“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” a small brown-skinned man in a bright orange jacket greeted us as if we were walking into his living room and not onto a cracked sidewalk under a lowering sky. The street was lined with brick row houses, some with boarded windows that looked like blackened teeth. He stuck out his hand, pumped my arm.

“Where are we?” my 12-year-old son Tommy leaned over and whispered in my ear as I smiled and nodded and said hello in return.

It was a fair question. We had only been in the car for twenty minutes, headed a dozen miles up the Interstate from our home in Newark, Delaware to Wilmington, a place that was not supposed to be unfamiliar. In the annals of our traveling family, this was hardly a blip. In fact, I take Tommy and his 10-year-old brother Teddy to Wilmington every week to a tree-lined street for their music lessons. Sometimes we go out for ice cream before or dinner afterward, just a mile or two from where we now stood. Just a mile or two – and an entire world – away.