Last June, I spent some time in the past, as one increasingly does when growing older. I don’t mean I was lost in memories. I mean I was sitting on a beach in Cape May, where I have vacationed all my life, and I was feeling nostalgic about the present.

I wasn’t missing the old days. The place itself hasn’t changed all that much. It is still a shabby Victorian village with white sand, sedate waves, young lifeguards on high chairs, and the same glorious sun that shone when I was little. There are still arcades, T-shirt shops, and restaurants. It is almost exactly as it was in my childhood, even if the arcade uses swipe cards instead of nickels, even if the general store has had a makeover since last year and looks less like an old Woolworth’s 5&10. The movie theater may have closed and been turned into snack shops, but the town is the place it always was.

But there I was, somebody’s grandmother, who grunts when she picks something up from the floor. Also, the sun was making me a little sick, because I am too old to bask all day. There are signs at the entry to the beach that forbid body-surfing, and instead of being outraged (I spent decades body-surfing at Cape May, and it was something I looked forward to every year), I was mildly relieved. Last time I tried to body-surf, I nearly broke my neck.

I remember the moment when my mother got to that age. She scraped her nose one time when we were at the beach together, and suddenly she didn’t want to body-surf any more. I was annoyed at the time. I recognize now how she must have felt to be reminded of her frailty, but at the time I couldn’t understand why it came as such a surprise to her. Surely she knew she was old. I mean, she had always been old.

Now I’m the one who keeps getting surprised.

I’m not alone, though. My adult kid, who is now over 40, told me the other day that they heard themselves say, “Huh. There used to be a gas station here.” I heard astonishment in their voice. The astonishment told me how impatient they were with me when I would say things like “Oh! I used to live here. My house was where that parking lot is.” They are beginning to realize that it wasn’t a delusion I was having. It was that reality keeps changing, often without notice. The suddenness of the change is the important thing, I think. Not the change itself, but how abrupt it seems.

(It was only last week that everyone knew what Woolworth’s was, you know. That if they dropped the atom bomb, everyone except me would die and I would have to figure out how to survive. That everything would stay the same except we would have flying cars and we would be immortal.)

Losing our certainty always feels odd. For instance, yesterday I was talking to two different people who were navigating the break-up of close friendships. They were both offended, and I recognized the assumption: Surely one’s friends are always going to be there for us, aren’t they? How could they possibly get married and stop inviting us over to dinner, or stop asking us to go on trips with them? That loss, that blank incomprehension, is as integral to nostalgia as the surprise.

(How could the boardwalk be replaced by a paved promenade in Cape May? How could the house my grandmother owned now be someone else’s rental property?)

We don’t just say that things have changed, and shrug; we are disappointed. We are annoyed and shocked. We think that at some idyllic point, everyone knew their place, everyone was secure, no one questioned their identity, and that things were nice that way.

We are nostalgic for being eight years old,

When you are eight, you don’t know a few things. For instance, that your grandmother is grieving. That your parents should never have gotten married in the first place. That you too will become someone else entirely. Eight is a great age. It isn’t just that people hide things from you when you’re eight, it’s that you don’t think those things are important.

So last June, I got up from the sand and went to stand in the ocean, the ocean that isn’t as full of life as it used to be but doesn’t smell as much like petroleum as it did when I was a kid. I looked out at the horizon, as I always did, and saw dolphins dipping up and down, chasing fish. Seagulls were mewing and soaring. Families chattered quietly under their umbrellas. It was exactly the same.

I stood there and I cried a little bit, because there I was, in the place of my childhood, and even if the place hadn’t changed, I had.

It’s easier to think that it isn’t us who changed. It must be everything else. The whole world is not as it used to be. If we could only make the whole world go back to what we thought it was when we were eight, everything would be all right again. I don’t actually believe that, mind you. But I recognize the temptation.

It was a nice little cry. I enjoyed it, because I am always nostalgic when I go to Cape May. It’s a nice place. And then I took my four-year-old grandchild to the arcade, which is a truly wonderful palace full of lights and adventure, where one’s grandmother has always been an old lady with grey in her hair and actual wrinkles, and where people give us glittering prizes in return for the points we have earned.