While here in Palo Alto, I’m staying at my parents house – in my old room, in fact, though by now my mother has co-opted the space into her office, replacing dressers with file cabinets, piling her paper and research materials onto my emptied bookshelves. The room’s front window has been replaced by a much larger one, the overhead light changed, but my bed still dominates one corner of the room, exactly where it sat when I was growing up.

Working from home during the day, between calls and emails, I catch myself simply wandering around, gauging the feel of rooms, of closets, corners and small spaces. Absently, I pick up old knick-knacks to test their weight in my hands, to see what memories might be hidden inside. I crouch to feel the texture of our living room carpet, and can feel again the rug burns from wrestling around on the floor, afternoon after afternoon, with my younger brother.

A few things I noticed this morning:

1. Bedroom Tassel

My Freshman year at Yale, as first semester moved towards a close, my parents and I developed a running joke throughout my calls home. “I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed,” I would tell them, the dorm by then still not quite feeling like home. “Actually,” my father would reply, “we’re taking out your bed. I think we’re going to replace it with a Javanese Gamelan. But you can sleep on top of that.”

There were other, similar, threatened changes as well, and my response to all of them was the same: “I think you should keep the room unchanged, in perpetuity. Just hang a tassel from the ceiling and make the room into a shrine to me.” I was remarkably good-natured about it, I think – I even offered to let my parents keep the money made by charging admission to the shrine.

For a month or two, the joke played on: shrine vs. Javanese gamelan, et al. When I finally came home, dragged my duffel bag into my bedroom, and looked up: hanging from the ceiling was the much discussed red shrine tassel. Apparently, the week before my arrival, my parents had actually headed into Chinatown and picked one up.

To this day, the sight of that tassel makes me smile. It’s a reminder that, in my case, the inevitable turning into my parents might not be so bad after all. And that, no matter how office-ified my old room becomes, with the tassel hanging, it’s still, deep down, my very own shrine.

2. Backyard Playhouse

When I was seven, and my brother four, my father decided to build us a playhouse in the corner of our backyard. He built it himself – technically with my help, though I can’t imagine the seven year-old me provided much actual assistance. I do, however, vividly recall both painting the house’s exterior, then heading down to an airplane parts junkyard in San Jose, where we picked up a variety of cockpit parts (a control stick and wheel, a handful of mismatched gauges) which we mounted to the inside walls.

My brother and I spent countless hours piloting the house to the moon and beyond, defending it from oncoming imaginary hordes, or just hiding from our parents to secretly discuss whatever issues dominate the minds of six and nine year-old boys.

By now, the house is hidden away, tucked behind a bench and a small potted tree. Inside, the linoleum floor is peeling, covered with dried leaves, a few old toys still in a basket in the back corner. My head brushes the roof (at 5’6″, an unusual occurrence!). Still, in there, I can’t help but feel vaguely delighted, ready to head up to the moon, or just to cause juvenile trouble all over again.

3. Garbage Shed

Towards the front of the backyard is a small roofless shed, gated off from the rest of the yard, to hold garbage cans and piles of recyclables. Before my parents replaced their wood-burning fireplace with a gas-burning faux-fire, we piled firewood out there, and the memory of constantly finding black widows in the pile still raises the hairs on the back of my neck whenever I open the shed’s gate.

I must admit, I’ve always been rather arachnophobic. Sure, I can play tough, carry out the requisite boyfriend duty of spider-removal. But the sight of those eight segmented legs always secretly makes me shiver. Other phobias, I’ve systematically, purposefully overcome – I initially took up climbing, for example, to conquer a fear of heights. But I’m happy to stay a bit scared by spiders. Or, rather, I don’t see any need to get buddy-buddy with them – I do my own thing, they do theirs, and we’re cool. Still, if I’m sitting in my parents backyard, and I notice the garbage shed’s gate is open, I’ll always head over to close it. Just in case.

This afternoon, walking in the door to my apartment on the way back from a jazz gig with an all-lesbian big band, my roommate Colin stopped me to ask if I thought we might be willing to adopt Steve Buscemi’s cat.