A man thinks about his relationship with his parents (especially his mother) as he watches them grow old. He then realizes that he is now old too.

An encounter with a little boy and his abusive mother at an airport causes an old woman to reflect upon her relationship with her children and her late, depressive, and abusive ex-husband.

An elderly Russian man comes across a young American in a park and tells the young man about coming of age in Russia.

When a mother's memory begins to deteriorate, her daughter catalogs her memories, both the ones she does and doesn't remember.

One Mother's Day, two old women reflect on their relationships with their children--present and absent--and with the same adulterous man. When their paths cross at a crucial moment, one woman's refusal to accept the help of her husband's secret lover leads to her death.

A father tells his twenty-year-old son how he was married suddenly to his son's mother at a young age.

When an old woman sees her son straining to leave to see the world, she remembers her husband doing the same many years earlier. In a fierce battle pitting love against discovery and adventure, she does her utmost to set him free.

Four women–a retired dancer enacting an old dance, a grandmother preparing a birthday dinner for her family, her granddaughter participating in a genetics study, and a researcher quantifying the burden of old memories–all unite under the combined weight of their war-burdened pasts in the contemporary United States.

When a writer and her old writing professor reconvene in a Mexican restaurant one final time before the professor's death, they experience a night of unwanted encounters and unnecessary criticism that leaves the writer with a bitter taste in her mouth.

As an old woman revisits her family's quintessentially American history, she finds a way to respect and love her parents, despite the scandals and tragedies they endured.