My childhood memories of Chanukah parties and family barbecues are replete with “business talk.” My siblings and cousins would walk away; I stayed and listened to the adults, though I couldn’t always follow the details.

My grandfather often started the conversation by saying, “You’ll never guess who came to the office this week.” There was talk of the lousy store manager, the delayed shipment from China, the brilliant buy.

“Isaac,” Grandpa might say.

“Cousin Isaac or paper-goods Isaac?” an uncle would ask.

“No, Isaac from the country!” And a proud smile would light up Grandpa’s face.

Now, we continue driving. “Rising Sun, Right Lane” the green exit sign announces to the hundreds of cars that pass by in a minute. The thousands that pass in a day. I wonder who takes that exit, and if I’m the only one whose heart beats faster at distant memories.

As young children, we’d occasionally go to work with my father. Tina, the secretary with the long red nails, would be in charge of keeping tabs on my sisters and I. She’d take us down to the store, and we’d pick out toys and art supplies to keep us busy. As I got older, I heard people complaining about Tina. She had a bad attitude, she didn’t get along well with people. But as little girls, we saw only warmth. She’d ask us about school and hold our hands as we walked through the aisles of the store.

By the time I was ten, my father moved on from the family business to other business endeavors. Yet he always kept his office there with the family, and the minor detail that our father didn’t actually work for the business never impressed upon me or my siblings that anything had changed.

As a teenager I begged my parents to let me be a cashier in one of the stores. They never allowed it. From time to time, I worked in the office, where I was paired up with Grace, a nice enough bookkeeper whose office smelled like Calvin Klein Obsession and curry.

She gave me long lines of numbers to input into the computer. It was boring work, but I appreciated the paycheck, as well as the convenience of giving zero commitment. I could have a job one day and not show up the next. I’d be greeted warmly on the third.

The stores hummed along while I grew up. And like traffic, high school, and middle-of-the-night feedings, nothing lasts forever. In 2018, the stores weren’t doing well. My grandparents weren’t either. They’d aged and no longer went into the office regularly. They kept their offices, but by this point someone had to drive them in, and they needed assistance getting inside the building.

Then came bankruptcy, the closing up of shop, and my grandmother’s petirah. Grandpa became very sick after that; the doctors said terminal cancer. We knew he was dying from a broken heart.

In an 80-mile-an-hour blur, the sign is gone, and we’re that much closer to the Smithsonian National Zoo.

My kids know little about the stores and barely remember my grandparents. There’s a whole part of my childhood identity that they don’t carry with them at all. I wonder what things will shape their childhoods. The things that, with space and time, will grow to be more important than they were in the first place.

I look at my children sleeping in the back seat. I’m struck now that my memories seem so old. Maybe they were even in black and white. I look over at my husband again — two hands on the wheel, eyes looking ahead at the road.

We’re miles past Rising Sun, and the exit winks at me through the side mirror. I smile.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 790)