There came a moment, early in that screening of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, when, seated beside my sister in the theater, something shot straight through my synapses and neurons, vaulting me back to a certain summer day in the late 1970s when, like the new movie’s protagonist, I sat in the back seat of the family car, my head turned and my eyes fastened on the rapidly-receding view of what had been, as long as I remembered, my home block. But standing in place of Margaret’s sadly-waving paternal grandmother, Sylvia Simon in Manhattan, were my own father’s parents, outside our neighboring apartment buildings on our quieter South Brooklyn street.

This moment was, of course, what they wanted; what they had hoped and worked and struggled for from the time they were young, lonely, twenty-somethings who’d each fled Nazi Germany for New York. They’d met in their new city, married there, became parents, and raised their son—like Herb Simon, an only child—to become the family’s first college graduate; the first to work a white-collar job; the first, now, to purchase a small house in the New Jersey suburbs—in a town that no less estimable a source than The New York Times had pronounced home to one of the area’s very best public-school districts—a house where the moving van was already headed and now, as the car carried us down the block and the turn signal began to click, where my parents, sister, and I were headed, too. It was what they wanted; what we all wanted. (My sister and I would have our own rooms! And a backyard, complete with a promised playhouse!)

And yet, like Sylvia Simon, our grandparents had been infinitely more than just our neighbors. Something precious was lost that day, even as much was gained. Our lives were opening, yes. But a chapter was closing, too. As with Sylvia and Margaret, the not-vast distance could be managed, and would be managed, even in that era long before FaceTime, and even if, like Sylvia, my grandparents didn’t drive. But in that on-screen moment, my heart hurt, again; pressure built behind my eyes; and, forty-five years after we shared that backseat and drove away, I nearly reached across the armrest to grab my sister’s hand.