Somewhere a few blocks past a small minor league field, with Creedence Clearwater Revival playing in my AirPods and a dozen more miles left to run, I weirdly became nostalgic for a life that I had never lived.
The shiplap and brick buildings didn't mean anything to me, or at least they shouldn't have. Neither should the old field tucked into the middle of a neighborhood on the north side of town. I had never been to a Portland Sea Dogs game. I had no childhood memories there. No father waiting outside the stadium, no summer job serving snow cones, no first beer in right field.
This was the first time I had ever been to this place.
But for some reason, accompanied by light chills, I missed it.
That was the strange part.
We had come up from New York City to Maine for Labor Day weekend with honorable ambitions: eat lobster in all form factors, drink beer, stare at the water and, for a weekend, pretend to be the sort of people who know how to slow down and relax.
Archie joined too, of course.
He spent the weekend leading the group to any discarded fries, finding the closest tree to sniff and making his best attempt at a sneak attack on any bird that came within his six-foot leash. He accepted Maine immediately. So did we. There were new floors to lie on and new people willing to carry him around. He had no understanding of what a long weekend even meant.
There was coffee in the sunroom, crisp in the morning air. I was halfway through James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, which is not exactly beach reading, though Maine in September is not exactly beach weather. I would read a few pages, lose my place, drink my coffee and watch Archie inspect every floorboard with diligence.
The weekend was aggressively pleasant.
We ate lobster rolls and oysters like they might be the last ones in our lives.
Large pieces of meat packed into soft, toasted buns with enough butter to satisfy the Odyssey's opening weekend. Within minutes, the table was littered with empty oyster shells, lemon wedges, crumpled napkins and pint glasses with just a few bubbles remaining.
These were friends I had known for only a couple of years. We met in New York, which is long enough to have accumulated stories but not long enough to have known one another before we became the people we are now. There are entire childhoods missing. Old apartments, first jobs, bad haircuts, family holidays, private disasters. None of us can say, "You've always done that," with any real authority.
And yet there we were, passing plates and pouring coffee, moving easily through a rented house as if we had been doing it for years.
The only time I left the group for long was to run.
I set out without much of a plan and followed the perimeter of the city, or what felt like its perimeter, tracing the edges until Portland started to loosen around me. Running is one of the few ways I know to be alone without feeling idle. A city reveals itself differently at that pace. Too fast to linger, too slow to miss much. Storefronts, parking lots, porches, the backs of buildings. The parts no one tells you to photograph.
With no plan, I reached Hadlock Field, home of the Portland Sea Dogs. Maybe it was the brick. Maybe it was the scale of the stadium, modest and tucked into the neighborhood rather than dropped on top of it. Maybe it was the surrounding buildings, which seemed to belong to a version of Americana preserved in an old photograph.
Whatever it was, I was suddenly overwhelmed by nostalgia.
It feels like nostalgia is supposed to be attached to memory, but this time it seemed to arrive first, and the memory was to be invented after. A brick building, an old sign, the right late-summer light, and suddenly you miss a life you never lived. You can feel homesick for a place that was never home. You can long for a past that does not belong to you.
Maybe what I felt was not nostalgia for Portland at all.
Maybe it was nostalgia for a kind of permanence. For neighborhood ballparks and buildings that look as though they have watched generations pass through them. For the imagined comfort of having been somewhere long enough that every corner carries evidence of who you used to be.
Maybe it was the music, or the increasingly difficult-to-ignore fact that I am getting older.
In a year full of change, nostalgia had started to feel different. Less like affection for the past and more like a funny feeling about the future I had assumed would arrive. There was, and I suspected there would continue to be, a melancholy that came with mourning a life I once thought would be predictable. Not necessarily easy or perfect, but legible. A life in which one thing followed another in some recognizable order.
Maybe that was what those buildings seemed to offer. Continuity. Simplicity. Predictability. Brick on brick, season after season, the same ballpark sitting in the same neighborhood.
Obviously, change did happen in that neighborhood, even if the buildings didn't show it. People came and went. Children grew older and left. People got married. People got divorced. Life changed even if the exterior didn't always show it. Change was inevitable, even when it was not visible.
I kept running.
That is the unsatisfying truth of most revelations and simple thoughts that happen on my runs. They are quick but meaningful interruptions. Nothing life-changing, just enough to pull me out of my normal mind for a few minutes.
Then it is back to it.
My watch buzzes. The song changes. The crosswalk light turns to the little white man. The thought that felt important a moment ago is forced to make room for the next mile.
By the time I got back, the group had already explored a few of the lighthouses. I caught them in time to check off the last one before dinner and a few beers.
These were friends without the long archive. Friends who had not known me as a child and could not fill in the missing years. Our friendship was still mostly written in the present tense.
Out on the run, I had felt the pull of an imagined past, some borrowed sense of history embedded in brick and faded signs. Back with my friends, I was surrounded by something newer and less certain. Not history inherited, but history accumulating quietly, without announcement.
There is an almost uncomfortable feeling that comes with missing certainty, or at least the illusion of it, while knowing that the same uncertainty brings us to new people and experiences.
But I had made it back in time for the last lighthouse, and everyone was hungry.