Packing up the household for a recent move, I was delving into shoeboxes, photo albums, and file folders that had not been opened in decades. One of my discoveries, found in an envelope at the back of a file drawer, was the paper sleeve from a drinking straw, imprinted with a saccharine message: This flimsy slip of paper seems like an odd scrap to preserve for the ages, but when I pulled it out of the envelope, I knew instantly where it came from and why I had saved it. The year was 1967. I was 17 then; I’m 71 now. Transposing those two digits takes just a flick of the fingertips. I can blithely skip back and forth from one prime number to the other. But the span of lived time between 1967 and 2021 is a chasm I cannot so easily leap across. At 17 I was in a great hurry to grow up, but I couldn’t see as far as 71; I didn’t even try. Going the other way—revisiting the mental and emotional life of an adolescent boy—is also a journey deep into alien territory. But the straw wrapper helps—it’s a Proustian