I didn’t expect to go this many days without posting, but I kind of got lazy over my Thanksgiving break.

I took last Wednesday off from work, and Matt and I saw a matinee of The Boy From Oz. I liked it more than I’d expected to. The plot is nothing special, and the show would be nothing without Hugh Jackman; even with him, it’s basically just an enjoyable afternoon at the theater. But that’s worth something. The over-the-top impersonations of Judy Garland and Liza Minelli added to the fun — as did the post-show auction of a t-shirt worn by Hugh Jackman, which went for $2,000.

I went to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving on Wednesday night, and I didn’t come back until tonight. That happens a lot when I visit my parents’ house: I get comfortable there, and I postpone leaving until the last possible moment. It’s so cozy.

On Wednesday night one of my favorite movies, The Age of Innocence, was on HBO, so I cuddled up with a blanket and watched it. Sometimes at the end of a vacation I look back nostalgically to the beginning of the vacation. That’s the point I’m looking back at right now.

On Thursday we had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with a few relatives and friends over.

Much of the rest of the weekend was depressing — boredom, dark clouds in the sky, worrying about work, knowing that Thanksgiving vacation would eventually end. Friday was a blur, except for a trip to a local secondhand bookstore, where I bought Richard Rodgers’s autobiography.

Saturday night was better. My parents and I went to see The Station Agent, which has the sexiest dwarf I’ve ever seen, and then we went to a typical New Jersey diner for dinner.

Today I helped my parents and my aunt clean out my grandmother’s apartment in her assisted-living community, because my dad and my aunt have just moved her into a nursing home. We kept passing old people who would ask us whether she’d died or just gone to a home. “Once you come here you never know where the next stop is,” one of the old women said.

Then my mom took me grocery shopping and then home, so I now have a refrigerator full of food once more.

I feel so secure at my parents’ house, and it’s often a little unsettling to come back to my regular life. Especially at times like now, when my regular life feels unsettled. At least I have the nice memories — cozying up with the dog on the couch with a blanket watching movies on TV, eating out with my parents, having interesting Thanksgiving conversation with our guests, falling asleep in the guest room at night listening to my mom’s CD of the London production of “Oklahoma”…

I don’t know why I worry so much about the future when there always seem to be new things up ahead to someday get nostalgic about.

I wasn’t expecting the view.

The PATH car emerged from under the Hudson River and pulled right into the pit of Ground Zero. Through the car’s windows I could see the sweep of it all before me as the car rolled along — the rough retaining wall, the cross-section of the former parking garage, the wide ramp that leads down into the pit. Stadium lights illuminated everything in the early evening darkness. We were in Ground Zero.

“That’s just wrong,” one black girl said to her friend.

The car came to a stop and the doors opened. “World Trade Center, final stop,” the conductor said. I stepped out of the car and onto the platform. It all seemed so familiar again. I felt like I’d just been here yesterday. But the last time I’d been here was on the evening of September 10, 2001, right after buying a new T-shirt at the Gap in the World Trade Center concourse. Back when we lived in a different world.

Now I ascended the same staircase I used to ascend — or if it wasn’t the same, then it was at least in the same place. Here was a better view of Ground Zero, although it was covered by a mesh scrim. I walked through the turnstile, and there was a Hudson News stand, in the same place where the old one used to be.

And then those escalators.

That tall, tall bank of escalators. I used to run down those steps, two at a time, late at night, hoping to catch the next train home.

I walked up them now — the very same escalators as before. Only when I got to the top, there was no concourse. No stores. There was just a big concrete space, the breeze blowing in through the scrims, and a sign pointing to the N/R/W and A/C/E trains.

But I could see where everything used to be. I could see the Warner Brothers Store, with its big statues of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I could see J. Crew, and the HSBC branch, and the cell phone kiosk, and the Gap, and Duane Reade. I could see them. But they weren’t really there. Ghosts, all of them. I felt like I was standing inside a matrix, inside a blueprint. This wasn’t real.

I walked up the final set of stairs and out onto Church Street. And there, a block away, was the subway station for the A, C, 2, 3, 4, 5, J, M, and Z trains. Blue, red, green, and brown circles. A beautiful rainbow of subway connections.

A seven-minute ride across the Hudson and I can once again hop onto almost any subway line I need. I can easily go anywhere in the city again.

It’s just like it was before.

Well, no, it can’t be just like it was before. That will never be possible.

But it’s as back as it can be.

Yesterday Matt and I went to one of my favorite places in the city: the Panorama of the City of New York, located in the Queens Museum of Art, right across from the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. We took the 7 train — riding through Queens, past Jackson Heights, where my dad grew up and where I used to visit my grandparents, and continuing all the way out almost to the end of the line.

The Panorama of the City of New York is a huge scale model of the entire city. All five boroughs. Models of every building, every street, every park, every bridge — everything. Even all the random islands: Roosevelt Island, Governor’s Island, Ellis Island, Randall’s Island, et cetera. You really have to see it to believe it.

It’s contained in a big room, and there’s a walkway around the perimeter, so you can take your time and examine the city from any angle. It’s a great lesson in New York City geography. You enter on the Manhattan side, and as you make your way counterclockwise around the perimeter, getting further away from Manhattan, you realize just how small a part of New York City Manhattan really is. From the southern tip of Staten Island, the Financial District is so far away; once you’re out at the far reaches of Queens, Manhattan’s skyscrapers look even tinier. What’s also striking is that Manhattan is really the only part of the city with tall buildings; most of the rest of the outer boroughs is a vast valley of residential areas.

There’s even a tiny model of the Queens Museum of Art itself — the very building in which you’re standing. I’d like to think that inside that tiny museum is another tiny panorama of the city, containing an even tinier model of the museum, containing an even tinier panorama…

Anyway, a visit to the Panorama is a trek, but I think it’s a mandatory visit for anyone who loves and cares about New York.