Memory is malleable enough to make one swap out brands from formative moments. While I would fret about early onset dementia because I cannot help but do anything else, I realize I settled on remembering IHOP as Denny’s for one specific reason: IHOP used to be ours.
In Hartsdale, a third of a mile from the Metro-North station and nestled next to the Compuage Computers where I fell in love with circuits, an IHOP stood tall like a church on Central (Park) Ave. We ate chocolate chip pancakes and my sister came out of her shell, talking about school and who knows what during an abnormally calm period of our lives before moving, moving out, and moving away. I can recall these meals as vividly as the brunch I had with my wife yesterday, despite being around thirty years removed. (It still remains at 28 S Central Ave, as IHOPs will outlast all of our memories.)
The West Palm IHOP still stands under loops of overpasses and on-ramps. We see it not even two minutes after leaving the airport. The city looks different from a mile away, a bonafide skyline replacing stadium-sized parking lots and tanned granite buildings for rent. The cousins have children now, their parents donning a few more grey hairs. Yet despite the new sheen, the new lives, and the surrounding glow-up, everything feels as it did twenty years ago. We sat around tables in family restaurants and in the dining room of a beautiful home. The restaurants and home may not be the same as they were six, twelve, or twenty years ago, but they feel as if no time passed at all. (My cousin says it feels as if we were there a week ago, though we last made an appearance at the beginning of December 2019.) There are absences, yes, but the dead are remembered by their selflessness, in-jokes, and well-tried sayings. I am about to be forty, but I feel 19 in the best way: unexpectedly accepted, treated as one of the adults without condition, and unconditionally loved.
Flight anxiety creeps in as we leave. A good friend coaches me through it as I apologize for being a child. Then we reach cruising altitude and it hits: anxiety not of flying, but of leaving. Escaping New York and West Palm now share the same agita. Escaping to New York from West Palm means an absence of most family, a notable absence for over half a decade crammed into five short days. I set a price alert for tickets in November and February somewhere over Virginia. We will be back soon enough that it never stops feeling like last week.