Last night, I found myself floating in a dream across the grounds of the old school. It was next to my grandmother's house, where I had lived with my father, brother, sister, aunt, a cousin, and her cat.

The old school was a solar system in which my grandmother's house was one planet. Another was the old gym, with the aroma of old hardwood floors, oiled leather fittings on athletic equipment, and streaks of daylight through tall windows. There were photographs of young boys, including my father, his brothers, and friends, some lost to the war, their memories held in this august temple.

Nearby was another planet, the skating rink, where on Saturdays, parents and grandparents would gather to cheer the varsity hockey team. At night, we would gather to skate and watch girls shimmy to the latest Beatles song. In the dressing room later, hot tongues against cold lips, as parents would wait outside, exhaust from their cars steaming into the night sky. Can I call you later, one last kiss?

Across the lane, in the woods at the outer edge of the old school, next to my grandmother's house, lay the ruins of an ancient velodrome from the 1920s. Banked wooden tracks, overgrown but still accessible, made it possible to climb up and, for a moment, imagine a world long past. I assumed this had been a dream until my brother, sixty years later, said yes, it had been there.

Today, the velodrome is gone, replaced by a sparkling artificial turf field, the skating rink by a sprawling athletic center. There is a disorienting presentness, but the ghosts remain. What does it mean that something that was there before is no longer? Is it a palimpsest of history, or does it only live on in the minds of the living, as they dream at night?