“How are the boys?” my father asked. It was New Year’s Day and he looked thin, exhausted from fighting a difficult infection and bad hospital food.
“They’re learning to swim,” I said. I figured he’d like that. I remember looking up from a swimming lesson of my own, a little boy in a big lake, and seeing my dad on shore, making enthusiastic doggy-paddle motions. He meant it to be encouraging. I just wanted him to rescue me.
Now the roles were reversed. I knew he hated asking for help. So when he did, I went. As the sun rose for the first time on 2025, I shook off the champagne cobwebs, left my wife and kids (Theo, 5, Jamie, 3) on vacation in Florida, and flew to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. On the drive from the airport, I felt a pit in my stomach. They call it the “sandwich generation” when you’re pressed between little kids and aging parents. Was this what the next few years would be like?
Coming into town, I passed the house where I grew up. A lot of my dreams still take place there. It’s been more than 20 years since it sold and I’ve lived many other places, but in my subconscious it’s still home. As I worried about the future waiting for me at the hospital, I felt the tug of the past. When you see your father frail, it’s hard not to think of how he used to seem indestructible. To miss the safety and security of those days.
My dad loved climbing mountains and always wanted me to love it, too. When my boots gave me blisters, or I fell in the stream jumping from rock to rock, or I cried out, “Are we ever going to get home?” the answer was always the same: Don’t worry, Dad’s here. I wish I knew how to give my boys that same sense of sturdy confidence, especially in this unsettling time.
January in Washington, DC, where we live, felt particularly bleak. As I helped my dad leave the hospital, I said, “I’ve been thinking about California. Maybe we’ll move back.”
During the first Trump term, my wife YJ and I lived in Los Angeles. I had spent the previous decade in Washington working for Hillary Clinton, including as chief speechwriter on her 2016 presidential campaign. Losing that race upended the life we thought we were building. Like so many before us, we hoped that heading west would give us a chance to build something new.
There were no kids then. No mortgage. No real plan, either. We talked a lot about wish fulfillment and doing things we couldn’t have done if we had won and were chained to desks in the White House. Let’s live by the beach, we said, and go hiking in the canyons. Let’s buy a Jeep and learn to surf. Let’s start a family. Eventually we found a house in Pacific Palisades. It didn’t have much of a yard, but there was good light and a graceful tree that filled up the bay window of the second-floor living room. We painted the doors and trim a bright Santorini blue and planted jasmine in the back.
After our first son, Theo, arrived, wish fulfilment gave way to midnight feeds and diaper rashes. On one of those stressful early nights of parenthood, my father called from New York. The baby was screaming in the background. I was exhausted, distracted. “Savor every moment,” Dad said, “You’ll miss this.” That wasn’t a sentiment I was ready to hear. In fact, I resented it. This was hard! Didn’t he remember that?
The pandemic hit when Theo was about six months old. Our lives slowed down. YJ and I took the baby on long walks around the neighborhood most afternoons, wending our way to the bluffs that look out over the Pacific. There was a house with half a dozen wind chimes hanging over the sidewalk that would trill as the breeze came off the water. Theo loved batting them with his little hand.
When Theo was 18 months old, we had our second son, Jamie. The first 15 minutes of his life were the scariest 15 of mine. He couldn’t breathe. I watched the doctors panic and whisk him out of the delivery room. Miraculously, eight days later, we were able to bring him home from the NICU, healthy and adorable. I’ve never been so happy to walk through my front door.
When Theo was two, he loved to sit at the corner of Sunset Boulevard, just a block from our house, and watch cars zip by. Parked in a stroller that looked like a blue race car, he would spin the wheel and call out passing vehicles he recognized—a school bus, a motorcycle, or the best: a mail truck! Every morning, we drove a few minutes west on Sunset to the nursery school. You could see the ocean from the playground. And next door, a fire station with shiny trucks and firefighters who would sometimes show a star-struck toddler around.
Living in the Palisades, we always knew that fire was a risk. There were often brush fires in the hills. I had at least three different air quality apps on my phone; it was not uncommon to find there was too much smoke in the air to take the babies outside. One day in October 2019, when a fire got out of control near the Getty Center, we watched nervously as evacuation orders extended to within a few blocks of our house. My dad was visiting and helped pack a go-bag of baby gear in case we had to get out fast. I had an early morning flight to San Francisco and on the drive to LAX I could see flames in the distance. Sitting on the tarmac, waiting for takeoff, my phone vibrated with alerts. LeBron James tweeted that he and his family had evacuated from Brentwood. I stood up, ran off the plane, and raced home.
In the end, that fire never reached the Palisades. And other than my panic attack on the runway, I usually had a hard time imagining the danger would ever really threaten us. We lived in a heavily populated area, not up in some remote canyon. It would take a disaster of unimaginable proportions for us to be affected. It didn’t seem worth losing sleep over, especially when we had a pandemic and Donald Trump to worry about.
In 2021, when Joe Biden took office, our thoughts drifted east. California had initially felt like a refuge. More sun and fewer fascists, we used to say. It became home, especially when the kids came. But increasingly we felt distant from our friends and family on the East Coast. My wife was offered a job in the new administration and we decided to leave Pacific Palisades.
I ended up missing Los Angeles more than I expected. Some of it was the classic lament of the former Californian: the weather, the beaches, the food. But I wondered how much of the nostalgia I felt was for the home we’d left and how much was for the special phase of life we spent there.
In many ways, parenting is easier now. The anxieties of caring for an infant, especially the first time, have faded. We have less gear to tote around and are able to have actual conversations with the kids. They can tell jokes, sing songs, be independent. And yet, I finally understand what my dad had been trying to tell me. I do miss those early moments. I have come to see the first years of our family life as a kind of golden time. It wasn’t just that the Palisades Bluffs were an idyllic place to push a stroller; it was having a new family and the time and space to be together.
When Donald Trump won in 2024, I started dreaming of California again. Moving didn’t seem practical this time—the kids are in school and our life is full and complicated. But I felt the pull.
Then came the fire. On Sunset, not far from where Theo used to watch the cars, people abandoned their gridlocked vehicles and fled on foot. Firefighters had to use bulldozers to clear a path through the charred wrecks. All that was left of our former home was the chimney and the front steps. Virtually every house on the block burned. The entire neighborhood was incinerated. Thousands of people lost everything.
I watched the devastation from a distance. I couldn’t smell the smoke or feel the fierce winds blowing in off the desert. My family is extraordinarily lucky. That house isn’t ours anymore. My children didn’t have to evacuate. There’s no painful rebuilding process ahead of us. But I kept thinking about flames ripping through the rooms where Theo learned to crawl and said his first words, where I sang him “Sweet Baby James” as he fell asleep on my shoulder. I closed my eyes and saw fire racing down our quiet cul-de-sac. I tried to imagine how our neighbors were coping with the unimaginable.
In the first days after the fire, when information was hard to come by, I searched obsessively for photos or video of our street. My wife couldn’t bear to look, but I couldn’t look away. I needed to know. I found myself grieving not just a place but a time—a period of our life that now feels almost like a paradise lost. As the fire burned down the town we loved, it lifted up a reminder: You can’t go back. Chasing nostalgia is a cul-de-sac of its own. Parenthood is about creating the future, not recreating the past. So is life.
My dad recovered from his infection and is doing much better. Maybe the sandwich-generation pressures can wait a few more years. Recently he was out in LA and drove through the Palisades. He sent photos of our flattened street. The debris has finally been cleared from the lot where our house used to sit. I hope something new and beautiful will be built there: A new home for a new family.
Theo loves trains now. Instead of watching cars zoom by along Sunset, we ride the DC Metro from end to end. He calls out station names the way he used to call out buses and mail trucks. He and Jamie don’t remember our house in the Palisades any more than they remember their pacifiers and bottles. One day, when they’re older, I’ll tell them about it.