This is the memory palace. I'm Nate D'Ameyau. I spent my 20s in Providence. I

lived in a two-story tenement on the west side of the city, on the other side

of the highway from downtown, and the other side of the tracks from Brown

University and the fancy houses of the East Side. My mom grew up in that house. Her

father did too. And after my grandfather died at 86 years old, it turned out that

his widow couldn't take living there anymore. She couldn't take sharing her

space with the ghosts of days spent with her husband and their daughters, with

her husband's family, and of herself as young broad, that would appear in

every corner, at the top of the stairs, at the sink by the window, in the empty

side of the bed. So my grandmother moved out, and I moved in. It loved it. And not

just because I was 23 and aimless and got to live by myself, rent-free, in this

big old house. I loved the house. Growing up, it had echoed with stories,

endlessly repeated at big Italian family dinners, during the tail ends of

Christmas's with the dying embers, and some uncle conked out in the Maroon

Valor chair. For visitors, for new audiences, the stories were stretched and

embellished. For close family, they were invoked. They were compressed like

mandarin' proverbs, until they could be summoned by a couple of brushstrokes. Dad

in the Studebaker. Mom's broken finger. Janus threw the bathroom window. I loved

those stories. I surely tell stories now because I loved those stories then. And

despite the sheer volume and breadth of memories in anecdotes, the pile up in the

dusty corners of a house occupied by one family since 1914. Despite the vast

quantity of potential material, most of the stories, the ones in heavy

...