I discover America through Columbus, Ohio, my hometown, a town much changed from when I grew up there in the seventies and eighties. The surface lots like dead ponds have been infilled with developer boxes. Buckeye propaganda flies like you’ve stumbled into a strange little fiefdom. We watched football. Em cooked spaghetti and whitefish stew and cheeseburgers for the family, my mother mostly retired from the kitchen. The grass was green. We hit the Y, drank Kirkland coffee, stepped on Legos. I wonder how many more holidays we’ll have like it. Not Christmas, but the week after, that gray-taffy stretch of bittersweet time, of excess. I can’t believe how old we all are.