After living in six cities on three continents, I have chosen to raise my children in the same place where I grew up (walking distance, in fact, from my old high school). Where once this was the default choice of many American families, in our rootless age, it is no longer an automatic decision. Instead, it was a conscious, specific choice, and not in all ways the most obvious or the most easy.   But it has its advantages.

I have   few specific memories of childhood but those I do have are strongly rooted in Los Angeles-area places.   To visit again as an adult the parks, museums, and restaurants of my youth never provided me with more than the vague and vaguely pleasant aura of nostalgia I might feel for the original Fisher Price Little People playhouse or for the “Little Mermaid” soundtrack my younger sister played on loop for the better part of 1989.   But to visit them again with my own child is quite another matter.   Whole new textures of the city have reappeared to me, new layers of experience and memory, things once simply treasured or simply feared and now seen again through the prism of adult understanding.   I feel as though I have discovered a second city atop the one I knew, and these two cities, one of the past and one of the present, coexist simultaneously for me now, along with a third: the city of the future, the city I imagine my daughter Beatrice will one day see for herself.

Now I remember my parents better.   I remember them in specific locations, like my mother walking with me along Hollywood Boulevard to the bus stop that would take me to school at Fountain and Highland; or my father lifting me up to sit, legs dangling, on the folding tables at our regular laundromat. I remember the convenience store where he bought me apple juice in glass apple-shaped bottles; I remember eating fruit out of the vending machines at Los Angeles City College while my mother was in class.   (I also remember foolishly biting into an unpeeled orange and crying at its unexpected bitterness.)   I remember the drugstore where weekly my mother bought me Golden Books and also the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital where once I went screaming after I injured my eye.

I remember my friends better. Here now are my childhood friends, many with young children of their own.   Many of these girls I first met in elementary school and while I would have been hard-pressed to recall the occasion before I had children of my own, I can recall now with perfect clarity the park where I had my tenth birthday party because I have taken my own daughter there with these same old friends and their new daughters and sons.   Here is my high school friend, now a married man and as of three weeks ago, a father, whom I remember from the long, long bus trips we took back and forth between my home in Glendale and his in Santa Monica when neither of us had a car.   I remember us walking down Wilshire Avenue to the beach before winding up at Canters’s deli, where we’d often go at two or three in the morning when the excitement of our mutual teenage brilliance kept us awake.

I remember what kids remember.   Because while I do remember fondly the parks, zoos, amusement parks, and museums of my early childhood (and the all-night delis of my teenage years) what I remember most and best about Los Angeles are things utterly unremarkable and seemingly random.   Why should I know by heart one taco stand, one bus stop, one street corner, above all the many stands, stops, and corners in my life?   Why is that I remember so well the public fountain in a plaza in Sherman Oaks where I went shopping once with my grandmother, though nothing particularly remarkable happened there?   Why is it that going to the laundromat with my father should loom as large in my life now as going to Disneyland?

I go through my day now with my daughter doing ordinary things and hopefully also some extraordinary ones, and I wonder all the time, what is she going to remember?   The pony rides at Griffith Park, or the free candy at the dry cleaner’s?   What will she see when she comes back to this city again in thirty years time””what shops, what corners?   I feel I am building this city anew for her.   Perhaps a few decades from now, I will hear her exclaim over the spot on 14^th Street where last weekend she met a very friendly housecat, “I remember that!”