When I was nineteen years old, I dropped out of the Berklee College of Music, where I’d been studying guitar—the one thing I’d ever been halfway good at—to tour with a band that wanted a screaming lead player, and when that all got too stupid and wasted, I moved back in with my parents in Connecticut.
Every Christmas Eve, my father used to drive us down to Uncle Wayne and Aunt Phyllis’s house: a two-bedroom box in a subdivision backed against the Connecticut Turnpike.
Last summer, flying back from Frankfurt, I happened to look up at an overhead screen while trying to learn my lines in Twelfth Night, and for a second I thought I saw myself in a promotional video for Singapore Airlines, among a crowd at JFK two weeks earlier.
The man who built this house—Royall Brown, 1750–1797—is buried in the graveyard up across the road, along with his wife, his son, and his son’s wife and children. I’ve outlived him, at least in the sense that he was forty-seven and I’m now sixty-one.