I remember visiting my old block.

I hadn’t been back in more than 20 years, but I was back in LA for a high school reunion, and I begged my then-girlfriend to drive me to my old house. I had planned this trip out meticulously; who I’d see, what I’d eat, things I needed to reconnect with after a long time away from the place I was born and raised.

We parked across the street from my old house, in front of a neighbor’s house which had housed a lot of the kids I played with from ages 6-16. Their house was up for sale, I could see, but the lawn I used to roll down was still evident. I resisted the urge to roll down said hill at my age and looked across at my old place.

I took pictures to send to my mother, so she could see that they cut our cypress trees. Had taken down our basketball rim. That our lawn now had a bunch of kids toys on it. I crossed the street, wondering how I could play football on it. This wasn’t the wide avenue of my childhood, it couldn’t be.

We left there, and I was…sad. Sad not for what was, but for what wasn’t. My childhood home now had a family in t I didn’t know making their own memories, and any hint or trace that we were even there was gone.

Evanston, Illinois, has a special place in my heart. Besides going to college there, a lot of my formative memories as a young adult were made there. I met some great people, did a lot of things in an environ that was a great incubator for me.

It’s also where my wife was born and raised, and after we got together, she shared with me a lot of Evanston I had previously been unaware of. The history of its interracial marriages. The mixing made possible by their high school. The places she’d go I had never heard of or couldn’t make it to because I had no car.

And in Evanston were her parents, still living in the same house that she and her two sisters were raised in. It was tiny by any standard, but we’d go once a month to visit her mom and dad and eat and talk and laugh with them, and small or not, I could see that house for its charm and the love contained within its walls.

A lot has happened since then; that may be an understatement.

The house was sold to another family making their own memory. The parents’ bodies are committed to the earth, memory still aflame in the personage of those they lived by and worked with.

We were talking the other day, my wife and I, and she mentioned that she had to go get an emissions test, and she was going to go the Evanston one, since it was off the beaten track, not many people know of it, and it takes less than 20 minutes.

She sighed, and said “There’s no one left to visit up there anymore.” And we got incredibly sad.

Trips to do stuff on the north side of Chicago or on the North shore was an excuse to drop by and see her parents. Even as they endured their last physical days, were still in the area making hospital visits and runs to their senior living apartment.

Now, no more. Her folks weren’t there any more. Her house was someone else’s house.

We’re not one to visit their graves often, and all the business that we had to take care of is long settled. What now? What is there besides memories, the old joyful ones drowned out by newer, rawer, sadder ones?

What is there?