I have always had such nights when returning to the Catskills. It is as though I am again seventeen and in awe of all that I see and experience. Each moment is a visit with the ghost of who I used to be, and with the ghosts of the people I knew. When Lila speaks of Pine Hill as a ghost town, she means it is an empty place, a once-crowded village that has been bypassed by the highway that used to run through it. To me, it is a ghost town because ghosts are in it. I see them. They are walking in their toddling steps on the sidewalks and they are sitting in the fold-out lounge chairs beside the neglected ruin of the swimming pool. They ask me for water—“Wasser! Wasser!”—in the dining room of the Inn when I am having breakfast or lunch or dinner with Sammy and Lila. They push hurriedly through the swinging doors leading into the kitchen, balancing trays of dishes like circus performers. They are red-faced at the stoves and ovens, and the kerchiefs tied around their necks are stained with perspiration. When I am in Dan’s Coffee and Pastry Shop, sitting at the table where my bed used to be, I can smell the Marlboros that Carter used to smoke in the bunk above me. I can stand on the sidewalk in front of Arch’s, where Sammy now smashes stone in the name of art, and see apparitions floating in and out of the store.

Privately, secretly, I want to think these ghosts wait for me to return to the Catskills—that, somehow, I am a medium for them. When I am in Pine Hill, they go about happily, being what, and who, they were. They do this for me, I believe, because they know I am aware of them.

Once I asked a friend, a psychologist, about such sensations. We were at a cocktail party and perhaps he was only trying to be clever, but what he said satisfied me: “It’s reenactment. Your mind is simply forcing you to relive moments that were memorable, for one reason or another.”

I started to tell him about Avrum’s theory of the one grand, undeniable moment of change, but I did not. The cocktail party was too lively. No one was thinking about change: they were simply trying to keep up.

It didn’t matter. Reenactment was the word I needed to know, because it was the correct word.

It has happened to me many times.