A 20-year detour is long enough. — PITTSBURGH, Pa., 9/11/21 It is 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2021, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am driving my 18-year-old son down from our home in the northern suburbs to the University of Pittsburgh campus, to a dorm not far from the elementary school that we both attended. …

Aging, death and the lies of 1980s bubblegum music. — “Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.” — Tears for Fears, 1985 For Chris Wenzler (1967–2020). ALLISON PARK, Pa. Me, right now: standing in the front bathroom of the split-level house passed to me by my parents a decade ago. I glance in the mirror where, each weekday morning between 1982 and…

‘Star Trek: Picard’ concludes by reasserting what gradually became the franchise’s most potent hidden theme: Growing older is something to master, not dread. — From Unsorted but Significant on Substack. “They say `time is the fire in which we burn.’ .… Right now, Captain, my time is running out.” — Dr. Tolian Soran to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, “Star Trek: Generations” (1994) “Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young, Doctor.” —…

In undoing the architecture of my late parents’ everyday lives and deciding what to discard, was I committing a small act of violence? — I STAND IN the mouth of Guardian Storage Unit No. 12104, on a swath of land just east of Pittsburgh. It is a sunny August afternoon in 2020, the height of the pandemic. …

Nature, memories and the lonely death of Jay Gatsby. Notes from the woods on my father’s 100th birthday. — LISBON, Ohio, 9/1/22 There is a vast difference between being alone and being lonely. My father knew this, I think. He was an introvert by nature who chose somewhere along the way to become an extrovert and engage with the world. Exactly when this choice was made, I am not certain. Perhaps it…

Our apartment sits at the mouth of one of the world’s busiest tunnels, and some of the world’s most impatient drivers creep by every day. Here’s how we leveraged the unrelenting noise. — During the second year of the pandemic, my wife, a New York City native who always wanted to replant her feet there, had an idea: Let’s rent a small apartment there in addition to our home in Pittsburgh. …

The house was haunted. So was he. — “He’s dead,” Elise said. “I get it now. He’s the one who’s dead.” She was barely 12 at the time. We had rented “The Sixth Sense” from the Blockbuster down on Claremont, back when “Blockbuster” wasn’t yet an archaic word that summoned a pre-digital era of finding your entertainment at…

You know that friend who can whip up a perfect cocktail and make it look absurdly easy? Mine just wrote a book about it. And it’s not as difficult as you might think. — Shake Strain Done: Craft Cocktails at Home. By J.M. Hirsch. Illustrations by Lika Kvirikashvili. Voracious (Little, Brown & Co.), $25. One evening in the fall of 2004, my friend Jason and I went for dinner at Gallagher’s, a time-tested, high-end steak house in midtown Manhattan.

When the stuff is cleared out, what happens to the stories? — ASPINWALL, PA 8/8/20 2:03 PM Sometimes you do violence to things, and even people and memories, by simply moving stuff or getting rid of it. I stand here inside Fox Chapel Guardian Storage unit № 12104. This truck-sized storage space just east of Pittsburgh where we brought many of the contents of my parents’ house…