“Your Uncle Max isn’t quite there.”

My mother would snigger into her pear and walnut salad (low fat dressing). Prattle on about The Kids (who weren’t quite kids anymore), The Boss and That Damned Economy, in between forkfuls of Martha Stewart K-mart collection cutlery. And occasionally she would make fun of her older brother.

I learned to recycle anecdotes. College-is-great-no-I-haven’t-declared-a-major-yes-it-does-get-cold-in-Chicago. The sun bounced off my father’s wristwatch in broken rainbows as he jiggled it tactlessly. We conjured up false promises through small talk and Cole slaw, piled back into the Subaru, and made a mental check mark next to “mandatory family gathering.”

Uncle Max would stand in the corner. He wouldn’t play his banjo but he would hold it—cradle it or something—overstuff two paper plates and never quite look you in the eye. He would fulfill the role of zany, unhinged relative, we would all giggle mechanically and life would rotate the same old circles. Simple.

There was something kind of tragic about Uncle Max. Beneath the grizzled hair, the bemused grin, there was a man trapped in another era. Max was pining for acid-trips, countercultural communes and outdoor concerts. He craved the Haight but he was trapped in suburbia. The present—iPhones, reality television, apathy—was pitiable. The past was supreme.

But it’s laughable, isn’t it? To claim some covert connection with an aging hippie. And yet (probably erroneously) I crafted this intuitive, unspoken bond. You see, secretly I claimed to “get” Uncle Max. I, too—in my own naive, tenuous way—was nostalgic for a nebulous former time.

No, I didn’t grow wistful with visions of eggnog or Easter baskets or candlesticks. For the most part I hated holidays. There was something inevitably trite about the idea that an arbitrary mark on a calendar could automatically dictate happiness. What I missed was much more trivial, unpleasant even. I was nostalgic for things like the beginning of college, when I was scared silly and all impressionable and foolish and lost. I wanted to return to childhood, but just to remember what it felt like to have faith in Hollywood and happenstance. To shudder when someone said “shit” and to be afraid of the dark and the dark alone.

“This is too much.”

My mother chuckled sheepishly, her dinner-party laugh. Switched the track number on the Subaru’s C.D. player. Perhaps Dylan sparked recollections of her UNH years, her own compilation of memories. Unlike my father, who reveled in the opportunity to spin cherished yarns about his zany roommate Mertz or his semester studying in Bologna, her past proved hazy. She had been younger than I, a stick-thin, straw-blonde seventeen-year-old awkwardly skidding toward independence. The car nudged forward, raindrops ricocheting off the trunk door of a mustard-gold Camry. She put the windshield wipers on. Had she ever been close with Max?

He was stuck. The sixties seemed buoyant and syrupy and noble, but the 2000s were uninspired. His brain churned out Beatles’ lyrics and Jack Kerouac quotes: “What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye.” Or maybe it wasn’t the era he missed at all. Rather, Max was itching for a former self. Possibly youth, or possibly just the person he once was, in all his callowness, with all his flaws.

I idly toyed with my seat belt, considering. Because of course this was merely speculation (presumptuous too). Unless one calculates companionship by the accumulation of petty formalities, I didn’t really know Uncle Max at all. I didn’t really know any of them.

But it made me feel a little restless inside—like limp feet peaking through the cracks of a balcony—when I met that glazed expression, that jaded stare. I couldn’t help but think I was staring at myself.