I Go Back

Unpacking the stuff I saved from my dad's condo and preparing for a milestone college reunion has thrown me into youthful reverie.

Nostalgia is a helluva drug. The last few weekends, I’ve been unpacking the boxes I brought home from Toronto last summer, when I emptied out my dad’s place after his death. The packing wasn’t really a rush job—I had been methodically taking inventory and carrying away or discarding various things over the last few years—but it was still melancholy to know I would never see so many things that were imprinted on my mind as part of my family and childhood.

I don’t mean important things—again, I was pretty diligent about saving, for example, official documents from our lives in the Soviet Union and immigration to Canada and other mementos marking precious family history, let alone a trove of photographs—but just the detritus of a lifetime. Of several lifetimes, really, because here was the last accumulated store of stuff from my mom (who passed in 1998), my dad, and my childhood. I didn’t have much sentimental attachment to the place itself—a condo in a nondescript high-rise where I lived only during the last three years of high school and part of a summer home from college—but everything from the furniture to the 1980s Hi-Fi system (with the glass door and sweet turntable on top), my parents’ books (the collected works of Pushkin; a gigantic set of Russian-English dictionaries) to various knick-knacks, served as a mental anchor of sorts.