Running to recapture 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 to Europe he took with his parents when he was 14, in 1966. She told me how much Nonie loved the immaculate Swiss streets and the planters buzzing with flowers; the fireplace in the house on the hill outside Lugano, where her father was born, with ingenious niches on either side for hanging clothes or heating bread; the palpable poverty of the house in Pozzuoli, a city just outside Naples, where Nonie's aunt had covered the walls with newspapers to better insulate. Every now and then, my dad would take out the projector and show me his Kodachrome slides.As an adult, I spent years telling him that he and I should repeat the trip together, or at least a short version where we went to Switz...