of the last bastions of unpretentiousness in the Main Line. I, too, do not want the annihilation of Garrett Hill Pizza and the emergence of a GAP, but it's no longer my battle. So I stand on the sidelines, watching the bakery workers and the bar owners on the front lines, battling for a place I've never quite understood.
The end of the year, of course, brings about bouts of uncalled for, and much too cliched, nostalgia. At 25, I'm seeing my parents age and watching them witnessing their own aging parents. My grandmother, my father's mother, who once greeted us with plates of cheese and salami after we made the two-day drive from Rosemont to Chicago, is now 91 and can barely hold the phone up to her chin to say she's lonely this Christmas. My grandfather died when I was 13, my dad's only sibling died when I was in college and her second husband died last year. When we flip through photograph albums with her, she almost always prefaces information about each photo with "that person died in..." We all slip away so quietly from this world. We all somehow manage to love and laugh and dance and sob and collapse and almost break and then we fade, waving goodbye to a world that doesn't wave back. But perhaps, just perhaps, it winks.
