The house is not for sale
May 2, 2026
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 movement in long running, long distance stories, the thing which for me had clearly happened, namely the atrophy of a home, into an address, a floor plan, a count of square meters, reports on the foundation, abestos (removed), all packaged in a series of photographs by a visitor who stood in corners with a tripod where I generally forget to dust. My cousin sent a link to my childhood home. . 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 uptake lately. I dream in that house. Its 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 real estate ad looked like a discount sale at Target. I'm asked every day, multiple times per day, if I'll be moving back. It's been that way since I put the house for sale. I've been in the Netherlands for 14 years. Back where? Do you realize what happens to anyone 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, but he best shut up. Take this with a grain of salt, the rim of a margarita glass, but on the same evening my cousin wrote me, my childhood buddy did the same. Buddy. That's exactly how he opened the message. The he mentioned his sister by name, who I haven't seen in 33 years, then straight to his side hustle. Landscape stone, from the NC coast to western Mass, half the price of his competitors, just needs a website. Am I game? Sure, of course. Buddy. New Year's Eve, 2001 was the last time I saw him. My memory, normally devoid of architectural detail, provides a firescape under the window he jumped out of on in Montreal. Whether that's recollection or logic, I couldn't say, but he's alive. Alive, stones in tact. In the same same year, I met Graham, and for twenty-five years he was the one who remembered details. He traveled more, came to me, made the effort. The small image chosen by my photo archive app is him on his twenty-fifth birthday, when he had rented a house in Napa, near French Laundry. The others went there with notebooks and good clothes, like well dressed kids from Bible study. I stayed behind. In the picture he's wearing a single-breasted blazer with gold lurex pinstripes, a garment completely him that it seems unlikely he ever took it of. Behind him, back to the camera, is Kim; and somewhere outside the frame is her husband, Peter, who broke the news the morning Graham died. He was there for the fortieth birthday in Italy. We called it , 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 it arrives with two names attached to it, a small disturbance, one beginning and one absence. Graham was married in 2017 at the in San Francisco. It had opened in 1907, the same year the house in Haarlem was built, and because dates seem to echo -- why we do we look for an echo? -- 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 money 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 later forgotten, but his wife reminded me later 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 . 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 it that sticks in memory, when the tour bus sings Tiny Dancer. I love that scene. I love Penny Lane. I love that little thing she does with her hand. -- I have to go home Count the headlights on the highway -- You are home Pretty-eyed, pirate smile You'll marry a music man