My dad says the same thing. FWIW, he managed to craft the perfect young childhood for me. I was born in a small, semi-rural college town, moved to a bigger city

My dad says the same thing. FWIW, he managed to craft the perfect young childhood for me. I was born in a small, semi-rural college town, moved to a bigger city when I was 10. This means that around the time I started to become aware of some of the sadness of life (and actual sad things began to happen, like my parents divorcing), I was in a different city. This preservation of my earliest, most innocent time has given me kind of a safe-haven. The town has changed (and so have I), but there is so much there that I recognize and have memories of. I try to go back and visit every few years. Although there's always some sense of sadness and loss (friends I no longer know, family bonds broken, realizing that my childhood has truly passed, etc.), those newer memories never butt out the old ones; if anything, they just refresh them. That's something I'm going to think about when I have kids; how to preserve their earliest happy memories such that they will feel like they can revisit them as an adult to take solace.