Of the two signs, the one I remembered was the one I had ordered. I sat in the living room of my aunt's house in Haarlem, where she had lived since 1969. I was waiting for the estate agent. He'd finally make visible, from the street, to the neighbors, to the relatives who expect some movement in long running, long distance stories, the thing which for me had clearly already happened, namely the atrophy of a home into an address, a floor plan, a count of square meters, reports on the foundation, asbestos (removed), all packaged in a series of photographs by a woman with a tripod who stood in corners I generally forget to dust. In the same week, my cousin sent a link to my childhood home. For sale. I haven't seen it since the day I left, aged eleven, although I still go back to Massachusetts for weddings and funerals, both of which seem to be on the uptick. I dream in that house. It's absent of all architectural details, colors, sound, and light, but that's the case with all of my memory. What I can tell you is the whitewashed ad looks like a discount sale at Target, and that's not how I remember things. The question is asked every day, multiple times per day, if I'll be moving back. They see the sign, and ask the question. I've been in the Netherlands for 14 years. Back where? Do you realize what happens to someone in 14 years? To me, to them, to a house, to a country? Of course I ask myself the same question. I also ask the bald man in the mirror about Turkey. Also in the same week, my childhood best friend also wrote me. Buddy. That's exactly how he opened the message. He also said his sister's name, not "my sister" – even though I haven't seen her in 33 years, and she surely wouldn't remember me – then straight to the side hustle: landscape stone, from the North Carolina coast to Western Mass, half the price of his competitors, just needs a website. Am I game? Sure, of course I'm game. Buddy. He jumped out of a window the last time I saw him. New Year's Eve going into 2001 in Montreal. My memory, normally devoid of architectural detail, provides a fire escape next to the club on Guy Street. Whether that's recollection or logic, I couldn't say, but he's alive. Alive, stones intact. And in the same year I met Graham, who for twenty-five years was the one who remembered details. He traveled more, came to me, made the effort. The thumbnail auto-selected by my photo app is him on his twenty-fifth birthday, when we had rented a house in Napa, near French Laundry. The others went there with notebooks and good clothes, like well dressed kids at a California Bible camp. I stayed behind. In the picture he's wearing a single-breasted blazer with gold lurex pinstripes, a garment so entirely him that it seems unlikely he ever took it off. Behind him, back to the camera, is Kim; and somewhere outside the frame is her husband, Peter, who broke the news to me the morning it happened. He was there for my 40th birthday in Italy. I called it Marty's Party, after a collage I had made from concert tickets while we were roommates in 2007, after a Greek word for witness, a reference he caught at once, as I knew he would. His son and I have the same birthday. Each year now arrives with two names attached to it. One's a Pirate. Graham was married in 2017 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. It had opened in 1907, the same year the house in Haarlem was built, and because dates seem to echo – there's never too much reverb – I thought, these two structures have been waiting a century to meet; the gilded balcony, the frescoed ceiling, the cigarette smell and old turpentine paint; it's where we stood in 2006, in my first week in SF, watching a band from Brighton while the city was still a magic of hills, and panic about apartments and future. On the night of the wedding, the billboard read Till Death Do Us Part. That was a detail of his wedding I had forgotten, but his wife reminded me in an email after he died. It fits his humor, and it fits hers. At any rate, the whole thing ended too soon. I've been rewatching Almost Famous, about a fifteen-year-old boy sent out to follow a fictional band called Stillwater. There's a fantastic scene with Frances McDormand lecturing on intuition and the collective unconscious, when she loses her concentration and announces her son, the teenage journalist William Miller, has been kidnapped by rockstars. A great scene, but one you tend to forget. It's the scene before the memorable one, when the tour bus sings Tiny Dancer. And I do love that scene. I love Penny Lane. I love that magic wand gesture she makes with her hand. Like poof, it's gone. Or poof, you're home. Pretty-eyed, pirate smile You'll marry a music man