It hurts me to look at the few surviving photos from this period. Through an impulsive error I lost hundreds of images, including almost everything from a fourth trip to India. All that's left are the lossy, super-compressed files I had posted to Facebook. There's some component of my personality that can't leave this behind.

The experience was an object lesson in the difference between analog and digital files. No matter how poorly I stored negatives and prints, a half-century later most of them still exist. Water damage, scratches, and dust can all be repaired (more or less). In the digital realm a single button click can wipe out the work of a year. There, then not there.

We resided in Manhattan's East Village until anything interesting had been held underwater until it died. A spray of junkie blood adorned the second-floor hallway (for months); puke and piss from NYU students decorated our front-door alcove on East 10th Street; a young French girl across the hall began to practice bass guitar through an amplifier. The real musicians were gone; only the DJs remained in the clubs. In front of the Avenue A pizza joints—places that formerly slid down the metal gates at 6PM—there were now velvet ropes and bouncers. We moved just to get some air.

We bought a house, the first place we could afford that still had Metro North access to the city. It was lovely, quiet, private; a year or so later we had a kid. Outside her window were trees that shaded her room all summer and a granite ridge that she liked to climb. It was the opposite of the EV.

About twenty years later H lived somewhere else and I was moldering away on a big yellow chair in the living room. A mile away the Applachian Trail crossed Route 9; in twenty years I'd never been on it. Two pain-in-the-ass cars were sitting in the driveway, and we remembered all those years when we could walk to the store and take the subway to work. In Putnam County we were just far enough away to make it difficult to see our friends, a movie at the Film Forum, the serving counter at Katz's. Somehow we needed the tribulation, the frisson, the assholes, the subway. We moved back home.