The Long Way Home

Happiness

After my mother graduated high school in 1969, she got her first taste of independence: a front desk job at the Hilton downtown and a two-bedroom apartment with four other young women. She talked so much about those times in the last years of her life that she became mired in nostalgia, happiest lost in memory. Recently I found the photos in this post among her albums, and I try to match the stories she had told us over the years with the people in them: parties full of weed and wine, wearing micro-mini skirts to work, dancing late at a club called 2000 (I think) over in the North Side – eventually meeting my father at the Wooden Keg, now a Dunkin Donuts. I never had a god-like illusion of my parents that others may have had about their own; they had always been refreshingly — sometimes painfully — human.

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