As much as we would like to be the people who keep a journal of their dinner parties, or have a guest book, we just aren’t. Believe me, we have bought lovely blank books for just such occasion. There might be an entry, or 8, over the course of 10 years…but there is nothing done ...

When I was a kid, we had one small box of family photographs. It was bright red and we used to pull it out all the time — to flip through the pictures of my parents in Honolulu or Acapulco, looking tan and younger; and my brothers and I as infants, then at Disneyland, then ...