The internet and digital memory place nostalgia a keystroke or phone call away. These memories can be enveloping like a rising tide. I find that when a person exits the day to day of my life that the transition is the hardest time. Because of my unease the irregular is forgotten. Its the routine days that I look back on. Today at work I found myself listening on my phone to a song my grandmother used to request. It would be morning, the two of us sitting across from one another at the dining room table, with coffee and cigarettes. The sunlight through the sliding glass door illuminated the blue smoke rising from our mouths. We would talk and I would stream songs from the internet, whatever she wanted to hear. We listened to young Frank Sinatra and the big bands and Eddy Arnold, puffed on cigarettes, talked and listened to one another and to music. That’s what I miss when I miss my grandmother, not the long days at New Haven hospital, not the smells of the nursing home. I miss those mornings and all the nights we stayed up late to watch the end of the Yankees game together. These memories in my head may be older than the cells that make them up. The days of doing the same things form the groove of a record of those times that the needle slips easily into. Resonant notes are strung together into songs that please with their familiarity upon playback.

When I think back to my days as a dishwasher in Chicago, I am surprised that I was accepted into the environment and culture as I was, a white middle-class guy from Connecticut, unable to speak Spanish, into a group of Mexican immigrants mostly unable to speak English. The first thing I learned was how to sweep with a broom. To wash the dishes and glassware and silverware and pots and pans and stoves and ovens and hoods etc., and to do it well, brought me great satisfaction. The best times were the weddings every Saturday night and the slow Sundays that followed. The hardest part of the job was not the language barrier, not the social awkwardness; my ignorance was blessedly tolerated. By far the hardest part was giving up the routine. That month after I told everyone I was moving back East because my mom had died was unbearable. Juan Carlos suddenly hated me and always wanted to fight. Luis, an old timer and storyteller and sharp dresser, started ignoring me. It was like I was giving up on them personally. The Union League Club had a policy that if you left the job you could never come back, but I talked to Human Resources and they guaranteed that I could return at will because of the grievous circumstances. Of course you won’t come back, the H.R. director said. You will go on to bigger and better things. You will forget about this place.