Essays

• In the Fields of Howard Hughes

  I have always admired those who know the names of things in our natural world – forsythia, ladder-backed woodpeckers, meal moths. And not just the names of the living, but what a particular stone is called, or a phase of the moon. In short, they know how the world is made and what it’s made of. It’s a loss not to know. This is true in part because sometimes what you cannot name you are also unable to see. I never knew exactly what I was looking at as a boy, when I went into the world, and I still don’t. So when I think of my adventures in the fields of Howard Hughes, his name is the one I recall. As for the rest, there were trees and shrubs, and rocks and dirt, but that’s about as much specificity as I can provide.

  In Los Angeles, it was possible in those days for a family where the father worked on a laundry truck and the mother stayed home to own a house, and to live across the street from open land. Our home on Georgetown was on a corner. Across 80th, the undeveloped property was controlled by Hughes or one of his corporations. And back then, this is in the 1950s, the white stucco house my parents financed with a GI loan served as my frontier post, permitting sorties into the fields across the street.

  The Hughes fields were bordered by trees that dropped needles and cones. Some kind of pine tree, I know that much. Beyond that, open space, brambly shrubs, footpaths, and a movie set wilderness, with the score provided by the car traffic on 80th.

  It was possible to take a path that widened into a dirt road and hike all the way to what I called the bluffs, where there were jackrabbits, along with a view of Ballona Creek, an inaccessible wetland south of where Marina Del Rey would eventually be built. The bluffs were a kind of paradise for boys.

  None of that, though, is what I want to remember the name of.

  ii

  What is the difference between tree, bush, and shrub?

  Everywhere you turn in this world, there are shades of difference that are unregistered by your eyes. The weight of what you don’t know can be such a burden that the only way to bear it is to cast it away, to throw it like the torn pieces of a lover’s note into the moving stream. Most of us are blind to a world that only the specialist sees. So, what then is the difference between a tree and a bush, and, if that’s too easy, what separates the bush from the shrub?

  Here we go round the mulberry bush, because there is no mulberry bush. Mulberries only grow on trees.

  Some think the difference between tree and bush is size. Thirteen feet or under, bush; above thirteen feet, tree. It’s subject to debate. Others are of the opinion that a tree must have a single woody trunk, with a minimum diameter, and it must be perennial, not dying back each winter and coming to life again each spring. And bushes? They are allowed more than one vertical woody trunk – typically, several of them — rising from a base. Bushes have a minimum height, too, and not just a maximum. Shorter than a foot or two, they might be creepers. And the difference between a bush and a shrub? No difference, apparently. Plant either of them close enough together and they become a hedge, and the definitions proliferate.

  I am searching for the name of the bush or shrub, tree maybe, with purple berries that leave a stain when you are hit by one of them. There were a dozen of these bushes on the north side of the house at the corner of Georgetown and 80th. They formed a hedge.

  I texted my sister, Patti, who lives in Pittsburgh with her third husband, someone she met in AA. Surely she might know, though it has been sixty years since the two of us lived under the same roof in our first childhood home in suburban Los Angeles.

  “No idea,” she texted back, “but I remember the stain they would leave.” A moment later, “Whatever made you think of that?”
  And then, another moment later, she texted again, “Pokeweed or American beauty berry. I googled.” Patti included a link to pictures of chokeberries.

  What makes us think of anything? I had no answer to that. Google, on the other hand, will always provide an answer. I clicked on the link Patti had sent me. What was pictured wasn’t what I remembered. The chokeberries were smaller and blacker, not that wonderful fat purple berry that had left its stain on my memory. The leaves were wrong as well; or, what you could see of them in the pictures.

  Still, she had verified that there were bushes and berries. Maybe we were getting somewhere, even if that somewhere was the past.

  iii

  Mystery surrounding a tree or a bush whose very name provokes speculation by civilians and even the interest of mystics and scientists is nothing new. Whatever the berries were on the corner of Georgetown and 80th–that vegetation that stains my memory, that I can see perfectly in my mind’s eye but can’t name–those berries have plenty of cousins. What was the fruit that Eve gave Adam, which grew in the garden on the Tree of Knowledge? What was the bush that flamed but was not consumed and out of which the divine spoke to Moses? Horticulture doesn’t provide an answer, though there are plenty of guesses.

  So there is nothing new about plants that elusive. Some are legends. Sometimes In the real world nothing can be found of them other than their names. The vegetable lamb of Tartary, for example, has its own Wikipedia entry as a legendary zoophyte of Central Asia. It grew sheep as its fruit. We can be as condescending as we want about the wisdom of the past, but the vegetable lamb is also mentioned by Herodotus in Book III of his History, Thomas Browne more skeptically in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, who wrote poetry about it in The Botanic Garden, published, incidentally, in the same year that the troops led by George Washington lay siege to the British General Cornwallis at Yorktown:

  Rooted in earth, each cloven foot descends,
  And seems to bleat – a vegetable lamb.

  Golden apples, fern flower, mandrakes and moly – the names themselves have blossomed into legends. Moly, the herb Hermes gave to Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s spells, was Homer’s black root and white flower. Grown from the blood of the Giant Picolous, offspring of the earth goddess Gaia and sky god Uranus, it was described by Homer as dangerous for a mortal man to pluck from the soil, though not for the deathless gods.

  These days, science has demoted moly to the snowdrop, a common perennial, but that remains only a best guess.

  iv

  I’ve read memoirs. There are accounts that in their terrifying specificity seem to embody an ability to recall detail that seems almost superhuman, and the even more remarkable ability to have noticed in the first place. Who pays attention to the color of the striping of the wallpaper in a hotel room last seen on an evening a lifetime ago? Or, even more incredible, who can describe what one’s father ate on the riverbank or said to a fellow villager on a particular evening a decade before the author was even born?

  Ai Weiwei is an astonishing human being. But is it really possible in his 1000 Years of Joys And Sorrows to recount that Pablo Neruda wore a grass-green wool jacket in July 1954 when his father, Ai Qing, visited Neruda on the beach beside the town of Isla Negra?

  Maybe it is. There might have been a color photograph that survived internment camps and other captivities.

  I’m just a civilian in the age of online search wanting to know the name of a bush with purple berries that exists firmly in my memory, but so far only there. I’ve found no answer.

  Could it be the chokeberry, as Patti suggested, though I have no memory of the white flowers they produce in the spring, the five petals with a pink highlight. I can’t recall the changes that chokeberries undergo, from green to red, and finally black. It’s possible that a month before the black, they are the purple I remember. It seems unlikely. Surely our berries were not the same chokeberries used these days in smoothies and praised for their antioxidants. Our berries were just for throwing.

  v

  On the list of primal pleasures, throwing ranks high. Throwing is fun. Hitting a target, even better. No wonder targets provide the material for so many motivational posters and workplace bromides. Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see. That sort of thing.

  Some say that concentration is essential for hitting a target. Others, just the opposite. Either way, when you let an object fly from your hand, it is destined to hit something. It has been wittily said that the best way to accomplish a goal is to declare whatever result you achieve to have been the goal all along. The most expert bowman is the one who walks to where the arrow lands and draws the bullseye around the arrowhead.

  There are dozens of YouTube videos about what is called the shooter’s mentality. Many of them use basketball as the example, but the message is a general one. It’s about regaining confidence, or never losing it, after you make a mistake.

  That said, there is no link that I can see between throwing things and throwing things away, which is a topic for another time. When you are throwing things, you are throwing at something. When you throw things away, there’s no target. Never mind the waste basket. When you are throwing into the wastebasket, what you are doing is not targeting, but emptying. So, it’s an empty feeling. Some say that’s a good feeling, a light feeling. They apply it to travel. They apply it to the last years of their lives, to downsizing, to letting go of things. However many virtues there are to traveling light, many who do so have nowhere to go.

  Naturally they might think there’s nothing they’ll need when they get there.

  vi

  The literature of hitting a target has become a subcategory of sales training. It’s voluminous. But it probably belongs on the shelf next to Freud. With a berry in my hand, I was both hero and villain, warriors and criminal. The berries that sailed out of my hand became an extension of my fist. The fun was hostile.

  There was no six sigma process for throwing berries, and whatever our process was, we were uninterested in improving it. There was no concept of defects or eliminating them. We had time targets – be in for dinner – and that was all.

  These berry wars now seem as far ago as the Peloponnesian. They have fallen into the well of the unrecorded, which is bottomless. It is said that before the ancient conflicts between Athens and Sparta, which lasted 27 years, wars lasted only a few hours. A war was a single battle. One side won, and all sides went home. Our battles were like that, too. We fought in front yards and side yards, resupplying as needed. Wars ended when the sky darkened, or the call came for dinner. The second battle took place behind closed doors, when winners and losers showed up at the dinner table with stains on their t-shirts and pants.

  But if our mother was ever truly angry at us for throwing berries, neither of us can recall it.

  The stains must not have stained at all. If we had ruined a shirt, rather than just getting it dirty, there would have been trouble. Those purple marks on our play clothes must have come out in the wash. They were never seen on the jeans or the pedal pushers suspended by wooden pins on the clothesline in our backyard.

  vii

  What help do we have for retrieving memories from our lost childhoods, or for doublechecking them? Home movies might have helped. They could have captured a boy and his dad playing catch in the front yard on Georgetown, if mom or sister had been willing to be the cameraman. A close-up might have shown the boy’s Dick Sisler signature 1950s baseball glove, genuine cowhide, a model available for repurchase right now on eBay. An establishing shot would take in the background, where there would be the row of shrubs with berries, purple that spring or summer. But this was not a family that spent money on home movie equipment. And ordinary snapshots cost money, too, for a roll of Kodak film, and then to develop it at the drugstore.

  This was a home where lights were shut off when we left a room, and I didn’t stand indecisively peering into the mysterious light of an open refrigerator without being reminded to shut the door, because I was “letting the cold out.”

  viii

  Like Columbus sailing to East Asia but landing in the Bahamas, I navigated urban shrub with purple berries in California online, only to discover the black chokeberry, beautyberry, and elderberry, never discovering what I was looking for. All these berries grew in clusters. There were no clusters on the hedge I remembered, just single purple berries mounted on dense leaves, like tanzanite on an engagement ring.

  Cleyera japonica came closest to what was wedded to my memory. It was bushy enough. Reading the description, however, I had objections. Cleyera japonica has smooth, glossy, dark- green leaves that redden in the winter (not as I recall, but there was never much of a winter in the Los Angeles area, then or now). It has white fragrant flowers that form at the base of the leaves (I don’t remember them, but maybe I simply never noticed them). Unfortunately these flowers mature to clusters of berries, but the berries I knew were always single, never in a cluster. The cleyera japonica berries are red at first (that’s a maybe), turn black by late fall (possibly, if there’s a purple stage along the way). My search was turning into a cluster.

  Treecenter.com sells a 3-gallon, five foot tall Japanese Cleyera and asserts that its height measurements are “all tree” – meaning, from the top of the soil in the container to the top of the plant, not fudging by including the container as part of the height. The website also notes that “this attractive evergreen shrub is rarely available” and an “authentic addition to an Asian- themed garden.” It wasn’t what I was looking for.

  ix

  My search for the shrub and its berry was conducted from a chair. I searched online. Is it any surprise that this kind of exploration does not always lead to a discovery? Ask Google what are the greatest quests of all time, and the top answers the search returns are dominated by references to video games — to The Witcher, The Elder Scrolls, Fable II, and Final Fantasy VII. Further down, I did find lifetimedreamguide.com, a site that offers help discovering the Seven Innate Principles that will lead to unending happiness. This site actually opens with a paragraph from the Odyssey. The quest of Odysseus was to get back home, which most of us are able to do even after a night drinking, avoiding sirens on our return. The holy grail of questing is of course the knight’s quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian stories. The quest for a plant with magic properties is relatively common, starting with the herb of immortality sought by Gilgamesh. But no one ever quested for a purple berry.

  x

  My sister, in her seventies, remembers both the shrubs and the berries. She was a straw to grasp.
  I called her to help me dig for the roots of what I was looking for.
  “Your memory is better than mine,” she said. “I just remember that red stain.”
  The stain she remembers wasn’t red. At most, it was reddish. And she claimed not to remember who threw berries at her, maybe letting bygones be bygones.
  “Are you becoming a gardener in your retirement?”

  That was never my intent, and retirement isn’t the word I want to use for my current status, though it is the label that others apply. I no longer go into an office. I have no more paychecks, other than from Social Security, which might make the federal government my employer, even though it employs me to do nothing. Retirement is a bad label, but it’s a struggle find a better one. It belongs in the same family as significant other.

  Patti has no memory of me throwing berries at her, which happened lots of times. But does she remember the time she pushed me, so I tripped on the curb at Georgetown? I can’t actually remember it happening, but I have the scar to show for it, a small one, on my upper lip. It’s barely visible, but there, descending from the outer tip of my right nostril. I was three years old. I can imagine it, but Patti has never mentioned it. There must have been a lot of wailing, but a wall of years separates me from any real recall.

  A scar is part of a progression. A stain, difficult to remove, is a step or two to the right of dirt. Take another step further, and you have a scar. It’s what a wound leaves behind. It may fade over time, growing feint, but once there, it’s there forever.

  Scars are a natural part of the healing process, though that might only be true of the literal kind. What is healing after a bullet wound may not apply, if the need is to pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. But physical or otherwise, similar forces are responsible for the scar’s shape and size. What caused it, how deeply did the wound penetrate, where, what part of the body, how has it been treated. Scars are flat or raised. Some are sunken or pitted, mostly those from acne, and most of those acne scars are on the face unfortunately. And then there are the keloids. Keloid scars will rise above the surface, growing over time to become larger than the wound that caused them. Whether raised or flat, scars may fade, almost to disappear eventually. Not keloids. They never go away without treatment.

  Another factor that determines how a physical scar appears is the kind of skin you have; or, to say it another way, what you are made of. You could be one of those who decides not to have a child because, after all, look at the world – overpopulation, climate change, Donald Trump, whatnot. On the other hand, you could be the Holocaust survivor whose mother, father, and baby brother were murdered, but you went on to marry, have children and grandchildren, and nightmares as well.

  xii

  There are those who can recount events long past with a level of detail most cannot manage if asked to describe this morning’s breakfast. They possess an ability that must, at times, be a burden to them. Sometimes, it seems like a magician’s trick. Ai Weiwei was two-and-a-half years old when his parents were exiled once again to the far north. And yet, in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir, he says of the family’s journey into the northern reaches of China that none of them saw “even the smallest patch of green, only an endless expanse of camel thorn.” How could he know that? How would his parents have been able to tell him, years if not decades after the experience, the kind of thorn they had seen “on a two-day bus journey to Urumq’ui, then locked in snow and ice”? Maybe his father remembered the camel thorn and told his son about it. It’s possible. My own father talked very little to me, early or later in life, so I can only imagine.

  xiii

  There is no available expert on the landscaping habits of real estate developers in post-war Los Angeles and its neighborhoods. There is no one to ask, no obvious resource. I have no photographs to share. The hedge never appears in the color slides my parents left in carousels after their death; those images are mostly of vacations, or holiday meals with aunts, uncles, and cousins – all from my mother’s side of the family. I have no evidence to present, and it is easy enough to see with Google Street View that the hedge with its berries is no longer there, at the corner house on Georgetown.

  I suppose disappearance is the way of the world. Gone with the hedge are the forts we used to build out of discarded wood scraps in a fenced off section of our back yard. That was an area behind the garage, where the clothesline was, and also an incinerator. If the incinerator was ever used on Georgetown during my childhood, that memory is up in smoke. If it happened, it must have been before 1957, when Los Angeles officials banned backyard incinerators to fight smog. Since the ban meant paying for a new public service, garbage collection, people protested. They went downtown, they took to the streets. Black and white archival photos from the defunct Herald Examiner show men in suits with American flags and women in dresses and wearing hats, holding up signs that read We Will Burn Our Own Rubbish.

  Rubbish is one of those words that have also been borne backwards on the slipstream of the years.

  xiv

  All this is nothing but the way it is.

  Childhood is a foreign country, populated by strangers wearing familiar masks. My own past seems more foreign with every passing year. Its language is foreign as well, and I only understand it at the level of a beginner, maybe an advanced beginner. Nouns, particularly the proper names, always give me trouble.

  There were fields across Georgetown that were owned by Howard Hughes – that’s what I always thought. But the public records of the area lead to another conclusion. Loyola – now Loyola Marymount – was also on the other side of 80th. The predecessors of Loyola have a long history in Los Angeles. It began downtown as early as 1865 with St. Vincent’s College, in a donated two-story adobe house near Olvera Street, followed by a move to a larger campus on Grand in the 1880s. The Vincentians were replaced by the Jesuits in 1911. After one or two name changes the school became Loyola College of Los Angeles. In 1928 it moved to the Westchester campus, building on the fields. Howard Hughes, on the other hand, and his Hughes Aircraft Company, operated out of Glendale, California through the end of the nineteen thirties. It wasn’t until then that Hughes began purchasing acreage in the flat Ballona wetlands. He needed room for the factory and outbuildings and landing strip that would enable him to win the largest government contracts in the war years. Even then, his land purchases in Westchester may have ended below the bluffs I knew as a child. We named our fields Hughes in the 1950s, but, truth be told, they probably belonged to the Jesuits.

  That I got it wrong about Howard Hughes is hardly a surprise. I paid just as little attention to the facts of my mother’s life. I can’t atone for that, or for what I never noticed about my father, to say nothing of his father. Might I perhaps have taken enough interest to learn something about this man who fled conscription in the tsar’s army as a teenager and came by himself to America, knowing nobody, and having nothing? I do know he smoked unfiltered Camels, and he owned a 1954 Buick that my parents refused to let me have when I turned sixteen the same year he stopped driving. Apparently he wasn’t of interest to me. No wonder I am unable to name anything then or now, or understand things, either. The rationale for refusing to let me have the car was provided by my uncle Hy at one of those holiday meals. “An old car,” he said, “will dollar you to death.”

  xv

  Borges has wisdom to offer on this, telling us that our memory is not a summation, it is a chaos of vague possibilities. He references St. Augustine as well, who wrote of the palaces and caverns of memory. Caverns seemed the more correct to Borges. They do to me as well. My memories are not well-lit. Most of them are in a deep place, some of them lost in a bottomless one. Other thinkers have compared the mind to a palimpsest, a manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing. Traces of what came before remain, and can be detected, but they are not always intelligible. By analogy, what happens today will cover over the events that preceded it, and today, too, will be written over by what follows. Contributing to the confusion, our recollection may also work mysteriously. Each time we recall something, we may be writing over the original memory; and the next time, we’re recalling the memory of that prior remembering. Eventually, what we think we remember may turn out to be largely our own invention. It’s more what we’ve told ourselves about the past, and not at all the truth of things.

  I think of my relationship to my past in more zoological terms. I can no more accurately recall the past than I can communicate with the humpback whale whose singing is among the sounds sent into space on the Golden Album, part of the probe for life that is now ten billion miles from Earth. My past and the present belong to different species.

  Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent, mais ou sont les neiges d’antan , where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The mystery that applies to the generations also applies within a single lifetime.

  xvi

  After I listed the plant suspects, I tried to cross them off, as a detective would in a drawing room mystery. Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), with its ovate, toothed leaves, was cut from consideration soon enough. The image in my mind isn’t focused enough to pick up a toothed edge on a leaf, but the beautyberry’s purple berries grow in clusters. The berries on Georgetown were singles, I’m clear on that. Also, the beautyberry’s leaves drop in the winter. The shrub on Georgetown was a thick hedge year-round. Black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa)? No and no. The berries are black, and it flowers in May, a five-petaled bloom with white horns, pink tripped, in its center. Those would have been impossible not to notice. Lillypilly? Its berries hang in bunches, like a grape cluster. So they could not be the Georgetown berry. Still, lillypilly is something special. They call it monkey apple in New Zealand, and its fruit and leaves have appeared on a 49 cent Australian stamp.

  Finally, a breakthrough, maybe. Using purple berries tall bushy tree california as the vehicle, I was steered toward Carib909 in Murrieta, in Riverside County, where eight years before residents had blocked busloads of immigrants on route to a temporary relocation and detention facility the federal government had planned to host in the town. Carib909 had posted a picture of a bush with berries and added a description she must have thought essential: the purple berries “stain everything they come in contact with.”

  She closed with a question, “What’s the name?”
  Her post was on Dave’s Garden community forum. It was nine years old, from a day in November, average high temperature 74F in Murrieta.
  Diana K from Contra Costa County had responded that same day:
  “Look into Syzygium and Eugenia. Names have changed. It can be any of several colors, usually somewhere between magenta and purple.”

  Syzygium, Syzygium australe, Eugenia, Eugenia Uniflora, Surinam Cherry, brush cherry – it’s one of the most common hedges in Southern California. Some call it a shrub, others a tree. Most are maintained as a screening shrub, or even kept lower as a hedge. A Eugenia tree in Goleta, CA, at the historic Stow House, stands 70 feet tall and is listed on the California Big Tree Registry. Edible berry or poisonous. That would make a difference. Tree or shrub, less so. We live in times when the notions of the binary are no longer muscular enough to hold a mirror up to reality. True and false are now the most suspect binary of all.

  On the way to Syzygium, I stopped at Syzygy, the only word in the English-speaking world with three y’s and no other vowels. It’s applied to a celestial situation, when three bodies are in alignment, which can occur during an eclipse. In Greek, it means “yoked together.” Whatever yoked together the hedge with purple berries and my memory had loosened over the years, but it had never broken. I decided to settle on Eugenia.

  Eugenia, erect, clothed with glossy leaves maybe two inches long, and a bit of reddish color. Eugenia, with its bronzy leaves and fragrant white flowers. Evergreen Eugenia, with a long taproot that helps it resist droughts that are more native to Southern California than it is. It thrives in full sun but can also tolerate shade. It’s fine in soil that might be alkaline, clayish, sandy, acidic, or loamy. So, unfussy. Was the hedge on Georgetown dense, or airy and welcoming? I have no memory of my father standing alongside and trimming the hedge, no sounds of scissoring, deeper voiced than the snips of hand shears. And the white brush-like flowers of the Eugenia have apparently been weeded from my memory, but never mind.

  It was time to hide the questions under an answer.

  I don’t know what finally happened to the Eugenia shrubs and their purple berries at the corner of Georgetown and 80th. Vegetation has a lifespan, just as we do. I read online that a tiny winged insect
  the size of an aphid, the psyllid Trioza eugeniae, was found in 1988 near Inglewood, which is practically down the street. It fed on Eugenia shrubs. So much so, that Eulophid wasps from New South Wales were imported as a biological control to fight back. The wasps worked. According to reports, they saved the Eugenia hedges at Disneyland.

  It’s time to stop now. I have asked myself what was I doing this for, though this is an endlessly regressive question, at the level of the three year old who repeatedly asks Why, no matter the sequence of answers provided. It wasn’t the Nile, but as far as I was concerned, I had found the source of the purple stain.

  There is no story here. It is ending because it is ending. I’m not sorry to disappoint you, if you are disappointed. I wasn’t concerned on this ramble with engaging with anyone else, and had no intention of having a companion come along. All of us talk to ourselves, don’t we? Whether we are doing it silently or out loud, we remain unheard.

  xvii

  Naming, that was the first task, the task of the first man – Adam. Naming was delegated to man by God. But there are names that are categories – animals, plants, clouds, rocks — and then there are personal names, which the named possess. I have read that the name of the first woman was not Ishah, meaning taken from man, but Chava, love, the mother of life, a specific woman, that one.

  In Tony Hoagland’s poem Among the Intellectuals, he describes his subject as “tormenting and arousing thinking into strange behaviors.” And then he continues:

  
  This was their religion.
  That and the light shining through the stained-glass ancestors.

  They preferred the name of the tree
  to the taste of the apple.

  To which I will add that even if the berries of the Eugenia, if that’s what the shrub was, were edible, none of us ever tried to eat one. They were just for throwing.

  *

• Speech After Long Silence

  It came into my inbox, an email with the subject line, Out Now in the U.S.: The Good Enough Parent. It was from a business calling itself The School of Life.

  I have had plenty of time and reason to think about what makes a parent – especially a father – good enough.

  My daughter Eden has not spoken to me in many years. Seven, I think, as of the moment of this writing, and it may be three multiples of that by the time of my death. How that came about is not exactly my topic, which is good, because I would stumble through an explanation. In the wilderness of our lives, the border that separates explaining and justifying is usually left unmarked. Let me leave it at this: there was no single precipitating event, to use language I remember from the period in my life when I volunteered for shifts as a telephone counselor at our local Crisis Center.

  The language that does apply comes from the vocabulary of estrangement.

  Estrangement is not an event that occurs between strangers. Who says to another person, I never want to see you again? Only those who once loved each other say it. One half of a former couple. Or a child, to a parent. Don’t ever call me—no one would bother saying that to a stranger. I will block the number of a robocaller, or simply not pick up. We don’t pick up the receiver anymore anyway. Lightness and mobility seem to be the newer virtues, loyalty and family weighing a little less in our decisions and actions. Never want to hear from you again?

  When a child says that to a parent, the strength of the rejection is a signal of the depth of the bond between them. It comes up from a depth and travels a great distance, however present it seems on the surface.

  ii

  When my son was two, I had the idea of creating a graphic to celebrate his age and his unstoppable energy, which is another way of describing what psychologists label oppositional behavior. I came up a line about burning the candle at both ends. I owned a graphic design business at the time, and one of the designers created an illustration of a horizontal candle, with a flame on either end to represent two. We had posters printed, and I framed one for my son’s bedroom. We also entered the poster in some of the award shows that are common in the self-regarding world of commercial design. Fifteen months later when my daughter, Eden, turned two, I wanted to produce something for her as well. Much of what we do in this world is done for a future that never comes to pass. I must have thought there would be a time, maybe a decade from then, when a father’s work in praise of his two-year-old daughter would be irresistible, even if it had the same sticky sweetness as an overpriced caramel apple from the State Fair midway. Nearly forty years later, this artifact reappeared, in one of the banker’s boxes in a storage room off my garage.

  The piece was not another poster, it was an essay I wrote, titled Eden Too, which was turned into a crafty sixteen-page booklet, five by seven inches in size, dark cream paper, with woodcut illustrations on the cover and throughout. The cover is charming enough – blue, pink, black and yellow illustrations of giraffes, toy firetrucks, a cat and other whimsies, designed on a heavy purple sheet. The whole thing was bound, with endpapers, just like a book. I don’t recall who on staff designed it; someone talented.

  Rereading it now, it deserves a disclaimer, it is sticky sweet. Here’s what I wrote:

  Eden, Too.

  Eden’s a second child, and it seems only now, in her turning two, that she has begun to dissent from her brother and to distinguish her wishes from his. Until now, whenever Ben would demand something, Eden wanted it, too.

  “Lemonade!” Ben would say, uncompromising.
  “Lemonade, too!” we would then hear from Eden. Or simply, “Some, too.”
  Her “too!” would be drawn-out and plaintive. Bibbed and impatient, she sat in her high chair, riding the coattails of Ben’s desires.
  Soon we began to speak to her in her own terms. “Some too?” we’d ask.
  “Some” could be a raisin, or a small, fat handful of them. “Some, too!”
  Or a bite of brown banana. “Some, too!”
  Or some of the Nestle’s Crunch bars, Ben’s favorite, which he calls “crunchee.” “Crunchee, too!”
  At Eden’s second birthday, celebrated September 13, she presided over the ceremony of cake and presents and confusion.
  “Eden!” we said, trying to get her to look at the camera the same time her brother did. “Eden! Eden!”
  But we could never synchronize them. Now the snapshot delights us by its side views and higgledy-piggledy merriment.
  So does Eden generally.

  To my ear, her name is lyrical and comfortable. It was Dolores who proposed it, taking it from her own childhood, from a snowflake of her past that has thawed, melted and resolved itself into a dew.

  Eden was a pet name Dolores used for her own mother, Frances Louise, who called herself Frances. It was Louise turned into “eese” that turned into Eden.

  Dolores’s mother, a difficult person, regularly abandoned Dolores, sometimes vanishing for the day, sometimes for very long periods, assigning her to relatives for upbringing. Dolores can’t remember, but was told she used to ask her mother’s whereabouts. In her piping childish voice she would say, soliciting, “Where’s my Eden?”

  Our Eden isn’t so independent yet that we need to go looking for her. She sticks nearby. She’s usually outraged when one of us goes outside without her, and she will bawl in anticipation when we get too far ahead in our hurrying. I cannot shut a door without shutting it in her face, she keeps so close to my heels. But that, too, is changing. Her habits are shifting. She’s more offhanded and less reliable with each passing day. Here we go, from the living room to the kitchen, and I expect her behind me, but when I look back she has disappeared to her own devices, sidetracked to the stairs, or down the hall, or into a closet junked with wooden blocks, our Children’s Highlights monthly magazines, two untuned ukuleles, and a deflating plastic dinosaur.

  Maybe we don’t photograph Eden often enough. Sometimes I wonder: If she were lost, how would I describe her to the police? And then what good would an identifying photograph do, because the shots we take are aimed at a moving target. Eden is a mutable thing, like one of those sci-fi phenomena that pulse and phosphoresce, dividing and enlarging.

  She hasn’t got her face yet, and she hasn’t really settled in her skin. These days she’s rounded, her body as soft as puddles.

  Naked, she’s a sore sight for sad parental eyes. Bruised, scratched, bitten and bumpy. Red patchy rashes down under. Dimpled hither and yon. But there she is, the thing itself: pot- bellied, turned-out feet, chubby arms.

  *

  Unrestricted by clothing she moves with a cheery animation, usually waddling away from us, screaming glee. We had her hair cut months ago – very short, for summer—and she has yet to grow it back out. It’s clipped at the back of her head, and her neck shows; when she runs, her neck is a stem, and her head bobs like a goofy toy atop the dashboard of an automobile.

  Her face is moony, her chin hardly there. Unlike Ben, who’s sharp, boney, and lean, there’s nothing angular about Eden. Her bitty teeth are buck, gapped, and one in front has gone tarnished, having been struck a couple of times on cement. The chip in her front tooth she owes to Ben, who chased after her on the patio of our house on Inwood Road and, catching up, gave her an exhilarating push forward.

  Even without help, Eden’s clumsy, and she will trip herself up if in her enthusiasms she gains too much speed. In her madcap dashes she charms us completely. As she runs she babbles merrily. It is her habit to greet me with a bull-blind charge from a middle distance, coming smack into my legs, her fingers catching at my pants as she bounces to the floor, satisfied. She takes a lot of dives and breaks many of them with her face.

  Her upper lip is often puffy. One time she bloodied it on the hard-as-nails linoleum at pre- school. That day they called to tell us that she had fallen from a plastic horse and would we come get her. Her mouth looked pulpy to us, as though she’d taken a roundhouse punch, and we rushed her to “Dr. Andy,” the kids’ dentist in Preston Center, who peeled back her upper lip to inspect.

  It was nothing.

  Much of our parenthood is protective, preoccupied with harms. It seems there are so many sharp sticks in the world, sooner or later our children will be stabbed by one of them. Eden is not one of those children possessed by the daredevil (unlike Ben, whose moves are choreographed to the soundtrack of a suspense thriller); still, Eden taxes us. We worry about shoves from her brother, the cat’s claws, a drink of perfume or cleanser, a tumble three steps up from the landing – if life’s experience is infinitely varied, the subset of hurts is no less so, and a simple scratch, or a bump on the behind, or any little pain is can prefigure some greater disaster. It might even be seen darkly as the foreshadowing of a catastrophic incapacity.

  Eden delights in edges, small precipices, and heights just high enough. She hoists herself upon the retaining wall that borders our brick patio. How high must a wall be for it to attract her? Skull-cracking height. Our front curb is another thrill. When on a summer evening we open the kitchen door and loose Eden and Ben, she will run, stumbly, to the curb, a footstep from the street, and then try the gutter, especially if there’s the thin runoff from a neighbor’s sprinkler in it. She keeps her eyes downcast, as though she has to watch her white Mary Janes to keep them in motion. Then on she goes, into the street.

  “No, Eden, no, no!”
  She doesn’t exactly thumb her nose at us. But in her acceleration away from the voice calling after her, she captures the gesture in spirit.

  A child’s life is a hurly-burly, and Eden’s hours have the intensity of the moment. She exults in the mundane, a sort of Thoreau at the pond of her experience, making the most of small things. She is the self-appointed inspector of crumbs and dirt and does her duty regularly, although she is more likely to receive reprimands than any praise for it. In a shopping center parking lot, she will stop to pick up a scrap of treaded paper, or a filthy clod, and her grip, which is never tight enough to prevent Ben from ripping a toy away, has to be cracked open like crab claw, before she’ll release her prize.

  It is the slimmest of margins that divides her wants from her tears, which fall easily. How easily stirred she is, how pure in her urgency. Maybe it’s this that we admire most about her and children generally, when we have the serenity to appreciate it: that what they do they do completely, following in spirit that injunction of the author of Ecclesiastes, that whatever we put our hands to, we should do with all our might.

  When put to bed, Eden stays in bed, until recently with a pacifier as yellow as a daisy popped like a cork into her mouth. She is the enemy of order, but she depends upon routines, and we do our best to provide them to her in naptimes and bedtimes. There are some nights she welcomes sleep and is content to collapse into a doodlebug’s curve, remaining prone as we walk away. Other nights, she mews piteously as we carry her to the blue rectangle of her mattress, as if it were the stone of an ancient sacrifice and she knew it.

  “No, no, no, Daddy, no.”

  Or she flares angrily. We might then pull down the string on the music maker that hangs from the knob of her closet door, and she might in response redouble her screaming to drown out the artificial lullaby.

  Every night, Eden goes to bed before her brother, for whom falling asleep is a ritual and a contest and a struggle. Demanding and receiving attention, Ben must fall asleep with one of us consoling him. Sometimes I creep in to check on Eden and find her lying in the dark with her eyes open, listening to the coaxing and dealmaking through the walls, as Dolores talks Ben to sleep. She can hear Ben and Dolores giggle at some muffled piece of nonsense.
  Maybe it sounds to her like secrets they are sharing.

  Eden’s affections are already dispersing. Laverne Cook, who takes care of her and Ben five days a week, is her special friend. When “Baderne” goes home in the evening, Eden scoots to the front windows to wave goodbye; she watches the white Dodge rock away from the curb.

  Esther Lee is another grown-up friend. A Chinese Malaysian, Esther studies Christian Education at SMU’s Perkins School and babysits occasionally for us with her husband, John Ho. We have heard Eden speaking babble and suspect it may be Chinese. We know she has learned at least one song in Mandarin.

  Esther has also taught Eden oddly-accented Methodist hymns. “I have joy like a ree-ver,” Eden sings.
  When Esther arrives, Eden runs into her arms. Esther crouches, calling: “Eee-den. Howar yoo.”

  It’s difficult with two children not to think of one in terms of the other. When we see Eden, we see her in comparison to her more rambunctious brother.

  Esther, however, has been better at taking Eden on her own terms.

  Esther and John are leaving Dallas this approaching May. They’re returning to Kuala Lumpur, to a church there that expects their participation as teachers.

  Esther says she rues going.
  “Maybe I take Eden with me,” she said one afternoon, as I drove her over from Moore Hall, the dormitory where she and John share a room.
  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  They’ll be coming back in 1989. John is due to defend a Ph.D. thesis he’ll write on the Methodist Church in Malaysia. Eden will be five years old then, in kindergarten.

  I have read that the words parents speak to their children in the privacy of home are not overheard at the time, but, as in a whispering gallery, they will be heard by others later. So goes parental influence out into the world.
  But what influence do our children’s words have on us?

  We wonder about Eden’s babyish pronunciations, whether they are typical, because her voice is faint and hints at lisping. Has dependence on pacifiers led to this? We hear her Chinese best friends in her speech. Her humming “uh huh” is like Esther Lee’s, her petite “maybe so” like Jasmine’s, another Malaysian sitter, whose voice is a warbling smile.

  All children have their vocabulary oddities, their “hangerburgs” an “pisghetti.” Eden does, too.
  She seems confused about the language of subjects and objects.

  Chase!” she commands me, wanting me to run so she can ride me down on her tricycle. “Hold you, hold you,” means that I am to hold her, to pick her up, to thrust her into the air, which sends her into coy, fearful giggles.

  In these simple commands (“Spin” is another), Ben is her mentor by example.
  “Horse” means I am to be on my hands and knees so Eden can throw her arms like grappling hooks across my back and mount up.
  “Raffe” means I stand up, providing her that perspective of height she enjoys, as she hangs on with a choke hold.
  Everything is an imperative.
  “Don’t do that any more!” she demands. “Right now!” she orders.
  In this she mimics us.

  Eden’s bedroom door has a privacy lock—a button that she can pop on. The inside, locking us out—and although we ought to have changed it by now (we’ve owned the house on Wenonah over a year), we haven’t. Sure enough, she locked herself in one evening and would not turn the knob.

  We pleaded, we cajoled, we raised our voices; we promised to take her to Show Biz Pizza. Nothing worked.
  She would not come to the door.
  Instead, she flopped on the couch against the far wall in her room and turned pages in a storybook.
  I could see through the crack under the door. “Eden, open the door. Eden, turn the knob.”
  I slipped jelly beans under the door and she came to fetch them. I poked my fingers under, and she played with them, then ran away laughing.
  The doorknob cannot be disassembled from the outside. Her bedroom is on the second story. All the windows were locked.

  After three hours Dolores called the fire department. The massive truck parked at our curb. Its white and red siren lights spun, delighting Ben. Four men in uniform trooped upstairs. Eden’s door baffled them, but it took one of them only a few seconds to climb up a ladder to her upstairs window and lever it open with two screwdrivers. Eden seemed unsurprised by her rescue.

  Dr. Sparkman, our neighbor, a retired gentleman of ramrod posture, a former head of surgery at Baylor, appeared in our open front door after the fire department departed. He was wearing a tuxedo, and he asked us was everyone all right.

  *

  Alas, that I should be
  So old, and you so small.
  You will know naught of me When your dire times befall.

  That fathers are old, that daughters are small, that there will be dire times; here is the essence of a dilemma. But these first, earliest years, full of lessons to last a lifetime, these times when we are not yet superfluous to our children, and when our helplessness is not yet obvious, these are thrilling times.

  Turning two has scarcely been a turning for Eden. She isn’t ninety degrees from where she was; her trajectory is a series of windings. She is on no road, but on many little grassy footpaths.

  We cannot photograph her often enough to keep her. Every picture of Eden, no matter how formal, is temporary. I cannot write about her either, because she is slipping away. The baby’s gone, the infant’s gone, the toddler is half way out the door. The raising of young children is a series of goodbyes. We try to look closely and to pay attention and to remember. Who knows in a little girl what is essential and what is evanescent, a manifestation of these days only, and never to appear again, perceived by us as happy and fortuitous, and as lucky as the spotting of a firefly on a September evening at the end of one particular summer – this one this year – when the softness of the sky as day turn to night is no longer prolonged, but a moment only, everything cursory, and the air becomes chilly, less gentle, and turns to something new.

  That was the “essay” I wrote. And I dated it, at the end, as though it were a cornerstone with chiseled roman numerals, to excite a crowd at the jubilee year or after, when the time capsule that had been buried inside would be unearthed.
  It was dated, like a headstone.

  Winter, 1987 – 1988

  That was my tribute, to the person who from her teenage years on grew to despise me with a ferocity that seems uncoupled from any circumstances or actual events. She’s on her way to forty years old, refusing to speak to me or have anything to do with me. Odd, really, and I have no explanation for it, though I’m sure there is one. More than one, probably.

  iii

  Happy Tuesday. These are the first words in one of the many emails I receive from Dr. Joshua Coleman, this one titled How to Talk to Yourself About Estrangement. Dr. Joshua Coleman, Psychologist, Author, Speaker, Cutting Edge Advice on Parenting and Relationships. Tonight: Five Most Common Mistakes of Estranged Parents. Free Till Aug 19. After a link to register and another for the Free Study Guide, a list follows of recent media appearances, including NPR, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, and upcoming conferences, one in Toronto, another in Austin. Scrolling down further, but above the bio, there’s a short essay, which advises against defending yourself too much or explaining your estranged child’s complaints away, but also recommends engaging in “self-dialogue” in order to “soothe yourself.”

  You tell yourself, “I did the best I could.” You tell yourself, “You were a difficult kid to raise,” if they were. You tell yourself, “Your memory of me is all wrong. I was a much better parent than you’re recalling.”

  Dr. Coleman concludes:

  What’s required is to be practical, not to think about what’s fair. What’s fair is that you would actually get empathy from your child.

  In all likelihood, you’re probably not going to get it – at least not anytime soon. So, learning how to be in loving dialogue with yourself is critically important.

  If you need help in this arena, join us for our FREE webinar TONIGHT!

  iv

  From where I’m standing, the past provides a wider vista than the handful of years ahead of me, so why not look that way?

  The homes I have owned over the past forty years have had a basic flaw. They provided more storage space than necessary, and so they accommodated both sides of what should have been competing compulsions – my need to hold on to the past, and my horror of clutter and messy surfaces. My current house has a separate room off the unattached garage. There are dozens of bankers’ boxes inside, on three walls of refrigerator shelving; also, three sets metal cabinets, five feet wide, with four drawers each, and four massive trunks, almost the size of coffins.

  Everything is neatly contained. I have my daughter’s old crib in the storeroom, and the wicker basket she was carried in before the crib arrived for assembly. Also, baby bibs in Ziploc bags, booties not worn in nearly forty years, school papers from pre-school onward, drawings, stuffed animals, beads, shells, photo albums, yearbooks. Dolores, who died of colon cancer when Eden was 11 and Ben 13, seemed to have saved everything. After her death, I inherited a share of her inability to throw things away.

  Dolores had kept the stacks of cards congratulating us after Eden was born. “I am happy for you and thankful that your family is blooming beautifully. Your Ben and Eden are so blessed to come to you and you are blessed to find them. May God’s smile…” etc. This particular message, in a handsome, legible hand, is inside a greeting card from Michael Arrington. Both Michael and his partner, David, were patients of Dolores, and friends as well, which was how she conducted her practice. Both of them died of aids, within a few years of this card from 1985. They were in their early thirties, if that, when they suffered and died. From this remove, they seem even younger.

  Dolores also valued every record of any appearance by either child in a school play or program. And not only at those. She also saved evidence of their appearance as a member of the audience or part of the crowd. So we have a record of the first symphony Eden attended, and also the paper program from an Ann Richards Birthday Celebration. The Ann Richards event was a fundraiser for her re-election, Monday, October 3, 1994, at the Infomart. Robin Williams was the “special guest.” The following month, George Bush won.

  v

  I’ve read and listened to experts on the subject of parents and children. If there’s a discussion about the relative weighting of nature and nurture, and the dance between those two, I’m interested. The authors of the study of twins, who score it seventy percent nature, thirty percent nurture, can offer comfort to anxious parents, telling them not to worry so much, you aren’t that important to the outcome of the lives entrusted to you. In my opinion those twin studies are underestimating. My personal experience, however limited, feels definitive and defies any facts to the contrary. As the father of children adopted at birth, I’m going all in on nature, a hundred and ten percent. What children are at birth, that’s definitive, though unrecognizable at the time. Children are not only able to withstand our “mistakes,” they are also stronger than our love. If it’s in their nature, they will digest whatever nurture you and the enriching world have to offer and vomit it out.

  Dolores’s papers in the storage room, a trunkful of them, include calendars of appointments and agendas from committee meetings. Also, her comments. She had beautiful penmanship, with a hand from a different era of schooling. There are handwritten notes about human bonding and the failure to bond. She might have made those while attending a Grand Rounds session at the medical school, or during one of the lunch-and-learn programs sponsored by the Mental Health Association, where she was on the board. They are detailed enough to suggest that the subject was of interest to her.

  vi

  The months of summer immediately after Dolores’s death are blurry. But by the second summer, I became a part-time booking agent for both children. Some free time is desirable and inevitable, but I thought my job was to either minimize it, or at least offer engagement if they wanted it, which Eden did. I made the arrangements for Eden to go off on Overland Adventures every summer. In the school years I attended a decade of parent-teacher meetings solo. I supported the Rockefeller Foundation funded pass/fail college in Prescott, Arizona that Eden picked out, where time stood still, suffusing the desert blue sky there with the spirit of 1968. Prescott seemed to be a college for dyslexic trust funders, not for my gifted daughter who could have jumped any academic hurdle except those in her own mind. (Just thinking about it, I’m feeling sorry for myself, and disgusted as well.)

  The week after Eden turned 18, I received a phone call from her birth mother, who had tracked her down.
  Did Eden want to meet her? Very much so.
  I hired a private detective to make sure this “other family” was not criminally dangerous in any way. They were not, and I went with Eden to the first meeting.
  As it turned out, Eden was capable of bonding. Birth mother and given-up daughter seemed like a matched pair.
  Years passed, college came and went, Eden married, she divorced, the distances grew. Was she simply growing older, into her own life? Birthdays, holidays, and other times she visited, she seemed remote, disinterested, and unhappy, and after these times together I wasn’t unhappy to see her go.

  Somewhere between the year I placed Oliver Sack’s slim book Gratitude on my coffee table and my own mother’s death, the phone call came from Eden. She informed me that she wanted no further contact with me. And she has held true to that on her side. After several rejected attempts to reach out to her, including the message that her grandmother had died, I conceded that she meant it.

  vii

  In one of the banker’s boxes in the storage room: An envelope with no stamp, our return address in Dolores’s handwriting in the upper left corner, and a full address on the outside: 155 E. 38th St., Apt 6J, New York, NY 10016. Inside, a folded white sheet, with typing on it:

  EDEN’S JOURNAL
  Saturday
  August 15, 1992

  “Eden, Ben and Cheryl went on an exciting journey. To outer space today. We saw the chocolate fudge planet. Mmmmm! We saw the periwinkle planet. Everybody was made out of flowers. It was pretty, wasn’t it? Yes. Cheryl’s car was a rocket ship. This was in another galaxy, wasn’t it? Yes. We saw the ice cream planet. Yummy! We saw the Lego planet. Funny! We saw the train station planet. Weird! We saw Africa. It was beautiful! You should have been there! This was not really true? Ok, ok.”

  That was a paragraph typed by… Dolores? In August, 1992, Eden was seven years old, only a month away from eight. It sounds like a seven year old wrote it. Starting in third person, it changes to first person, has lots of exclamation points, and ends with a question.

  The address in New York City means nothing. And who on earth was Cheryl? There was no Cheryl in our family, only the only four of us, Dolores and me, Ben and Eden. Then after Dolores’s death, the three of us seem to have been left in our own outer spaces. In retrospect, I suppose we never got back to earth, not safely, we just crash landed.

  viii

  Dolores’s wallet, one of those long rectangles that women use, has multiple pockets and sleeves, and its red plastic skin is cracked and peeling. Inside the pockets and sleeves, there’s a small library of information: pictures Ben and Eden from 1997, a folded prescription for new glasses (June 1995), business cards, her PPO card from Pacific Mutual, a blood donor identification card from The Blood Center at Wadley (donation date 11/15/88, cholesterol level 184, blood type A+). Her Dallas Museum of Art membership card was expiring September 30, 1997. The receipt from The Children’s Collection is for four pairs of Khaki pants. Another receipt, trousers and shorts, paid to Circle Ten Council, Boy Scouts of America. A Dr. Dolores Dyer library card, a Dr. Dolores Dyer card for The Science Place. There’s Ben’s photo card from Mavericks Basketball Camps and another photo of Eden. The business card of Fernando Carrico, Director, Hoteis Alexandre de Almeida, Hotel Metropole, Rossio n 30 1100 Lisboa/Portugal. A folded note provides some medical information: Robaxisol – Back – 2 tabs 4x/day; Utram, 1 every 4-6 hrs for pain. Dolores had spent a year thinking the pains that turned out to be colon cancer were something else. On the other side, a list: Librax rx, flu shot, meds to lose weight, wrist bump, intestine sore.

  Also in there: a Neiman Marcus InCircle card, for Miss Dolores Dyer. A membership card, American Psychological Association. Her driver’s license. My driver’s license, “expires on birthday 1982.” Her mother’s driver’s license, expires 1977. A business card for Bob La Vigne, Mortuary Services, 518 West Davis – where I went to retrieve the cremains of Blufird Burch, her mother’s last husband and, later picked up Frances’s ashes as well. Another photo of Ben. A white rectangle, “For Dolores, for our anniversary, all my love – Mark.” Her social security card, another plastic card from Neiman’s for Miss Dolores Dyer. A post-it Dolores had written on, Osa Peninsula, La Paloma, owned by American.

  La Paloma, on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, overlooks the Pacific. Behind it, a tropical jungle. It’s in Drake Bay, and I don’t think we ever stayed there, though we took Eden and Ben with us to that magical country of volcanos and giant blue butterflies when they were six and seven.

  Three other items in Dolores’s wallet:

  A tiny manila envelope; inside it, a gold cap, from one of her teeth.

  A scrap Dolores must have torn out of The New Yorker, which listed The Magnificent Andersons, playing at the Museum of Modern Art, July 11 and July 13. Dolores had underlined the phrase, “Dolores Costello, the fragile blond beauty of the silent era.” She told me once that her star- struck mother had named her after Dolores del Rio. Her friend Louis, who conducted orchestras in Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, and Johannesburg, but who grew up in Eagle Pass on the Texas Mexico border, pretended that she was named after “El Grito de Dolores,” which had Dolores with two o’s (“as it should be,” he said) rather than two e’s. But it could have been Dolores Costello, the fragile blond beauty. The dates at the museum are spooky though – July 11 was Dolores’s birthday; July 13 was the day she died.

  And then, saved for no reason, a folded-up message, printing in pencil by a child:
  “Dear Buckeye Bunk, Please come to the climbing wall after siesta. Bring this note. I have $50 for each of you. This is real.”
  The is is underlined. The note’s signed with an X. And then:
  “PS. Tell Eden to go to Verbena Village instead.”

  Seven years after Dolores’s death, Eden left for college, then never returned. She, too, left piles of papers and objects behind. After leaving it in place for five years, I rescued all of it, put it in bankers’ boxes and shelved it in the storage room. But what I thought I was saving she was abandoning, and rightly so. Those seven teenage years needed to be not just left behind, but shredded, sent to the landfill.

  ix

  Among Eden’s left behinds: a dozen cassette tapes that she had recorded on. Several were journals of a sort, from 2001. She had labeled the multiple entries on a single tape by date and time:

  Sept 27 2:30 pm
  Sept 27 8:21 pm
  Oct 1 8:09 pm
  Oct 2 7:15 pm
  Oct 3 8:34 pm
  Oct 4 8:13 pm
  Oct 6 8:50 pm
  That tape went on, with most days logged, until the Oct 16 10:47 entry. Another tape had only four entries:
  Oct 27 10:57
  Oct 30 8:07 pm
  Nov. 19 9:56 pm
  Nov 24 10:30 pm
  Like most journaling, her recordings effort eventually flagged, then stopped.

  The tapes were hard to listen to, primarily because they seemed to have been recorded in the voice of a prisoner who fears being overheard. Even with the volume turned up as far as possible, it was a small voice. On some of the recordings there was other noise, music, or a television on in the same room. In her whispery voice, she asked whether the tapes would ever be heard, concluding that they should be, “one day, by the right people.” There were expressions of love for Juan, her gay friend at school, along with multiple mentions of Eden’s “secret,” which she cannot tell to just anyone. When Eden got her first car at 17, she placed the rainbow flag sticker on the back windshield. Keeping secrets was not her strength.

  Maybe it all just went with the territory of being a teenage girl. Oct 14. 9:46 pm

  “Sean called again. I mean I need to tell him it’s over, don’t call me anymore, but I just can’t do it. He cried, he actually cried. I was going to tell Robert, it was the 12th, right, and he said, I need to find a girlfriend to date, and I should have said something. I worry too much, but dammit I have a lot to worry about. There’s a girl on the internet, with an online diary, her name is Tasha, I need to connect with her. I don’t have any money, Jesus, I’m scared, but who wouldn’t be.”

  Oct 15 10:10 pm
  “I’m hurting all over again. Is that the only way it can be. I’m so twisting in agony every day. It’s just over a guy. And it’s opening up a whole lot of other problems. I’m going to turn a page, or open a door, and it’s going to be there, right there in my face, and what will I say, and what will I do. It hurts too much. Why can’t it ever stop hurting. I mean, I have a purpose, but I’m very depressed, why, if you want to drive me over the edge, mission accomplished. If you want to drive me crazy, you’ve done it. Congratulations. I’ve cracked. I’m riven in two and I can’t be put back together. Right now, I hate you. Oh, goody. I should be happy for both of you.”

  October 16 10:47 pm.

  “I took the PSAT today, I thought I would die it’s so boring. It’s time to let him go. Tonight is the formal ending and a beginning.
  So where do I go from here I don’t know.”

  The recordings were all more of the same, with occasional drama:

  “Okay, it’s Monday, November 19, it’s 9:56 pm. Okay, so much has happened. This weekend I had the best and worst weekend of my life. I really like Fergus, he’s so nice. Whidden’s parents freaked out, and I talked to Evan some. You don’t even know this, but about a week ago Richard moved into the psych ward at Children’s. He went over the edge so to speak. But on Sunday night I talked to Dana and she wasn’t herself and she wasn’t rational, and she and Whidden talked, and she’s much better now, so, anyway, things have been up and down, Leslie’s not doing so great, I need to talk to her, and Dana called me and she’s so much better today.”

  “School’s just crap, I’m wasting my time there, I don’t know what I’m doing.” “Fergus is so cool, we like the same things.”
  “November 24, it’s 10:30, he called me, he did, and he sounded like some freaky older man at first.”

  I should never have been the single parent of a teenage girl. Still, what I took away from listening to these tedious minutes on tape was relief. The message from twenty years prior seemed obvious. I had played an unimportant role in the events that had mattered most to my daughter. I hadn’t failed her or harmed her. Her preoccupations were entirely with her peers and herself. She seemed to have no greater or lesser concerns than those of an average member of the cast of one of The Real Housewives programs.

  x

  On April 9, 2003, when she was seventeen, Eden wrote a song and recorded it on a tape labeled “Original Demo.” It was another of the dozens of tapes she had left, maybe to be found “one day, by the right people.” The lyrics were written in pencil on a scrap of paper folded up in the cassette case. Eden sings –

  Chorus:
  Stolen (secret is crossed out) moments
  Secret (stolen is crossed out) hours I spent with you

  A handful of spare change, don’t ever (can never is crossed out) change
  You never (it don’t is crossed out) changed (d added) a thing.

  Everything’s so dull
  My lucidity is gone
  And it’s all my fault
  I did everything wrong
  But I know it’s right
  And I’m alone tonight.

  Finding solace
  In a cigarette burn
  My last comfort
  And I, and I, and I yearn

  For the bliss of ignorance
  Return of my lost innocence.
  

  (chorus w/variations)
  You never changed a thing

  She was unhappy enough to be burning herself with a cigarette? How could I not have realized that?
  Blind to dramas, self-absorbed, over my head, any of those reasons are likely true.

  xi

  Is The Child A Narcissist? Topic of the day, in Joshua Coleman’s webinar for the parents of estranged children.

  In the end, who is to say what kind of parent you were? No reason that your child should get the deciding vote, according to Dr. Coleman. And whatever decisions I made, the caretaking I provided, good or bad, those calls were not recorded for quality purposes. They cannot be reviewed.

  One thing must be given to Eden — her creative gift, which has allowed her to rewrite her childhood, or at least to edit out the love and commitment.

  Eden has also given me a gift. The tapes where she speaks in a whisper, Dolores’s red wallet. Beads, bits of stone, ten thousand pieces of paper, ephemera. All of it is working its way toward the trash.

  A serpent’s tooth.

  That was Lear’s take on it. He wasn’t on the heath yet when he said in reference to his daughters, though it only applied to two of the three, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have an ungrateful child.

  At the time he was feeling sorry for himself and disgusted as well.

  *

• Where Have You Gone, Patrick Wheeler

  Skateboards were invented by surfers, but it was Timmy Wheeler’s older brother Patrick who discovered that a playing card could be attached with a wooden clothespin to a spoke on a bicycle’s back wheel.
  The resulting sound thrilled us boys. We were motoring.
  Besides, we were unaware of surfing in those days, though we lived only a mile or so from the ocean. We were too young for that. And skateboards came later.
  We were mostly on our bicycles in the neighborhood.
  When we set off down the street, it was often with no desire greater than getting away. Patrick was the oldest and naturally took the lead. His eleven years gave him twice the authority of our seven and eight. He was also the only one of us who ever swore.
  In those days, words could still be dirty. There was no cable TV, so I had never heard what my parents called “swear words” in our living room. It must have been easier to be a parent then, or maybe the challenges were just different.
  One summer morning as we set out on our bikes for Westchester Park, which we called the playground, the playing card attached to Patrick’s back wheel worked itself free.
  “God damn it,” Patrick said. I don’t know why he needed to say that, but it was the first time I had ever heard it said.
  It shocked me. I considered it bad enough that I thought about going back home. How much difference after all separated swearing from murder? Both prohibitions were written in stone.

  Patrick Wheeler was also the one who first introduced me to fireflies. We would see them in the taller grasses across 80th, in the fields.
  Sometimes he called them lightening bugs, or sometimes glow worms.
  On summer evenings when it became darker later, fireflies in the field rose like thoughts. They must have had a life both before and beyond that instant, but it was unknown. All we could see was the spark. For me the firefly was nothing more than its display. Of course, it has its own complicated life. A firefly is no fly, it’s a beetle, and like all beetles, it was once an egg, then a larva, and then pupa, and finally an adult. The young were the glow worms. It was the adults we saw, and the cold light they made at the very end of the day.

  ii

  On our bikes, it was a thrill to use Georgetown as a straightaway, ignoring stop signs at the cross streets all the way to the traffic light at Manchester. The playground was across Manchester. It had a gym, ballfields, and sandpits with swings, tall metal slides, and one of those merry-go-rounds that was just a large metal plate you could spin and then jump on to ride. With a green light, we’d cross to the rec center, where the gym was. On the back side, there was the large covered patio that protected the wooden carrom boards that were fixed to their tables. That’s where we played. We could check out a set of the wooden sticks we pretended were pool cues. The boards had pockets in their corners; the red and green carroms, wooden rings the size of checkers, slid across into the pockets. We never knew how to play correctly or bothered keeping score. Whatever rules a carrom game has where it originated, we didn’t know; our rules only consisted of taking turns.

  I learned how to play tennis at Westchester Park, but that was later and it required buying equipment at Sportsville, the store on Manchester across from the park. Phil, the owner there, doubled as a tennis pro. He gave free lessons on the courts at the park. He was also the one who would restring the Dunlop Maxply rackets, the Jack Kramer models from Wilson, and, most beautiful of all, the Tad Davis Imperials.

  iii

  On Georgetown, my father kept our lawn groomed, using a push mower. We had the house on the corner, at Georgetown and 80th. The white façade of the house, stucco, was dressed with shrubs. A walkway with a rose bush on either side led to the open front porch. Green shutters on the windows, an orange brick chimney on the right side of the house, rising above the roof, and a green front door at the back of the porch. When you came inside, the dining room was to the left, and an entry to the kitchen. To the right, the living room, and a fixed octagonal window, above the mantel of the fireplace. Straight ahead, a short hallway, child’s bedroom on the right, parents’ bedroom on the right at the end on the right, the one bathroom to the left, and another bedroom, the older child’s, further down on the left. It was a stage set of sorts, post-war housing for a family of four.

  There’s a report on our house, or ones just like it, that the California Department of Transportation produced in 2011. Weighing in at two hundred pages, it provides the details on Tract Housing in California, A Context for National Register Evaluation. All rights are reserved, but nonetheless, quoting from the introduction, it says the purpose of the report is “to assist in applying the National Register of Historic Places eligibility criteria to tract housing built after World War II.” When does the mundane become the exotic, and the ordinary the precious? How long is long enough to acquire the valuable patina of time? If we find in a Roman outhouse the shard used to scrape an ancient backside, we save it, we catalog it, we might even treasure it.

  The National Register is open to considering “properties that embody the distinctive characteristics of a type period, or method of construction…or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction.”

  In the three decades after World War II brought the aviation and booming defense industries to California, there were some three and half million single family homes constructed in the state. In Los Angeles and its new suburbs, homebuilders sited tract neighborhoods near employers, targeting wage earners in the defense industries as their primary buyers. In Westchester, where our house was, developer Fritz Burns constructed his tract homes so the man of the family would be near North American Aviation, though my father worked on a laundry truck.

  I haven’t lived on Georgetown in over fifty years, but on a visit back to see the house I drove by the playground again, and there were homeless tents at Westchester Park. The tennis courts where I took lessons from Phil were still there, but fancier, resurfaced and landscaped, because the city had improved them.

  The indecency of homeless tents a mile from the Pacific is a message that I am almost unwilling to read. There was no such thing in my childhood. Maybe in a Bowery area, deep downtown, but not in the neighborhoods.

  It feels like a loose thread in the social fabric, sooner or later pulling on it will lead to an unraveling. Another friend from childhood, not Patrick Wheeler or his brother Timmy, sent me a link to an article on Yahoo about Los Angeles real estate. The title, “Limited house budget? Try Westchester.” It included the photo of a house for sale at 6462 W. 87th Place, not far from where we both grew up. The house looked abandoned. Weeds two feet tall grew on the cracked dirt of a front yard. The blinds were drawn on the trio of front windows. A strange wooden beam projected from the composition roof, impaling the house, which looked to be a best little more than a box. Three bedrooms, two baths, one thousand ninety square feet. The price? $1,275,000, which seemed to me further evidence that our economy is fed on fantasy and must collapse. Maybe this house too, surely destined for tearing down, belongs on the National Register.

  iv

  The jay hops down on the edge of the concrete bowl of a fountain and dips its head to drink. There are no gnomes beneath it, only a small concrete friar, a kind of comic nod to local history that is no more real than a fairytale or a theme park. The air in Southern California still feels as natural to me as my skin, forty years after I moved elsewhere. It is the original garden, where God breathed into me the breath of life. If I had the skill, I could describe it as a wine might be, with hints of ocean air and eucalyptus. The neighborhood streets then seemed as safe as meadows. The internal combustion engine was eternally in my ear on Georgetown and 80th, its background noise no more of a disturbance than the rustling of a breeze.

  The Wheeler brothers and I both had a sister. Theirs was younger, mine was older. We both had fathers working and a mother staying home.

  We knew nothing of our parents’ troubles, whatever their unhappiness, either with each other or with getting and spending. It was neither discussed nor imagined. We were all going to do great things.

  We walked to elementary school and returned to our mothers at home. We went every week to Sunday school and Sabbath school.

  We were the smartest children we knew, and no one told us otherwise.

  v

  Memory is slippery. So is history. So much of it turns on writing about what has been written down. The only writing some consider error-free was done on two stone tablets, and the originals of those were broken even before they were read. If history is an attempt to set memory in stone, the best we have may be only the fragments.

  According to my mother, I was born in Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood, California in 1951. The copy of my birth certificate says the same thing. But back up a hundred years or so from my mother in the hospital’s maternity ward, and she would have been in El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles. The land was well-watered then, the residents of El Pueblo used it for grazing cattle. Mexico issued land grants for the ranchos, over the years changes in ownership turned cattle into sheep, then fruit trees, and then into the grain-growing operations of Daniel Freeman. In 1887, Freeman’s Centinela-Inglewood Land Company began commercial real estate development, birthing Inglewood. In 1942, Daniel’s daughter, Grace, donated nine acres of her inheritance to the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet for the site of a hospital to be named after her father. That hospital, Daniel Freeman Hospital, opened in 1954. All this according to published history. So, how could I have been born there in 1951? If a hospital had already been there, renamed Daniel Freeman in 1954, my mother could have used the new name when she told me where I was born. It doesn’t seem likely, because there was no hospital on the site in Inglewood before the Daniel Freeman Hospital. And even if there had been, surely the birth certificate issued in 1951 would have the 1951 name. This factual discrepancy may have a simple resolution, in public records. In private life, however, memory is more problematic. The shape of what happened can shift. There is no pope of personal memory. It’s all fallible.

  vi

  The fallibility of memory is a phrase that stirs up trouble in the real world. It comes into play in criminal trials, where it is used to question the reliability of witnesses. Do they remember rightly whatever they swear they saw or heard?

  I’ve heard the TED talk. We do not record what happened in our memories, though we believe we do. There is no recording available later to play back, though we think there is. Memory is more like food on the shelf, perishable. It spoils. And it’s subject to contamination, sometimes by the suggestion of others, sometimes by our own thoughts or in the very act of recalling. On a night hike sponsored by a local nature preserve, it occurred to me how memory resembles open land in this respect. It, too, is in danger of encroachment.

  If I don’t file away the facts of my life, what am I remembering? Only the key bits. And when I want to retrieve them, I piece the bits together to reconstruct what happened. Time goes by, memory is lost. Or I never paid attention in the first place, so there was nothing to lose. Or the memory is there, but I’ve blocked it out. Or I’ve filed it under the wrong heading, misattributing to my life something I may only have heard about. Some say that bias is the real reason people edit or rewrite their past, changing what happened so it coincides with the opinion they formed later and want to believe. In the end, the past becomes more about what they think now, less about what happened then.

  Despite this, this understanding that what I remember is likely to be fiction, I’m still taken in by it. And as if my memories were manuscripts, the older they are, the more valuable they seem. I envy those who claim they can recall the colors of the circus animals suspended over their head in a mobile as they lay in their cribs, and they can still hear the nursery melody. My first five years are largely a blank. I must have come home from the hospital, whatever its name was. I’ve also seen black and white photos, squares with serrated edges, showing me in a high chair with birthday cake smeared on my face. There’s the black and white cake with a single candle. One earlier than that shows me on my back in a tiny tub, the film fast enough to freeze a stream of urine rising in an arc. And there’s me and my big sister, ages 3 and 4, all dressed up.

  But none of these are memories.

  vii

  For my fifth birthday, November 13, 1956, my parents gave me a toy bow and arrow set. Instead of a point at the end, the arrows had suction cups. A square paper target unfolded to reveal a giant circle with grey and black outer rings, a blue inner ring, and a bright red center that said 100 on the bullseye. Maybe my mother, who must have made the decision, thought it would help me with focus, coordination, confidence. It was a very sunny morning that birthday, and in retrospect I was unfocused, and overconfident.

  Our memories are intermittent. They are never a coherent narrative, only a scene here, part of a scene there, sometimes only a single image, as if life were a still photograph. My dreams are like that as well. Something remains, a residue that I know is only that. The longer sequence that the images were part of cannot be recovered. So it is with a memory I carry of being five years old, in the backyard on Georgetown, maybe the day my family marked my fifth birthday. I’m sure I only used the bow and arrow once, on the day I unwrapped it, with smiles all around. It’s November, sunny enough because this is Southern California. The fence in the backyard separates our grassy yard from a further back area, where there are weeds and dirt, our incinerator, a clothesline and a pile of wood scraps. My mother must have unfolded the bullseye target and taped it to the fence. She might have moved to one side. I was a few feet away, fumbling with an arrow. I couldn’t wait to shoot. From here on, nothing, no images. I can see in my mind’s eye that the suction cup, with the wooden shaft of the arrow behind it, hits my mother in the leg. No, it’s stuck on the side of her face. Or it bounces off her arm. No idea where that comes from. It belongs in that world that exists as a speculative memory, imagined, but not really seen. Same thing when I wonder where my sister or my father are; they are out of the frame, lost. The rest blurs as well. I am running. At least I believe I am. I have the same sense of this actual event as I do of a dream. I would not want to testify, but there’s certainty nonetheless, even though as an eye witness I could not have seen myself. I am chased, I am running, there’s a vapor of emotion. There are no further details.

  It’s probably not my birthday, November 13, that I remember, because that was a Tuesday in 1951. My father would not have been home. My birthday gift would not have been given, at least not in daylight. It could have been on the Sunday before, the eleventh. That was Veterans Day, the third Veterans Day ever. President Eisenhower had signed a bill in 1954 that turned what had been Armistice Day into Veterans Day. Poor Armistice Day, marked in honor of the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, when World War I ended, disappeared from our calendar. November 11 was also the birthday of my mother’s mother, who I called Nanny. So all these milestones were combined that Sunday, November 11, 1956. But if it did take place on Tuesday, the thirteenth, then it happened exactly one week after Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson, for the second time. Is that memorable? No more so than any day, or any year. In 1956, Elvis had his first real hit, Heartbreak Hotel. In a remake of The Ten Commandments, Charlton Hesston ordered Yul Brenner to let his people go. Coincidentally, Egypt told the British where to go in 1956, nationalizing the Suez Canal. Castro started a revolution in Cuba. So it was a year like every other. On Tuesday, November 13, the Supreme Court agreed that Alabama’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional, but what happened to me that day, or on the Sunday before, was an integration of events into a first memory: a sucker-tipped arrow, a red bullseye taped to the fence in the backyard, the moment I shot my mother in the middle of her forehead.

  After it happened, what happened next has completely disappeared. I probably started running, either toward my mother, because I was afraid, or away from her, for the same reason.

  Let’s pick running away. At five, I may not have made it out the backyard gate and to the curb at 80th. Crossing a busy street at that age would have been a major violation of the rules. But I can remember, or imagine, that I crossed it and then spent the rest of the day hiding in the fields across 80th, under the pines at first, then reaching the bluff that overlooked Ballona Creek in the distance. I could have stayed out until dark before returning, when my forgiving parents were so glad to see me that I was never punished. I was allowed that night to watch James MacArthur, Helen Hayes’ son, play an Indian on The Light In The Forest. Or I stayed away for days, sleeping on a bed of pine needles, eating I don’t know what, living like an Indian in the wilderness. Of course that’s nuts, no five year old would do that or even want to. Besides, The Light In The Forest didn’t come out until two years later. It was released in 1958, according to Wikipedia.

  viii

  Whether one thing leads to another, or two things that happen in sequence simply butt up to each other, with no connection to each other, other than the sequence in time—that’s a question that philosophers have taken seriously. For those in favor of the miraculous, it’s possible there’s no bond between one moment and the next. Every prediction stumbles into a post hoc ergo propter hoc pothole. David Hume shared some of that thinking in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. One of the takeaways I remember, if I remember it correctly, was to challenge the power of habit in our conclusions about causality. I base my confidence in what will happen in the future entirely on the sequences I observed in the past.

  Will the sun rise tomorrow? I know it will, because it rose on every tomorrow in my experience. Hume’s discussion supports a level of skepticism that might be brought to any of my judgments. Most of my proofs are downgraded to the status of my habits.

  Habit does explain a lot in the way I think about past, present, and future. Life is one new thing after another, but it still seems repetitive. Custom does much to make it seem so. So do the names of things. The names of the seven days of the week repeat. The names of the months do as well, even though every November is unique, as is every Tuesday. Habit also encourages me to think that everything is connected, as though the fabric of my universe is one infinite thread. It’s a notion that comes with some anxiety. Pull on one loose thread in the fabric, and there might be no end to the unraveling. Then again, for those moments when I think everything is connected, I still have to explain why I personally feel so disconnected, and not just from other people, but from ground and sky, birds, a stone, a box of old photos, the vase at a garage sale. And then I also have problems with beginnings and ends. The thread of the universe could be infinite at both ends, impossible though that is to conceive. It’s probably more like the twisted garden hose I have to wrestle with, when I’m trying to reach the plants in pots on the back porch, where the sprinkler system doesn’t cover. I untangle the knots in the hose and straighten it where it’s pinched. I find its beginning, where the male threads are, and spin them into the spigot. Then comes the part where this conceptual universe would not be like any garden hose I know, because the length of hose would go on forever, water forever flowing from it.

  ix

  Other than my fifth birthday, nothing else has stuck from those first five years, and very little from the following five. There’s the face of the boy, Jack, who wrestled me to the ground on the grass in front of Kentwood Elementary. That was my first and only physical fight, though at the time all I was doing was walking home minding my own business. Jack’s blond buzz cut dances in my mind to the tune of his laughter. He was a sixth grader, I was in fourth. The story I’ve told myself about the scuffle has to do with him wanting to impress my big sister, Patti, who was in his grade.

  One other memory, this one with a dog, a chow. It’s barking behind a cedar fence on my walk home from elementary school. Every school day, this dog, in its fury, would jump against the fence when I walked by. And the fence was falling apart, its pickets were separating. This dog was never not in the backyard in the afternoons on school days. On the day I remember, it breaks through the fence. Whether bitten or not, and I’m guessing not, I don’t remember anything further from that point, just a dark, longhaired dog, and furious noise.

  I do recall the first word I was taught to spell. First grade? Before that? It was look. Also, the name of my fifth grade teacher. Mr. Knoernschild made plastic models of aircraft from World War II and displayed them in the classroom. Still, given the years and the wonders of childhood, I have so little of it left, and no sense of where it all disappeared to.

  Why is it that memory fades, especially of names? One night my son and I were sharing a meal in Koreatown. In conversation I could not remember the name of my daughter’s first husband. “Do you know my name?” he asked me. I thought he was sneering, but a day later it came to me that he was offering a clue, when I remembered my former son-in-law’s first name was the same as my son’s.

  Proper names are not in their drawer where they ought to be in the cabinet of my memory. Also, the names of people minutes after I’ve met them.

  I suppose you can’t recollect what was never collected in the first place. This is my primary explanation for the loss. I am not paying attention.

  “I know him,” I tell myself, as if cheerleading, encouraging myself when I can’t come up with the name. I love the idea of the ineffable name of God, because I cannot possibly eff that up.

  x

  Then there are the things misnamed. The misinformation, the misunderstandings.

  A fat grey bird settled on the brick pavers. It was still for only a moment then flew off. This was the bird I always call morning dove, a dove early in the day, even though I see it evenings as well. I asked my partner why it had that name.
  “Mourning dove,” she corrected me. We were sitting out on the patio of her house having coffee early on a Saturday.
  She prolonged the syllable. “Mourning, mourning dove.”
  “Not good morning?”
  “No. Like a house of mourning. It’s also called turtle dove.”
  Back home that Sunday evening, I took my binoculars and a book into the backyard hammock that was suspended between two live oaks. The birds in the branches of the live oaks seemed to never sit still and to be saying the same thing over and over, at intervals. They flitted, in the late light of summer. To my eye, it was nervous movement, jumpiness, as if their muscles were popping. In the hammock I was gently rocking back and forth, looking up through the branches at patches of blue, then down at a page of Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. In his first years in New York, he had lost his scholarship, dropped out of Parsons, and then also left his classes at the Art Students League. He seemed happy enough though, with nothing expected of him, no plans for his days, no routine. He wrote of the time: “Still, I knew that possibilities are never completely exhausted, and life itself is a great work of art, with room enough to encompass disillusionment….”
  A spider that seemed suspended by nothing dropped down and hung above the page. Whatever the possibilities were, they did not seem good. The light in the sky was turning grey, and the insects wanted their world back. The outdoors was theirs at night. My place was inside, watching the fifth game of the Eastern Conference Finals with all the lights on.

  xi

  On foot with Patrick and Timmy, the fields across 80th street were the nearby that stood in for the faraway. The thorny bushes and grassland might as well have been Africa, or the frontier west, if we could close our ears to the cars and look away from the stucco houses in the neighborhood. For more distant adventure, I had Balboa, where my mother liked to go for summer vacations. We went in July, staying at one of the waterfront motels on the peninsula. The motels were pretty much all the same. They would have the two facing triangles of a shuffleboard court stained on cement in a side yard. Out front, the public boardwalk and, beyond that, a semi-private beach, like a small front yard of sand ending at the water. Going to Balboa, we thought we were travelers. In truth, the motels were less than an hour away from our house in Westchester. My father could have driven back and forth. But “getting away” was essential to my mother, important enough to buy lodging and meals for four, plus the gasoline, which was thirty-one cents a gallon. Maybe she did it “for the children.”

  My sister and I were ten and twelve when we first went, and Balboa was heaven for children old enough to be off leash for the first time in novel surroundings. Beyond the motels, the boardwalk area had penny arcades, filled with coin-operated entertainments. Pinball machines with flippers. Claw machines almost able to hold on to a prize. The food sold from wooden stands on the boardwalk belonged to a foreign cuisine. Sugar was the staple – frozen bananas dipped in chocolate, candy-coated apples. You could skip the fruit and go directly to a pink cloud of cotton candy. If you had a dollar left after the arcades and the food stands, there were gift shops. They sold tiny deer made of blown glass, long rubber snakes, stone elephants, and wind-up hopping metal frogs.

  At ten and twelve, my sister and I were still rivals. (We had entered into a battle that neither party fully retreated from until we had exited our thirties, if then.) One morning on the motel beach I found a reed, or maybe a driftwood stick near the water, and I was stabbing at the bubbles left behind when the tide receded. Patti was already there ahead of me, by the tide pools near the rocks that formed one border of the motel’s property. She was staring down at something. Before she could claim it for herself, I walked into the water next to the rocks. It was no deeper than my ankles. I could see a cluster of sea anemones covered by an inch of the shallow tide that moved in and out.
  Sea anemones are odd-looking animals. When I focused on the biggest one, what I saw through the water looked more like a flower, with the grey, yellowish circle of what I supposed was its face. The tentacles were like petals trembling around the circle. I wanted to poke it.
  “Don’t,” Patti said, “don’t do that.”
  Too late. I had touched the center of the circle with my stick.
  It was as though I had pushed a secret button, like in the movies when the wall in a paneled library rotates round and reveals a hidden room behind the bookshelves.
  This was more magical. The anemone closed up, like a flower in the night. Maybe that’s why I can still see it these years later.
  The tentacles of memory have closed in around it.

  Balboa was named for Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean. Like so many of the treasure seekers of his generation, Balboa came from Extremadura in the west of central Spain. It was harsh and unwelcoming place, not unlike a biblical wilderness, the place to be from when you are trying to reach the promised land. Balboa claimed the entire ocean for Spain. According to Keats, Balboa was silent when he first reached a mountaintop on the isthmus of Panama and saw the great body of the Pacific. It must have looked endless. If silence can be provoked, awe can do it. And yet, the ocean was not too big to be claimed, as if it could be owned.

  The beauty of the ocean, of its tidepools and shorelines, have been described countless times, by artists and by scientists. The eternity that Blake saw in a grain of sand was on the water’s edge. Rachel Carson saw the same lyrical eternity, where the running of the tides echoes the flow of time, and in its sound she heard melodies not only of the past, but of the future as well. Life seems to be both obliterated and contained in the beat of the surf. It spoke a message that was clear and deeply mysterious. Nothing could be more real than the sea anemone that I poked with a bit of reed in the shallow water in front of the motel. But if it existed for some reason, I could not fathom it. That was a message that applied to everything around me, myself included, if I choose to apply it.

  xii

  I can blame the bow and arrow on an inheritable trait passed down from the hunter ancestor on the savanna or veldt. But following Patrick to the park on my bicycle or on foot to the far edge of the fields might date back even further, to when ancestors of my human ancestors lived in packs. From the bluffs, we could look out at the unexplored territory of the wetlands beyond Lincoln Boulevard, where Ballona Creek was. It seemed both near and far. We knew something about that edge of land, because Ballona Creek was one of the places that big kids went. Surfers went there, to learn on the small waves where the creek emptied into the Pacific. Like Vasco Nunez de Balboa, we claimed the vistas of the ocean, but only for ourselves.

  Aside from riding bikes, and exploring the bluff on foot, Patrick, Timmy and I spent a lot of time throwing rocks. This was also usually done in the fields across the street. We threw dirt clods at each other. Stones were slung at tree trunks or just heaved into the air for distance. With a rock in our hands we were heroes, villains, warriors, or criminals, depending on what we had seen on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, or in a comic book. We had no formal game, with penalties or scoring, just the inexplicable thrill of aiming and throwing. Some say concentration is essential for hitting a target. Others, just the opposite. Now there are YouTube videos on the shooter’s mentality, with life lessons thrown in. The message is typically a general one. It’s about restoring confidence, and ideally never losing it, after you miss. But the most obvious lesson I learned when I let a rock fly from my hand is that it’s destined to hit something. And, lesson two, the sure way to accomplish the goal is to declare whatever result you achieve to have been the goal all along. Patrick used that a lot, throwing dirt clods at Timmy and me.
  “Missed me!” Or, “Not even close!”
  “I wasn’t trying to hit you,” Patrick would reply.
  Patrick Wheeler, are you still living? Is your younger brother?

  Thirteen years after Thoreau spent two weeks on a boat trip with his brother along the Concord and Merrimack rivers, he published an account of it at his own expense. Three years after the trip, John had died of tetanus. It is natural that Thoreau’s recounting of their trip together turned into more than a travelogue.

  It was an act of remembrance.

  Thoreau wrote down some two million words in the journals he kept during his short lifetime. He was dedicated to walking. He recorded what he saw routinely. He never earned a living doing so, finding work instead as a pencil maker, carpenter, day laborer, lecturer, and surveyor, but he must have considered the keeping of his journal and the making of observations to be his work. The landscape of his favorite places became a sacred scripture for him, and he took a Talmudic approach to its study, returning to it over and over and finding everything in it. In the journal entry of January 10, 1851, Thoreau wrote, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily – not to exercise the legs or body merely… but to succeed to the highest and worthiest ends by the abandonment of all specific ends – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” He then went on to explain the derivation of the word “saunter,” which, he continued in his entry, “is happily derived from idle people who roved about the country and asked charity under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy land, till perchance, the children exclaimed, There goes a Sainte-Terrer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds.”

  I don’t know if Thoreau quoted his derivation of saunter from Webster, who had published his very first English dictionary of the American language only a few years before, or simply recalled it from his own reading. Thoreau did make some use of the saunter journal entry a decade later, repeating his tale of the origins of the word in his essay Walking, published in The Atlantic in 1862. Walking is the essay in which you will also find “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” now the unofficial motto of The Sierra Club. It, too, is a recycled phrase, first used by Thoreau in a lecture in 1851 to members of the Concord Lyceum at First Parish Unitarian Church.

  Indeed, the Atlantic essay was a rewrite of the Concord Lyceum lecture. In that first lecture, the wildness was the wild in each of us, more than in the landscape.

  These days, I’m no longer on bicycles, or in fields, or on bluffs. My walking is mostly on sidewalks, with a dog on a leash, usually with my partner and her yappy little dog as well. To be in the wilderness at my age would be no idyll. On the contrary, the wilderness is an uncomfortable place, where everything bites or sticks or stings. But the wilderness is also where Horeb was found, the mountain of God. In the wilderness, Moses found the bush that was burning but never consumed. That may be the wildness I am still looking for inside myself, what is burning but not consumed.

  xiii

  In As You Like It, Shakespeare divides our lifespan into the Seven Stages of Man. I like a simpler scheme. There are the years when it’s desirable to be older, and then the many years when the longing is for youth. It plots as a lopsided graph, peaking for some as soon as the mid-twenties. That may be a peculiarity of modernity, with its advancements in public health. It also speaks to our ingratitude. Did the man who made it to forty-five in the tenth century wish to be eighteen again, or just congratulate himself on living so long?

  My father always wanted to live to one hundred and said so. When the State of California refused to re-issue his driver’s license sight unseen after he applied for the five- year renewal at 92, he was bitter about it. The Department of Motor Vehicles asked him to take a driving test, which he took as an insult. Then, when they failed him, he threatened to leave the state and my mother in what was the sixtieth year of their marriage. The end of the marriage would have been collateral damage.

  As it turned out, he didn’t make it to one hundred or out of the marriage.

  At 93, my father went to the local movie theater to see Tom Cruise play a Nazi in Valkyrie. On the way in, he tripped on a concrete step and struck his head. He stayed for a while in a rehab facility before returning home, but nothing was the same after that. He struggled to stay upright, and his mind wobbled as well.

  Within a year, he was living in the care of a small business, a residence that qualified as a nursing home for Medicare reimbursements. The home was close enough to the “community for active seniors” where my parents had lived together. My mother could drive over, daily if she chose, without ever getting on a freeway. Since she was only willing to drive on neighborhood streets, that was one of the criteria when she made the decision to place him in the home despite his objections.

  It’s unfair to attribute her decision to the irreconcilable differences that might have ended their marriage long before both of them were in their nineties. She had her reasons. He was disabled but not compliant, she was unhappy but in charge. So the war ended, with one of them defeated.

  Residents in the home stayed in rooms that must have once been filled by children, in a neighborhood zoned single family. When I flew into California to visit my parents, one goal was to take my father out for an hour or two, away from the home that wasn’t his home. On those visits I never brought him back to “the house,” because it would have been cruel and also disobedient, since my mother would no longer let him live with her there.

  Before whatever field trip we would go on, usually to a restaurant, my father and I we would sit together in the “common area,” the home’s former living room that was always empty. My father was sit quietly. The silence was not uncharacteristic, he had always been the father who didn’t talk a lot, at least not to his children. Once, though, he summarized his situation.
  “I don’t want to be here.”
  “I know,” I said.
  “Mom doesn’t want me to come home.”
  I didn’t reply to that.

  I knew his death was coming, but there were different ways to think about it. It’s one horizon that does not recede as you approach it. And it isn’t a cliff, where you only see the depths when you are practically at the edge. My visits to the home were at intervals of months. Usually no more than two, but not always. Each time I visited, the slope that my father was on seemed to have angled more sharply downward. During one of the intervals he gave up asking to go home. Then he found it harder to speak, and he may have stopped listening as well. He had always enjoyed listening to ballgames. When I picture his left ear, it’s plugged with an earpiece, the tinny voice of a broadcaster leaking out the edge, the thin wire descending to a transistor radio. In the summer when he was 94, he lost interest in baseball and had become someone else. Even then, though, it was not obvious that he was at the end physically. He was still stout. There was nothing wasted-looking about him.

  The fall had done him in, and other falls had precipitated my mother’s decision to remove him from their home. My father was stubborn. As she explained it, he refused to wait for help when he wanted to get up in the middle of the night. Getting out of his bed on his own, he would fall and remain on the floor of the bedroom or, worse, on the bathroom tile, if he had gotten that far. Ninety herself, my mother didn’t have the strength to pick him up. Some nights, a housekeeper stayed the night on a couch in the den, just for this purpose. Still, my mother explained that it had become for her an intolerable worry. Her doctor agreed. Even with her lorazepam, and my father in his separate bedroom, she couldn’t sleep with him in the same house.

  “Could you have been the one to move out?” I asked her, after my father’s death. “You could have taken an apartment, if only for sleeping, you could have let him to die at home.” If she had considered this, she never said. She told me that I didn’t understand.

  When I came out to visit, I would stay with my mother. I slept in my father’s bedroom. More than once, after I drove over to where he was, I took him out to Coco’s, so he could enjoy the French Dip sandwich. My last visit with him, we went to Coco’s twice on the same day, once for an early lunch, then later in the afternoon for no reason. French Dip sandwiches both times. After the second meal, when we were in our booth and I was waiting for the check, he left to go the men’s room. When he didn’t return, I went looking for him. He was still in the bathroom, but on the floor.
  He said he was just resting.
  I got him up, but we didn’t return to the table. I walked him to the car then went back in to pay.
  I’m not sure whether he had ever made it to the toilet or still needed to. I’m my mother’s son I suppose. I wanted him back at the residence, and I wanted to be elsewhere.

  xiv

  What is a human being? Humans are beings who ask themselves questions they cannot answer. It’s a neat formulation that seems to get to the heart of something. But what do we know, what could we know, about the questions a sea anemone asks itself? Whatever a sea anemone asks, it probably cannot answer either.

  It is hotter even than usual and earlier than usual this summer. After dinner, the temperature falls into the 90s. That’s when I sit outside, on one of the metal lounges, on the green sunbrella fabric of its cushion, near the turquoise rectangle of the pool. At seven in the evening, the sun still hasn’t given up. The undersides of my arms are hot, as though I am wearing the heat as a coat. I notice the spots on my skin, not just on the backs of my hands, but on my legs, below my swim trunks. Not evidence of skin cancer, but just the risk of it. If I could be a bird, it wouldn’t be one of the grieving jays in the branches of the live oaks. They are chasing each other through the tree tops.
  When a fly lands on the lounge cushion near my toes, I slap at it. It rises from the cushion, but immediately lands back down. Repeat, and the same result. I tell the fly out loud that there’s a wide world out there, so no reason for it to share the green cushion with me. I’m a slapping monster that can bring its life to an end, but the fly fails to recognize its vulnerability. Do flies ever die of natural causes? The average fly lives twenty-eight days, so death before the end of the month is its normal fate. If it does live a month, it has buzzed into old age.

  This summer I attended a funeral for a co-worker’s stepson. It was said that he died “of natural causes.” He was a young man in his forties. I presumed he had overdosed, because he was a musician living in Seattle who earned his living as a stage hand at rock concerts. He could have committed suicide. One of those listed as preceding him in death was his fiancé. He might have died of grief or of an overdose of the drug taken to numb his grief. That might be a natural cause.

  Given death, life is nothing like a box of chocolates. It’s more like a Cracker Jack box, it holds a surprise that you don’t want, and the surprise is always the same: time is running out. Cracker Jack with its saluting sailor boy on the package has its own tale of time. The caramel coated popcorn and peanuts were originally sold on Frederick Ruechkeim’s street cart along Fourth Street in Chicago. The sailor mascot has hardly aged since he first appeared in 1916, modeled after Ruechkeim’s grandson, who had died of pneumonia when he was eight. Frito-Lay, part of Pepsico, owns the boy now.

  xv

  The weight of the past is visible in storage rooms. There is a bond between collection and recollection that makes me unwilling to throw things away, even when I know I need to. What was once worth saving needs to be discarded. A child’s first shoes, her bibs and her toys, left for decades in sealed plastic bags and locked in a storage room trunk – it all had a use when it was first stored. It permitted me to imagine a future that has turned out to be imaginary. I never needed to save it all so carefully. It would have been enough, and would have saved time and space, to just dream about the future.

  In the movies, total amnesia happens. Sometimes it’s in a comedy. The character wakes up in a hospital bed and has no memories, so he has no idea who he is. All he has is today. Rather than consider the advantages, he is determined to find the key, open the door, and rediscover the clutter of the past. The message seems to be that you are nobody without memories. But what if you don’t let the mirror or the number of your years discourage you? What if each new day is new? Then the days ahead, however few or many, will be distant enough for planning and spacious enough to hold dreams.

  xvi

  The only career dream I ever heard my father express was to replace Walter Alston as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
  “Alston you bum, I want your job!” I had heard him say under his breath. We were in the bleacher seats near the upper rim of the Coliseum, where the Dodgers played their games before the move in 1962 to Chavez Ravine.

  The stands were as close as he ever got to a management position. He did make his opinions known while listening to games on the transistor radio, and also in attendance. He would say of a rival batter’s relationship to a Dodger pitcher that “he hits him like he owns him.” My mother looked at the Dodgers as her rival, and she refused to go to the ballpark with him, so my father usually went by himself.
  On August 31, 1959, however, he took me along.
  Even at seven, I knew the Dodger roster top to bottom. I had heard their names often enough. Wally Moon, Junior Gilliam, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Charlie Neal, Don Zimmer. Koufax was pitching that August night, Johnny Roseboro catching, and our team was playing San Francisco, our biggest rivals. Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey played on the Giants team. Willie Mays was on their roster as well. I don’t recall if Willie Mays played or not. What I remember is wanting the chocolate ice cream that came in a red and white Carnation brand stiff paper cup. I was afraid to ask for it. In our house, you didn’t leave a light on when you left a room. You were told repeatedly to not stand in front of the refrigerator with its door open, because you were letting the cold out. You weren’t going to for an overpriced treat from the stadium concession. I watched the ballplayers far below, like toy figures on the brown of the infield. The distance and the angle made it impossible to tell where a ball was, once it was hit. And there was hardly any hitting, so the game was a bore.
  That was the August night Koufax struck out eighteen batters.

  For much of his working life, my father thought of himself as a failure. No college degree, years on a laundry truck, then the years selling Baldwin pianos, or trying to. My mother was unsympathetic and dissatisfied. She took as her job policing his diet and fussing about his weight. In his late forties, he became a manufacturer’s rep and finally starting “earning a living.” That success was tainted some, because he owed the opportunity to my mother’s brother, who owned a factory that manufactured upholstered furniture. My uncle was louder about money than he needed to be, and my father disliked him. But now the trunk of my father’s car was full of swatch books. On his trips out of town to furniture stores up and down the coast, he would spend his evenings attending ballgames, the minors, even Pony league games, if there was a lighted ballpark.

  It seemed to me that my father came into his own in the years after he stopped working. Instead of swatch books, he hid Hershey bars in the trunk of his car. He entered a period of life when success was defined as being alive and not working. He had told me once that if he had to do it over again he would never have children. Now the children were adults and out of the house. The house was paid for, he had his favorite recliner. Funerals happened, but to other people. He was going to live to one hundred. Then he hit his head on a concrete step outside a movie theater, and things changed.

  The year before he was confined to a care facility, when he was still at home, his interests started to disappear along with his cognitive ability. Baseball came on the radio again that spring as it always does. He could have held on to it through summer and fall, the last thing to slip from his grasp. But he let go of it before the All-Star break. Then, for a month or two, he sat in the recliner listening to the Big Band music of the forties.

  He had managed to help his family through the Great Depression by selling newspapers from the stand he built on a Chicago street corner. He took violin lessons within earshot of the sound of gunfire from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He joined the army and served in World War II. He came to Los Angeles after the war, worked in a gas station, drove a laundry truck, was fired for union organizing, sold peanut brittle on Sundays on Lincoln Boulevard, peddled pianos. He moved to Oceanside, bowled played golf into his nineties. He died Sunday morning, August 22, 2010.

  My father had a sly sense of humor. I never heard him tell a joke, but he would invent comic phrases, a compound of sugar and hostility. After my sister’s first husband, Terry, moved into my parents’ neighborhood, he would visit them all the time. Terry still called my mother Mom. Also, he lived alone, he had not wanted the divorce, and hoped somehow my sister would return, which was never going to happen.
  He came over during one of my visits, too.
  There he was, in the living room, making conversation with me. My father was in the room but not really in the conversation and wanted it to end. He said out loud to no one, “How do you say adios in Spanish?”

  Twelve years later, Terry was in a care home himself, for dementia patients.

  xvii

  Patti texted me, attaching a snapshot of a drawing.
  “Jenna made a drawing of me when we FaceTimed. She got my jowls and my double chin perfectly.”
  A second text followed.
  “Lilly loves her pen by the way!”
  Jenna and Lilly were two of her grandchildren. Both were younger than ten. After Patti’s daughter left her husband, he won custody, and a year later he moved a thousand miles away with the girls.
  Another text:
  “Spoon is a bit iffy for Jenna. But was a sweet gesture. Thanks for thinking of them!”
  I texted back. “Pen and spoon? Who were you sending your message to?”
  “I just got off the phone with them,” she texted. “Wasn’t you that sent those things?”
  “I guess not,” she wrote, answering her own question.
  I had stuffed animals, colored pencil sets, plastic superheroes, beads, keepsake boxes, and more, in storage. They had belonged years ago to my son and daughter, who were disinterested adults. I wanted to give it away and suggested I would pick out some things and send them to Jenna and Lilly.
  Patti sent two messages back.
  “The apt they’re in is so small I don’t think there’s much room unfortunately” and then “They seem happy tho.”

  My sister Patti is someone who could go back with me to the beginning, to first memories. So I asked her to remember a sound I cannot pin to an event or an era, though we must have been small enough to fit in a lap. The sound belongs to a voice that must have belonged to our mother.
  “Do you remember being rocked, or being held, and hearing ‘Shaw, shaw.’” I asked Patti how old at our oldest might we have been.
  The word that was repeated was shaw, like shush but not a rebuke. It was a comfort, a calming sound.
  Patti couldn’t recall it.
  Some memories are like this – a sound, but unattached to any narrative.
  Sometimes, thinking about shaw, shaw, I head repeatedly to the same place, and it’s a dead end. I look for a way through, but there isn’t one. Still, there’s reluctance, even an inability, to abandon what’s not working. I’ve gone this far, I can’t quit now. Not exactly the same as a sunk cost fallacy. When I try to remember, but can’t, it’s more like being on a street and unable to see to the end. There’s no sign, no yellow diamond with a black inset border and large capitalized letters saying Dead End. I’m unwilling to be realistic. Nothing could be more realistic than the end of a road. That’s life, after all. You’re dead, it ends. Instead, I repeat the effort, over and over. So, trying to recover the past becomes like being on a treadmill.

  Treadmills are derided as a metaphor for going nowhere, but the point, as I see it, is to sustain the effort. Those who pray three times daily know that the ritual gains its strength and also its meaning through repetition.

  xviii

  Patti and I have photographs of ourselves together when we were small children. We don’t have nearly as many as people do today, when phones are cameras, and there’s no film to purchase. We have the photos our parents thought worth taking. Birthdays, milestones. When it cost money to have photographs developed at the drugstore, every waking moment did not merit documentation. We have fewer pictures from our teen years, during the long disturbances of adolescence. Photos then became a pictorial record of miserable times, which our parents may have been even more reluctant to waste money on. Middle school graduation, the car trip that same summer to Yellowstone. Patti can look at her fourteen-year- old self, eyes averted, sulking.

  Of course, as teenagers it was obvious that our parents had made a botch of their lives. It’s not a healthy way think. Better to realize that unhappiness is a human condition, and neither blameworthy nor a momentary event. We thought our lives would be nothing like our parents. But we were the children of rock and roll, which is rebellious and, to that degree, we were optimistic and naive. Country music is more likely to speak the truth, which is that rebellion is useless. I read that somewhere.

  Our parents never bothered to rebut our conclusions. I wonder, what war were they fighting within themselves? There must have been one. We are all masking up, calibrating our opinion, normalizing our behaviors. We are all just staying afloat. We are keeping our noses above water, because that is how we can breathe.

  In other news:

  The James Webb telescope has been launched into space. It, too, is looking at the past, using infrared light to study cosmic history. A million miles from earth, it orbits the sun, its gold- coated beryllium mirror shaded with a sunscreen the size of a tennis court. The Webb telescope is looking for the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. In other words, for the beginning of the beginning.

  The Webb is an advance over the Hubble telescope, no relation to the name of the Robert Redford character in The Way We Were. He’s the one who has the successful life that’s easy enough for him to acquire – of course it is, look at him. But he doesn’t stay true to himself and loses his chance for a more meaningful life.

  The telescope Hubble is Edward Hubble, whose name also appears in Hubble’s Constant. That’s the speed at which the galaxies in our expanding universe are moving, relative to their distance from Earth. At the rate of around one percent a year, which is the current understanding, the universe will double in size in ten billion years. Hubble calculated his constant in the 1920s. He came up with 342,000 miles per hour per million light years, or 501 kilometers per second per megaparsec. Ever since, other astronomers have been pointing out that Hubble was off. So his constant keeps changing. One figure slows things down to 50,400 miles per hour per million light years, or 73.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec. The debate continues. Some weigh in with comments on ripples in the fabric of space-time made by the crashes of neutron stars, some want to discuss black holes. But these conversations about cosmic time, an expanding universe, beginnings and ends, only send the rest of us down rabbit holes.

  A rabbit hole is one of two things. Either it’s a simple burrow on a hillside, or, it’s a source of confusion, taking you deeper and further into the ridiculous. Sometimes, so deep and so far that you struggle to extricate yourself. The phrase down the rabbit hole comes to us from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice does fall into the White Rabbit’s hole and tumbles into Wonderland. Any relationship between that and a rat hole, which is a squalid place? You can waste time and money by pouring it down the rat hole. The rat hole, as if there’s only one. With that definite article, every rat hole is the same hole.

  xix

  According to Ernest Becker, everyone has an immortality strategy, because human beings are incapable of truly believing that death is the end. Becker’s idea, which he explained in The Denial of Death, was that practically everything stems from this false relationship to mortality-civilization, war, art, overeating, getting drunk.

  Absurd though it is, ridiculous even, remembering can be an immortality strategy, too. I’m bothering with the past because I’m afraid of disappearing in the grave, despite being aware that, once disappeared, I’ll no longer be bothered.

  xx

  Things from the past do reappear.

  A luggage search at a Detroit airport has turned up a moth species not seen since 1912.

  Everywhere I go, I see people I used to know. Except it’s almost never them, it’s someone who looks like them, or looks like they did when I knew them. This happens more and more. The cause may be a combination of deteriorating eyesight, a porous memory, and wishful thinking. It can take place in a movie theater before the lights go down. Since I have my phone with me, I google the person I’m recalling. Sometimes there’s an obituary, with a picture. Sometimes, instead of immediately confirming my mistake, the picture looks less like the person I remember than the guy two rows ahead of me who prompted the search.

  Where is it now, the wooden clothespin that Patrick used to attach a playing card to the back wheel of his bicycle? It’s among the objects from childhood that have not changed. It cannot be improved, and hasn’t been, fundamentally, since the wooden clothespin was designed and perfected. There’s the hardwood, usually maple or beechwood, and the wound metal of the wire, rust resistant, that never loses its spring. The New York Times reports that the spring- hinged clothespin is the child of multiple fathers, so establishing paternity is not straightforward. There were no fewer than 146 separate patents recorded by the U.S. Patent Office between 1852 and 1857. David Smith might have been first. His “spring clamp for clothes-lines,” patented in 1853, had a hinge, a mechanism that let “the two longer legs move toward each other and at the same time move the shorter ones apart.” Solomon Moore came along in 1887 with the “coiled fulcrum,” made from a bit of wire. It was a perfect design, ingenious in its functioning and relatively easy to manufacture. And it works. There are videos on YouTube that show clothing held on a clothesline by wooden clothespins during a tornedo. You will see plenty of flapping shirts, but absolutely nothing flies off into the whirlwind.

  Patrick and Timmy are men in their mid-seventies now, if they are still living. I have no useful questions for either of them. What or where they have been in the intervening years belongs to their memories, not mine. Answers that might be provided would have nothing to do with bicycles, playgrounds, a mother in the back yard, a father at the ballgame. With luck I’ll never meet them as old men. I also won’t bump into David Newhall, who lived on Georgetown, directly across the street. I won’t ever see Lu Kate, my sister’s friend, whose obsession was all things Elvis; she lived in the house behind us, one block over. It’s only the memories I’m after, the memory like a mist, where everything’s hazy, and the one that’s like Medusa, making the moving world stand still. Even if, as Karl Kraus remarked about Freud and psychoanalysis, remembering may be the illness it was intended to cure.

  *

• Little Did I Know

  It was easy enough to throw away all the pens and pencils. Not because I have a self-discipline superior to my mother’s, but because I already have my own bundles of pens and pencils. My mother had saved four pens from Eternal Hills Memorial Park, where she and my father are both buried. She also had pens from Platinum Dental, Support Our Wounded, Stephens Nursery (“Come Grow With Us”), Tri-Cities Medical Center, and dozens of others. It didn’t surprise me. I keep more pens than I will ever use. I will never run out of ink.

  Also like me, my mother seemed unable to throw out the blank greeting cards and their right- sized envelopes that came from one the charitable organizations – UNICEF, American Heart Association – which send these things as part of their solicitation. There is direct mail marketing industry wisdom behind this. If you receive an unwanted gift, you feel some obligation to reciprocate. Did my mother imagine that somehow, some day, she might actually use all these cards and their envelopes to send a greeting? No matter. It goes against our natures to throw them out. So I was also unsurprised to find stacks of them after her death in the drawers and cubbyholes of the rolltop desk that had been in her bedroom.

  Pens and pencils fall into the category of objects that are of use, but there’s no good reason to have so many of them. It seems a shame to throw them away, even though they aren’t valuable, could easily be replaced, and are unlikely to ever be used. So much of what is kept falls into that category. More of the same, the hundreds of return address labels that were pre- printed with my mother’s name and address, which she kept. They were also free gifts that charities mailed her as a way of thanking in advance for a contribution.

  *

  The art on blank greeting cards from The National Foundation for Cancer Research showed botanical drawings of fruit, attributed to Pierre Redoute, 1759-1840. Braille Books for Blind Children cards used paintings of lighthouses, with the name of the artist and a licensing organization. There were cards from CARE, National Wildlife Federation, American Heart Association, and National Osteoporosis Foundation (flowers again, a painter botanist with the remarkable name of Herto Van Houiteano).

  She kept at least a hundred cards from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I get those, too, but always throw away the thick envelope they come in, without opening it. Most of these had children’s artwork, done by children who were “hiding in France during the Holocaust.” The use of France, one way or another, seemed to be a thread tying lots of her cards together. My mother’s largest collection, from Alzheimer’s Association, also favored French painters. But the more obvious connection was disease or disability – Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, blindness, and cancer.

  For the most part, the cards were blanks, so totally discretionary, to be used as the sender chose. And then there were the actual occasion cards, also from fundraising organizations — for birthdays, thinking of you, just a note, get well soon, thanks so much, and you’re in my thoughts.

  A dozen of the cards, all paintings of flowers, were attributed to The Mouth and Foot Painting Artists. One of them was signed. It was No. 603, “Promising Love” from an original painting by Martin Charles Odoms, Mouth Painter. Cards from Helen Keller International (“Our mission is to save the sight and lives and the world’s most vulnerable”) were stacked with cards from Perkins.org, “created by students from Perkins.” Each came with a quote from Helen Keller, “former Perkins student.” This might have been part of their attraction for my mother, since she was Ginny Perkins for most of her ninety-six years and five months, though in her heart she remained Regina Reegler.

  *

  The birth certificate for Regina Reegler in the rolltop desk shows that Isaac and Sally Reegler lived on Jamaica Avenue in Queens when my mother was born in 1921. But I know they moved out to Los Angeles when Regina was four years old. She attended Belmont High School with Jack Webb. Anthony Quinn and Ricardo Montalban were Belmont alums as well, though not her classmates. That was LA. My mother told me she used to take the streetcar to studio lots to find work as an extra, which she remembered mostly for the opportunity to eat the ham sandwich the studio provided for lunch, which not allowed in her home. She considered herself a Californian. When I looked up her father in the 1910 census, the family was living on the Lower East Side, 73 Eldridge Street, near the corner at Hester Street. There’s no building there now; Google Street View shows a parking lot, and all the street signs on Eldridge are in Chinese. But by the time my mother was born, the family had apparently moved on up, to Queens. The birth certificate that gives Jamaica Avenue as the address in 1921 also has Isaac Reegler, from Romania, as 41 that year. Sally Hoffenburg was 29. The family story is, Sally had married Isaac unhappily as a teenage immigrant from Galicia, an area so undefined it might as well be Erehwon.

  *

  In 2018, after our mother’s death, my sister Patti and I each inherited half of what was left in our parents’ Morgan Stanley account, which was easy enough to divide, and their home in Ocean Hills, which was not. Ocean Hills, a development formerly known as Leisure Village, is a “gated community” in Oceanside, California, with bylaws that required that homeowners be fifty-five years old or over, with exceptions made for younger spouses. Judging by the look of those walking their dogs or sometimes just themselves on Leisure Village Way, most of the residents are in their seventies and up.

  There are sixteen hundred and thirty-two homes in the Ocean Hills community, which is divided into “villages.” All the houses are white stucco with red-tiled roofs. The look is meant to suggest the Mediterranean, or an idealized Greek fishing village, and the names of the streets reinforce the branding. The house we inherited was on Delos Way, in the Village of Santorini.

  Walking the three-mile circuit of what is still Leisure Village Way (renaming a street is more difficult than rebranding a property), the fit elderly as if on a cruise will pass Mykonos, Corfu, Patmos and so on. The homes in the villages vary in size and “model,” but the overall impression is uniform. In the quarter-century I visited my parents there, I always struggled, even after turning on Delos Way in my rental car, to distinguish their house from the neighbors and stop at the right driveway. Most residents have their own look-alike tiles mounted on a white stucco wall near their front door, with their last names painted on them, like a summer camp craft project. By looking for The Perkins on a tile, I knew where to stop. At night, the tiles were illuminated.

  That first winter after our mother died in January, Patti and Joe spent months in the house on Delos. Patti lives in Pittsburgh. She and husband Joe are both retired. So they wanted to hold onto the Ocean Hills house and spend all their winters in California. My interests were different. I was still working, and I live in Dallas, where the seasons don’t impact me quite as much. So I had little use for a tiny second home I might only visit a few days a year. If I wanted a long weekend in Southern California, The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe isn’t very far from Ocean Hills. Aviara, a Four Seasons property, is even closer. And even at Aviara’s pricey room rates, a month a year for the next thirty years would be a minimal expense, compared to the cost of giving up half of the money from the sale of our parents’ home. And that didn’t take into account the cost of remodeling a kitchen or bathrooms that hadn’t been updated since our parents bought the house twenty-five years before, when they moved from Los Angeles where Patti and I grew up.

  Of all my relationships, the one with my sister is my most successful. It’s the one I go along with. So when Patti asked me if I would go in halves so she could hold onto our parents’ house, I did. We did a valuation. I don’t know whether or not she could have paid me my half, which came to a few hundred thousand dollars. I think she has Chevron stock, from her first marriage, as well as her half from the sale of that marriage’s California house. But that had all happened three marriages and three market downturns ago.

  *

  Patti and Joe handled all the remodeling themselves – planning it, hiring the contractor submitting plans that met the strict rules of the Ocean Hills homeowners’ association. I had nothing to do with any of that, other than paying my half. That was the arrangement that we all wanted. The second summer after my mother’s death, I did fly out to San Diego, rent a car, and make the drive north from Lindbergh Field to Oceans Hills. It takes about forty minutes if the traffic is light on what Californians call The Five. It’s a drive I made probably twice a year when both my parents were alive, then dozens of times in the years following my father’s death, when my mother lived alone.

  I was an owner now, or half owner. I could pick up my “homeowner’s pass” from the guard at the front gate and place it on the dash of the rental car, which I parked in the driveway of 4991 Delos Way. The homeowner’s association prohibits leaving cars parked either at the curb or in your own driveway for any length of time. Cars will be ticketed by the private security that is always on patrol. My stays in the past had never been longer than a few days, and this trip was no different. I was okay in the driveway.

  Which was fortunate, because the two-car garage at the house on Delos had no room for my rental car. Patti and Joe leave one of their cars in the garage permanently. Their SUV takes up half the space. In the other half, my half, they had exiled a large and very heavy rolltop desk that had been in my mother’s bedroom for as long as I could remember. The desk had enough width to make it impossible for a second car to fit. Joe must have moved this beast of a desk into the garage. Or the work crew had done it. Why it hadn’t been discarded or donated when Patti and Joe disposed of the upholstered sofas and Lazy-Boy recliners, the maple dining room table and its six chairs, and all the clothes left hanging in the closets, I didn’t know. But the desk was there. And it wasn’t empty, its drawers were packed. So were the cubbyholes revealed by rolling up the dark brown top. My sister must not have wanted to go through it all, not even during her long winter stays.

  *

  What’s gained by excavating the past? Archeologists will spend their lives gently digging in the dirt of the City of David on the eastern ridge of Jerusalem. They can thrill to the serendipitous discovery of an inscribed clay bulla, or a metal token that someone used as a seal to authenticate a transaction for grains or wine. It’s part of a contract, a bit of forgotten legal documentation. But we have the same things ourselves in desk drawers. Does a thing have no value because it is only a generation old, rather than twenty generations? If we are just as ignorant of the recent past, there’s much to discover close at hand.

  My Chicago-born father was part of a migration west that contributed to the boom postwar in Southern California. I always thought his life in Los Angeles began after the Army. But no. After digging in one of drawers of the rolltop desk, I found the $5,000 policy from National Service Life on Norman Perkins, first effective July 1, 1943. My parents met after the war, so this policy came before they knew each other. It stated my father’s address in Los Angeles in 1943: 326 No. Ogden Drive. You can look it up on Redfin. Built in 1937, he lived in a duplex just north of Beverly Boulevard, near the Miracle Mile.

  His policy seems to have been maintained. There’s an update on beneficiaries, and by the time of that update my mother is primary, the whole sum, with the secondary divided evenly, one half to daughter, the other half to son. My father spent the war protecting the Panama Canal, which was hardly Guadalcanal. But had he died in 1943, that $5,000 would have been the equivalent of $85,000 in 2010, when death did arrive. And of course there would have been no daughter and no son.

  *

  The arrangement with my sister was simple enough. Six months and six months. She and Joe took the heart of winter, starting in January, and I had the summer, from July on. They had spring, I had fall. They would stay for a few months, I would go for a few days. Four years went by like that. Then COVID cancelled all the trips I actually wanted to take, and I persuaded myself to take advantage of my California summer home instead, I felt compelled to do it, as much because I had paid for it than from any deeper desire to be there. So four years after my mother died, I decided to go and stay. Car rental in Southern California is usually more expensive than the price of round-trip air after a few days. This time, I was going to stay longer, long enough to make a car rental cost prohibitive. I would need to drive my own car from Dallas. That meant I would need to make room in the garage when I got there.

  The last time drove drive between California and Texas, I was in my twenties, and that trip was only one way. That decision, not well thought out, involved a first job after college, and it ended up determining where and how I lived for the next fifty years. The weight of our twenties can be so light, almost anything can leverage it. This time, in my seventies, nothing lifechanging seemed even possible, baring a car accident. I took my dog Mika with me. Two days before the trip, my adult son was laid off from his job; even after ten years of hating it, losing it was distressing to him. So he came along. Ben lives alone and struggles with conversation beyond yes or no answers. He did scout online for locations of the best marijuana dispensaries in Oceanside, but then slept or sat silently for most of the drive.

  It took two days. We did an overnight in El Paso. The second day was the longer drive, in part because I wanted to stop at the Xavier del Bac mission, where the sanctuary was as silent as the c in Tucson. The second day drive wasn’t that much longer, but it was much slower; the fifty miles from San Diego to Oceanside took almost as long as the two hundred and fifty miles from Tucson to the California state line. But we did arrive in Oceanside before six on a Friday evening. First things first, we stopped at Ben’s chosen weed dispensary. Then on to Ocean Hills, the driveway at 4991 Delos Way, and the rolltop desk that squatted in the garage, blocking my half.

  *

  There was only one thing I already knew about in the desk. And I knew exactly where it would be. No visit to my mother in her last years was complete unless she had reminded me again where a green metal box was, right side, third drawer down, in the rolltop desk in her bedroom. “I know, I know” was often my response.
  She accepted that, but only until the next visit.

  When a box is metal, it seems to declare that it holds something valuable. Cashboxes are metal. You might bury a treasure map, but you wouldn’t put it in a box if that box was cardboard. I know nobody whose house burned down in a fire. Still, it does happen, and what you don’t want to burn belongs in a metal box. The green metal box my parents kept in the rolltop desk had their wills in it. That’s what I was always told to remember. But other things were in there, too, mostly unmentioned. Four years after my mother’s death, the wills were no longer there, because Patti and I had already removed them. What was left, however, were testaments of other kinds. There was the handwritten note that said I was born in Inglewood General Hospital. I found my “Statistical Record,” which showed my first footprints. A xerox of the birth certificate for Patricia Belinda Perkins was accompanied by a small card from Cedars of Lebanon Hospital: Perkins, Pat, female, July 11 1949, 11:30 a.m. The card also provided my sister’s weight and length at birth. A handwritten note on the reverse offered instruction, “Please bring baby clothes to the hospital the day before you plan to leave.”

  If I wanted proof that my parents were married, there it was, a folded contract printed in Hebrew as well as English and requiring two witnesses. Norman and Regina married “the 1st day of the week, the 30th day of the month Nissan, in the year 5708,” — Sunday, May 9 th, 1948. “Be thou my wife,” my father declared, “according to the law of Moses and of Israel.” Our Aunt Diana was one of the witnessing signatories. The other must have been someone that my father knew. I didn’t recognize the name. My father’s independent social life disappeared in the marriage, as did any warm connections to most of his relatives. Our family was always my mother’s family. As for my mother’s declaration, “The said Bride…has thus taken upon herself the fulfilment of all the duties incumbent upon a Jewish wife.” The formality of the language seemed at odds with their marriage as I knew it.

  On a sheet of lined yellow paper in the green metal box, my mother had also left a sunnier declaration. She dated it, titled it Assets, and added her first and last names at the top of the sheet, as if it might be found by strangers. She was ninety-two, had years to go, but she enjoyed considering herself “near the end.” Her instruction included the name of the branch location where she used to deposit checks before caretakers took that over. Also, an 800 number to contact the Los Angeles Retirement System about a death benefit. She said to check on any annuities or tax-free bonds, and she reminded the reader that other papers were in the right hand second drawer. And then, direct address: “Mark and Patti – do things together. My diamond ring to Patti, the set of Dickens books to Mark.” Under that, a last instruction and promise:
  “Have fun. I’ll love you both forever & ever.”
  Forever and ever is a concept for the mathematicians. It’s like the length that results when you add one to infinity. It makes the same sense linguistically, if you think about it, with “ever” neatly contained within “forever.”

  Patti was pleased with the diamond ring. It so happens I already have a set of Mark Twain books, bound in cream yellow covers, which I had removed years ago from their house in Ocean Hills. So I decided to leave my inherited Dickens where it was on Delos Way, on shelving in the den. When my sister and her husband remodeled the house, however, they put the dozen brown volumes out in the garage.

  *

  I did have my plan for removing the rolltop desk. It was one of those plans that wasn’t made, but only thought about. I would take a day off after the long drives. Then, I would rent a truck in Oceanside and get Ben to help me hoist the rolltop desk onto the truck bed. We would take it to whatever local charity might want it for resale – Salvation Army, St. Vincent’s, Goodwill. There was a Furniture Bank in Dallas, for donations used to furnish the homes of Afghan refugees among others. Maybe there was here, too. But Saturday morning, my first full day in Ocean Hills, while my surly son was still sleeping, I googled “haul away used furniture” and got the job done by whoever had the best search engine optimization. That turned out to be College Hunks Moving Junk. I barely had time to lift the rolltop and open the drawers before they arrived.

  The desk held more than a green metal box. Much more. Every drawer, every cubbyhole had something in it. The only thing I had time to do before the college hunks moved the junk was to pile all of it on the floor of the garage. I’m not sure what I felt, but sympathetic, in part, and suddenly convicted. My mother must have left this task for me.

  There were two waste cans in a corner of the garage – the blue one for recycling, the grey for landfill. Despite that, I decided to take it all with me back to Dallas. All of it, the manilla folders and loose papers, the loose paperclips, the pens and pencils, the hundreds of greeting cards, a hardshell case, a rolodex, an address book, an Ocean Hills homeowner directory, the scattered business cards, the few photos, and the green metal box — all, including the most obvious trash. I filled two hefty trash bags, put both bags in the trunk of my car, and forgot about it for the time being.

  *

  The envelope that held the contract for my father’s burial also had a color xerox of a sales sheet from Eternal Hills Memorial Park in Carlsbad, the next beach town south from Oceanside. The xerox showed the “half lid” raised for viewing on the coffin style that had been selected – Poplar, an oval hinged panel casket, dark nut brown exterior, $1,285. Its interior was described as “rosatan crepe.”

  My mother had written my father’s name on the envelope burial. The “counselor,” Jacquelyn Lechowicz, signed the documents on behalf of Eternal Hills. Jacquelyn is very photogenic in her headshot on the business card that was stapled to the contact.

  The “internment order” specified 25 chairs, along with other details. My mother countersigned it on the same Sunday my father died. But it had all been planned and paid for years in advance. And the details matched exactly what my mother also specified for herself. They must have picked coffins as a couple, as I’ve done when I was married, but for paint colors or wallpaper. Of the total balance, $6,891.00, only the tax would be due. My mother had kept the cemetery purchase documents in the same envelope, along with papers from American Memorial Life Insurance Company, which provided a “three-pay flex” policy to fund the “prearrangement.” The beneficiary, my mother; contingent, Estate of Insured. A contract for the financed $4,145 would require monthly payments of $77.20. It seems like too modest a sum to pay it out this way. A second whole life policy covered a second “prearrangement” – this one for my mother. Primary Beneficiary: my father; contingent, Estate of Insured. They had covered each other and contingently relieved anyone else of any expense. That was them, a hundred percent, always responsible.

  Eternal Hills also provides Psalm 23 on a laminated card. My mother may have received this when my father died, but it seems most applicable as part of the pre-arrangement. Psalm 23 is the one with a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It may have been written around 1000 BC. It’s difficult for me to imagine my father’s head anointed with oil, but easy enough to see his cup running over. I’d seen that happen once as a child, when he poured a glass of Bubble Up in our kitchen on Belton Drive in Los Angeles.

  *

  Jacqueline Lechowicz was still working at Eternal Hills eight years later, and she was even better looking than her photo. I met with her the day after my mother died, when I was the one signing off at the Eternal Hills Mortuary. Jacqueline asked if the “deceased” had been in the military.
  “Marines,” I said. My mother had signed up in 1944 and served as a clerk-typist at Camp Pendleton, just up the coast from where we were sitting. As a result, my mother’s service graveside, included a Marine honor guard, and I was presented with a folded American flag. My mother hadn’t made the same arrangements for my father, but he hadn’t been in the Marines. The rolltop desk had his Honorable Discharge, Norman Perkins, Staff Sergeant, Squadron B 450th AAF Base Unit, Army of the United States.

  *

  What is the difference between the miraculous and the coincidental? The one is extraordinary, the other ordinary? But both are extraordinary. The one an explanation for the other? Each might serve in that way.

  Why, who makes much of a miracle?
  As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.

  That would be an interesting “get well soon” or “thinking of you” note. Walt Whitman was the sort to send it, a soup served up for good health, with spicy homespun bits in a broth of grandeur, the “why” that means the same as “shucks,” and always the bit of odd flavor that cannot be placed, the “as to me” instead of “for me.” But there was nothing like that on any of the folded cards in my mother’s rolltop desk.

  I wanted to see the Whitmanesque, something miraculous in the everyday, in the invoice from Rico the gardener, on tallies of the hours for the freelance caretakers whose hours increased in the first months after my father’s fall, and then again some years later, during the last two years of my mother’s life. Perhaps in part because I hadn’t been enough in touch with my parents, I wanted to touch this paper, as if it were skin. In part it was because I have so much paper of my own, far more than my parents left behind. Tax returns, credit card statements, property deeds, adoption records, the sign-in book with the names of attendees at my first wife’s funeral, a divorce decree that ended at least formally my second marriage. Nobody was going to go through those papers, after I drop dead. I was sure of that. So, in a way, inspecting and disposing of remnants in the rolltop desk would be good practice. On a small scale, it was what I also needed to do with mine.

  *

  Real estate is a theme in our lives and afterlives. We value homesites for the living and gravesites for the dead. There were files in the rolltop desk for buying and selling both kinds of sites. An envelope from Centre City Escrow, thick with documentation, served as the final resting place for the facts of the transaction that resulted in my parents’ purchase of the house in Ocean Hills. Price: $245,000. Escrow Deposit: $5,000. A settlement statement specified county taxes, assessments, the closing fee, recording fees, and the Ocean Hills Homeowners Association dues for the following month. Patti and I own the house now. Our only paperwork was a deed filed with the county to formalize our 50-50 ownership. That, and the unfiled agreement my sister and I signed that describes what happens if one of us wants out of the deal – a kind of ownership divorce agreement our parents never needed.

  They kept the invoices from the work they wanted done before they moved to their new address. A proposal from Gerhard’s HVAC, but also business cards from Lomack Service, with notes from my father, to comparisons the two services. CJ Orndoff III from CJ’s custom painting made a proposal, “all work to be performed in a professional, clean manner.” The work order for carpet care was from IncredaClean. On the receipt from Elephant Moving Co., Venice, California, my parents were billed for twenty-five small boxes and twenty others, all of them “used,” for $24.25. They kept the mover’s bill, too, also from Elephant.

  A xerox of the realtor’s sales sheet for 4991 Delos was especially revealing. This Home is Special! On the sales sheet, the price was advertised as “Reduced!” though it was still $15,000 higher than the price my parents ended up paying. They bought the home in Ocean Hills from Isabel Carson, whose name was on several of the documents. A contract provided Ms. Carson’s address as 2222 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles 90024. This was then and probably still is a very fancy location.

  Avenue of the Stars is in Century City, an area of Los Angeles first developed in the 1960s on the former back lot of 20th Century Studios. It has its own story, as does most of the dirt in our lives. Before 20 th Century Studios, the land was owned by cowboy actor Tom Mix, who used it as his ranch. In 1961, after a series of flops, the studio needed cash, and so it sold 170 acres to a partnership between developer William Zeckendorf and Alcoa, the aluminum manufacturer. One of the factors encouraging the sale was the endless expense of producing Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a biopic. But the bios it was best known for were Taylor’s and co-star Richard Burton’s. Taylor’s record-setting $1 million salary made news, as did the affair between the two married-but-not-yet-to-each-other actors.

  None of this has anything to do with my parents. It was a rabbit hole that opened when I emptied the envelope from Centre City Escrow. A seller’s name and her Avenue of the Stars address sent me sliding down the online tunnel toward Isabel Carson. There she was, apparently still alive at one hundred and one. She was still living in her unit at 2222 Avenue of the Stars. Husband Irving was no longer around, though an Irving Carson did turn up in a Wikipedia article about a scout who had served under the direction of Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. I think of that scout and the future president as also having their place in my mother’s rolltop desk by association.

  *

  If Centre City Escrow was a right parenthesis, the left belonged to a packet from Addison Escrow Company, which my mother had labeled Selling Home On Belton Dr. Belton Drive was one of two Los Angeles homes where Patti and I grew up. It was the home we left for college or marriage, and like most children we were eager to leave. Parents are the ones who stay behind. When they move, and they no longer want to store the boxes with Y camp trophies or the trunk with a daughter’s stuffed animals or a prom dress, we might still be childish enough to not understand. We feel a twinge. It’s the upset that they are no longer willing to be the keepers of our childhoods.

  Papers in the Addison Escrow packet were a rinse and repeat of purchase and sale processes, a recurring dream that is also one version of the American Dream. The CalVet Loan document through Security National Bank quantified the purchase of 7940 Belton Drive in 1962, for $28,607.50. Then the Grant Deed from the Department of Veterans Affairs of the State of California in 1982 memorialized the loan payoff. A statement of the taxable value of the house ten years later showed $64,682. Then, two years after that, the sale in 1994 to Gerald R. Johnson and Diane K. Johnson brought my parents the $260,000 they needed to make the move to Ocean Hills. It was an economic swap.

  The house on Belton Drive was in the Westchester neighborhood and not far from the ocean. So the location was desirable. Home prices in Westchester were rising with almost reckless velocity. But nothing compared to the acceleration of a decade later, when Aunt Diana and Uncle Earl sold their house in Culver City The postwar starter home in the dingy neighborhood that they had lived in all their adult lives sold in one day for $500,000. And it had never been updated. What kind of place was it? In the living room, the painting over the sofa was a glued and framed jigsaw puzzle that Diana and Earl had put together. It was that kind of place. The finished puzzle showed an English rural scene, but no one would describe their twelve-hundred square-foot house as a “cottage.” Out of curiosity, I looked up their old address on Emporia as I threw away my parents’ Belton Drive contracts. A few years after Diana and Earl sold, houses on the street were selling for over two million dollars. No doubt these homes have been remodeled. They have granite counters and hardwood floors, instead of the linoleum that was in Diana and Earl’s kitchen, along with other appurtenances that my aunt and uncle never wanted.

  *

  Sometimes things must be set right before we can move on. Even when we sell “as is,” we are obligated to reveal hidden flaws. As part of selling Belton Drive, my parents produced receipts for some of the repairs they had made over the years. They saved the bill for stucco, from Bozzalla Acoustic & Plastering (“Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.”) They also engaged Dan Shanks Pest Management. I found the Wood Destroying Pests and Organisms Inspection Report in the Addison Escrow packet. Dan’s summary finding: rot damage, “subterranean termite-damaged timbers noted.”

  My mother wrote a list of repairs and maintenance performed and purchases remembered: “House painted many times,” she declared, and the list continued, “copper plumbing, new sink, recarpeted three times, shutters in den, sliding glass door, trimmed trees many times, put bookshelves up, new chandelier, stucco ceiling in family room and little den, new floor in kitchen and both bathrooms, new wallpaper in bedroom by bathroom, tile behind stove, tile over sink in small bathroom, lights on porches, light bulbs in kitchen, fixed furnace, termite service yearly, tented once $1,000.”

  I know my mother well enough to imagine that these expenses must have been painful. Were there arguments, as my father suggested repairs and she resisted? I may have heard some of them from behind my closed bedroom doors—the room described as “little den” on her list. My bedroom was actually a wide passageway from the kitchen to the foyer. It had doors in its north and south walls. It was also the room where my father put up the bookshelves she mentioned. These shelves in my bedroom were do-it-yourself particle board balanced on metal tracks, from the hardware store. They were sturdy enough to hold all the volumes of our dark blue Encyclopedia Americana, including year books and the bonus book, A Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods.

  *

  It seemed reasonable to hold on to information about the purchase of the home in Ocean Hills, where my parents intended to live for the rest of their lives. It could make sense to also keep detailed records on the sale of their home on Belton Drive in Los Angeles. I don’t know. I’m not an attorney or an accountant. But why the third envelope? Why the nine by twelve envelope packed with documents about their purchase of 8001 Georgetown in 1949? There was the State Veteran Loan of $7,400, a purchase price of $9,500 with $2,100 paid in cash. And there was the home’s sale in 1962 to Ramona Kulzer, for $19,039.56, not including a $5,000 down payment that was required in escrow. Could there be any authority, in government or otherwise, that would be interested seventy years later in these details about the Georgetown house, where we lived until I was eleven?

  It’s true they received a letter on the letterhead of Goodwin J. Knight, Governor, State of California, about the Georgetown house. But that was from 1955, and the letter was not from the governor. Thos M. Healy, representing the Construction Section, Los Angeles Office, Department of Veteran Affairs, Division of Farm and Home Purchases, wrote to my parents: “In connection with the work you are having done under an application for an advance from the Department, please sign each copy of the attached at the points marked X and return to this office.” He signed it very truly yours, as people do.

  My memories of the house on Georgetown are some of my most fragrant, though they waft from a great distance. I don’t remember any construction ever being done at that house. I can’t recall the mailman coming up our walk with such an official letter. But then I don’t remember where our mailbox was, either – whether it was a slot in the front door or a metal container on the porch, or on a post at the curb.

  *

  Real estate, part two – burial plots. In the second drawer, right hand side, my mother kept the “certificate of ownership” for a grave at Hillside Mausoleum, Garden of Memories, Court of Peace, S 241. This was for “Sally Reegler aka Sally Reegler Brodsky.” After the death of Isaac Reegler, my grandmother had a brief second marriage to Harry Brodsky, who deserted her after a stroke left her disabled. From then on, Nanny was in and out of nursing homes in Los Angeles. They were wretched places. Unforgettable, too. On one visit when I was a teenager, walking down a long hallway to Nanny’s room, I passed a woman restrained in a wheelchair, with bruises up and down her arms. I tried not to look at her. I didn’t need to ask her how she was.
  “Chained like a dog,” she informed me.

  For visitors, Hillside is much nicer than a nursing home. There are no stale hallways or fluorescent lights, and no complaints, muffled or otherwise. Hillside is the cemetery in Los Angeles where Al Jolson is buried. On West Centinela, it was the preferred final resting place for my mother’s family. Long before the idea of moving to Ocean Hills occurred to her, my mother made arrangements for her own burial at Hillside. She and my father purchased two plots at Hillside in August 1971. The date – one week before my mother turned fifty, which turned out to be only halfway through her life. She kept the fifty-year-old receipt in the rolltop desk.

  *

  Like Abraham, who insisted on paying the Hittites for the cave in Machpelah where Sarah was to be buried, the steps my parents took to dispose of each other’s remains were firmly transactional. In Sarah’s case, the burial site in Hebron has the bitter odor of conflict these days, while my parents’ business was smooth from beginning to end. They arranged financing for the Hillside plots they purchased in 1971. Twenty-five years later, after they had settled into new lives at Ocean Hills and realized they were there for keeps, they decided against having their bodies transported back to Hillside in Los Angeles. If no traffic, that last trip could have been done in ninety minutes. But there was always traffic. Better for brother and two sisters still in Los Angeles to drive south for a funeral then for a hearse to drive north. And how many of her relatives, if any, would still be alive, by the time she died? As it turned out, her judgment was sound. My father outlived most and my mother outlasted all the relatives of her generation.

  The decision meant they had business to attend to. They owned the real estate at Hillside, but no longer had a use for it. The contents of a black folder from Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary in the rolltop desk detailed what they did. My mother managed to write “cancelled” on its slippery coated cover. Inside, correspondence from The Estin Company, Cemetery Property Resales: “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Perkins,” it began. “We are pleased to inform you that we have sold the above-named property in Hillside Memorial Park. Enclosed find check 8376 in the amount of $8,000 as payment in full. The transfer has been completed at the cemetery.”
  Signed, Sue Estin.

  My mother saved all of Sue’s correspondence about the Hillside properties, Sunland Gardens Block 3 Plot 35 CLC 6AB. She must have admired Sue Estin, who had chosen an unusual specialty in real estate, compared to all the brokers who worked the open houses at Ocean Hills. Sue Estin was in cemetery resales. This is a business no little girl in a princess costume ever dreamed of being in. Sue wrote to my parents in 2005 requesting a signed Power of Attorney. She let them know that she was listing their gravesites for $10,000, “total net to you when sold.” I never found a reveal of what happened between the listing and the sales price. It’s possible the $2,000 gap was accounted for by a down payment from the new owners.

  Hillside corresponded with my parents as well. That began with the initial purchase in 1971 and the contracts labeled “Papers regarding our cemetery plots for Norman & Regina at Hillside Memorial Park.” The cost for space, $900; $300 was paid down, $600 was financed. The real money was in the arrangements, which Hillcrest also sold —the caskets, the funeral. Eight years after they moved to Ocean Hills, my parents must still have considered Los Angeles as their final resting place, because it wasn’t until 2002 that they bought “Funeral Goods and Services.” Each ordered $3,848.75 in services for their bodies and in merchandise — the caskets, plus sales tax. And they set up a trust account to pay for it.

  That, too, was refundable. In 2006, a full twelve years after they left Los Angeles, they received a letter from Master Trust California. “It is our understanding that you wish to cancel your preneed trust account through Hillside Memorial Park…” The xeroxes of two checks in the black folder, a total of $7,851.38, represented “the full amount of your Pre-Need Trust Agreements with Hillside Memorial Park Mortuary, plus any interest.”

  My parents took care that their burials were completely taken care of. It was a message of self- sufficiency. But still, after the move to Ocean Hills, it took how many years for my mother to decide that her burial would no longer be at Hillside Memorial on Centinela? She had finally left her mother behind, as we all do.

  *

  “If you live long enough,” she would say, “it can all work out.”
  That was my mother’s wisdom when I would talk to her about my disappointments, or about how baffled I was by my children. By my son, whom I love deeply, but cannot seem to help or to shake my sense that help is needed. Or by my daughter, who is estranged from me, her choice.

  I don’t believe either my mother or father were happier than I am. But what they had was orderly lives. True, they went through the Depression and World War II. I went through my first wife’s death, when our two adopted children were eleven and thirteen, and then the turmoil of a second marriage, ending in divorce, which seemed to permanently misshape those two children.

  The conversations with my mother about all that all took place after my father’s death, during the last eight years of her life, since that was when I went to visit her often enough to finally have the kind of nothing-to-do time that seemed to be necessary for us both to have personal conversations.

  From my perspective, my parents had enjoyed conventional, orderly lives, and had unsurprisingly arranged for its orderly conclusion with prepaid plans for burials and funerals. A place for everything, everything in its place, as the phrase goes.

  Their sense of order, and their need for it, was obvious in the cleanliness of their home in Ocean Hills. On my visits to Delos Way when my mother lived alone, she chastised me if I left any dish unwashed on a counter. She worried about ants. And my father had similar notions about cleanliness. It was a virtue. It was also a trait that bordered on nuttiness; and in his case, it may have been inherited from his mother, Elizabeth Simon, Grandma. My grandmother on my father’s side had the strongest imaginable feelings about pleated lampshades, because she believed that with all their crevices they were impossible to dust. No surprise, childhood chores had included sweeping the floor of our garage to leave it “clean enough to eat off of,” which was my father’s standard.

  All of us see organization differently of course. Growing up, both my children preferred piles of unwashed clothes in various corners in their rooms. My son still does, in his own condominium. There, the mess isn’t just in the corners. Every table top and counter is covered with debris– dishes, an opened bag of chips, computer monitors, trash, gaming joysticks. He says he knows where everything is so it’s no problem for him, however much it bothers me. I suppose my parents’ ways will always seem more understandable to me.

  *

  In some instances, their sense of order did seem eccentric, even when alphabetic. In a mini- rolodex I found in the rolltop desk, my father wrote Bowling Alley in the B’s, Carpenter in the C’s, Drivers in the D’s, Gardener in the G’s, and Handyman in the H’s. It’s a category grouping, even if there’s only one name and number per category.

  An address book in one of cubbyholes had Washing Machine in the W’s, the phone number for A&K Appliance Repair written alongside it.

  In the B’s my mother had written Beauty Parlor.

  I flipped through the address book, which was a kind of time capsule –all the way past the Video Store in the V’s. The Buists, our across-the-street neighbors on Belton Drive, belonged in the B’s. Anne and Dan had two daughters, Donna and Nadine. Even Nadine, the younger sister, would be in her seventies now.

  The C’s had City Hall, Cleaning Lady, City of Hope, Caregiver, and Carmen, who was one of the caregivers. Under D, Joyce Smith, her name written beside a capitalized Driver. David, my sister’s oldest son and my parent’s first grandson, was also in the D’s, where he was still living in Olympia, Washington. Granddaughter Lisa in the L’s was still married to Billy, and they resided together in Pittsburgh, which neither of them do any longer.

  My parents had themselves lived through more ages than most, and they entered their nineties in good health. But neither had ever entered the age of the cellphone. Phone numbers in their address book were written down, crossed out, written over. Children and grandchildren had a variety of addresses, until the updating stopped.

  My estranged daughter Eden was in the address book at 1 Yale Ave, in Claymont, Delaware. That was an address she had never shared with me. My father loved Eden. When the day arrived to fly out from Dallas for his funeral at Eternal Hills, she was still speaking to me, and we planned to fly together to California. But Eden never made it to our scheduled flight. It was rainy, she was late, and she got into a one-car accident, sideswiping a highway median. Eventually we all got on another flight together. Even more eventually, she began to claim that the accident caused her permanent brain injury. Strange was normal for Eden. When my mother died, Eden never acknowledged the death.

  I found Golf in the G’s in the address book, along with Gas Company, Great Cuts, and Margarita Guevara, one of the original caretakers. Margarita worked a factory day job, then came to Delos after work four days a week to help my mother.

  H is for Harold, my mother’s big brother. Uncle Harold had the only bald head in my mother’s family. “Grass doesn’t grow on a busy street,” he liked to say. He was also the only “success” in my mother’s family. Partner in a business that made upholstered furniture, he gave my father his start as a manufacturer’s representative. My father always disliked him for it. Even my mother, who loved her birth family more than our own, liked to remind me how Harold gave me a five-dollar fountain pen for my Bar Mitzvah and then proceeded to overuse the open bar at the party my struggling parents hosted.

  My father’s career as a rep had its difficulties. During a rough patch, he became a “sub- salesman” and worked for Joe Livio, a rep who had the Murray Feiss line of sconces and chandeliers, and too much territory. Joe was in the L’s. I met him once, when came to Dallas regularly for Market Week and, just being sociable, he took me to dinner at the French Room, which was the city’s most expensive restaurant. Bill Cosby was having dinner there. Was he leaning over a white tablecloth and dropping a drug into his companion’s drink? This was the 1970s, I was in my early twenties and, according to Joe, “full of promise.”

  Back in the J’s, Milt and Evelyn Jacobson were friends of my parents for decades, until Evelyn descended into Alzheimer’s. Is anyone named Milt anymore? Patti and I knew their both their sons when we were growing up together in Los Angeles. Robert, the brilliant one, was in all the AP classes and got interested in “virtual reality” long before it had commercial reality. Gary, the shy younger brother, became a gambler in Las Vegas and, so I heard but don’t believe, either a drug addict or some other kind of criminal.

  And so the address book went on. There were no O’s or K’s. I’m in the book with a phone number I no longer recognize. Most entries are in my mother’s hand, but not all. My father’s writing was distinct, because he preferred print to script and liked capitalizing words for no obvious reason. The short, encouraging notes he would send me when I was in college, sometimes clipped to an article he had torn out of the newspaper, would have sentences with words capitalized seemingly at random. He liked abbreviations as well. The address book has much of the same. It’s full of Bev Hills and Mex Rest in block letters.

  *

  Aside from the mentions in the address book, tradesmen and their services showed up on scraps of paper. There were handwritten notes and tear-outs of ads. Like shards of pottery, business cards could be dug out of the cubbyholes or surfaced from the bottom of the drawers. The stapled, four-page reference list from the homeowner’s association at Ocean Hills went from air conditioning, bee removal and concrete all the way to window washing. My father had circled the Window Washing heading. I found receipts for Albert the Plumber, Mariners Pest Control, My Handyman, and Boyd Masing Purofirst Disaster Services (Fire, Smoke & Water Damage), among others. Dress was not limited to blue collars. On a paper scrap that also had a phone number for Michael Morey Appliance Repair, Diane Harmata’s number appeared. Diane was the lawyer who handled my parents’ last wills and testaments.

  *

  Much of the paper that my parents left behind reflected their willingness to look ahead. Death was coming, so they planned for their burials. But death is only one of the two things in this world that are certain. The other certainty, taxes, left its paper trail as well. Copies of submitted returns and back-up documentation in manilla folders filled one of the drawers in the rolltop desk.

  While my father was alive and my parents lived in Ocean Hills, Irving Horn prepared their tax returns. He must have been a neighbor. The address on the engagement letter was his home address on Corinthian Way.

  The 2009 tax return that Irving Horn prepared shows no capital gains that year — in fact, an investment loss. But the greater loss appears in supporting documents that accompany the return.

  By far the largest expense of that year was for the women my mother hired to come to Delos Way as caregivers. She provided a figure, $45,930. By comparison, the return reported $24,501 as total income for the year.

  The need for in-home care was new., the result of my father’s accident at the end of the year before, when he decided to go by himself on the day after Christmas to see Valkyrie, a Tom Cruise movie about a decent Nazi, which was playing nearby in San Marcos. It turned out to be a bad decision on every level. On the way in, he tripped on concrete steps and was knocked unconscious. In the return for 2009, my mother’s list of medical expenses began with San Marcos Ambulance transportation, 12/26/2008.

  So, the dissolution of the rest of my father’s life began. It may actually have begun the year before, but I don’t know that. My parents always kept their troubles to themselves. Or, at least, away from their children. When I went through other tax returns in the rolltop desk, I learned that the fall at the movie theater was part of a sequence of troubles. In the supporting documents for the prior year’s return, there was a bill from Balboa Ambulance, service provided November 13, 2008. My father apparently was taken by ambulance that day to Tri City ER and then to a rehab facility, Vista Knoll Sunbridge.

  Did I know any of this? In 2008 I was rehabilitating myself from a divorce, I lived a thousand miles away and called my parents infrequently. On the other hand, November 13 isn’t just another day. It’s my birthday. I don’t remember my mother calling me that day, but I bet she did.

  The 2008 invoices included Tri City, for SNF level 1 and level 2, which are the abbreviations the State of California uses for levels of care in a skilled nursing facility. The bill was nearly $37,000; there was a pharmacy cost for $4,000 more. In any case, whatever had happened, happened, but the fall my father took the day after Christmas that same year was different. It was cataclysmic, and the decline it precipitated was final.

  To help Irving Horn prepare the 2009 return, my mother wrote out a list of the medical expenses. The list began with a breakout of costs incurred from December 26 through the end of January 2009. Hospital & emergency, $1,050. Ambulances, $300. Ten days in another rehab facility, and then rentals, including a hospital bed and a wheelchair, when my father came home.

  The payments to caregivers started in February and continued through the end of November. She recorded names, days, hours, and payments, beginning with Lucy Simpson, 2/7/09. The baseline task was preventing my father from getting up on his own, because he might fall. But there was also light cleaning, shopping for groceries, and keeping my mother company. The first day, Lucy Simpson started at 8 a.m. and ended at 8 a.m., a 24-hour shift. The next week, Lucy Simpson logged 117 hours, a serious workweek. Lucy disappears from the record after February. It’s possible my mother didn’t like her, or vice versa. Another caretaker, Onie Ruiz – Apolonia – had 91 hours the week starting March 7. Her longest day, 16 hours. She made $12 per hour, $20 per hour on Saturdays. Olivia Enciso earned $18,352 from February to November.

  The caregivers rotated. My mother managed the schedules. She matched the constant need to their shifting availabilities. From May 10-16, Onie was paid $300; in the same period, Olivia had five eight-hour days, $480. In June, a new name. One of the two regulars might have gone on vacation, visiting family in Mexico. So Loddy – Eloisa Montefalcon – joined the rotation. She logged nine hours at $12 and thirteen hours at $10 her first to days on the job. From June forward, Loddy was one of the regulars, which now included three women. By September there were four, when Carmen started. My mother made her notes on the timesheets (“September 26, paid Loddy $84 for 7 hours”). Sometimes Loddy would initial EM next to the “paid.”

  My mother hired Lucy, Loddy, Onie, Olivia and Carmen. But there was another folder elsewhere in the desk with other names, telephone numbers, resumes and business cards. Alicia Eckhert Loves Pets! Brenda Wagner provides “The Care You Wish For.” Krysten Flohr has Experience with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Did my mother interview all of them? Did she see and then reject the woman whose mission was “Helping your Loved One Maintain a Healthy Happy Environment”?

  The expense records for the caregivers ended in November, when my mother decided it was all too much, the management, the accounting, the worry, and perhaps also the expense. In December my father was driven a small group home not far from Ocean Hills, Alta Vista Manor, where he spent the ten months he had left.

  She had banished my father.

  *

  The ”Casket Price List” from Eternal Hills came with a business card that had no one’s name on it from Dignity. That might be the perfect name for a holding company owning a network of mortuaries, funeral homes, and cemeteries. Dignity is also a brand identity bestowed on funeral homes to help them sell to their end users. It’s a sort of Good Housekeeping seal. As Dignity says in promotional materials, it’s a promise of “service beyond expectation.” Of the many business cards my parents kept in the rolltop desk – Melrose Optical, Senior Move Masters, Mobile Dentistry—the one from Dignity seemed to best embody a genius for entrepreneurship. Senior Move Masters may well be “San Diego’s Finest Move Manager in America’s Finest City.” But Dignity is “The Mark of Quality.” It’s found everywhere, and yet only “when funeral, cremation and cemetery providers meet our rigid standard of service.” The standard is comprehensive. It applies to service “before, during and after the service.” It’s like Good Housekeeping, but it’s much better than good. Dignity comes with the “100% Guarantee” of complete satisfaction.

  Caskets were a minor subset of the Eternal Hills material in the rolltop desk. How to describe the bulk of it? Other than voluminous, even dominant, the word mundane fits. Contracts, evidence of payments, whatever a survivor might need as instructions, answers to any question that might arise about billing. Going through it, I felt rebuked by its thoroughness, as if it were a model I have failed to live up to. Thirty years ago, when my first wife was dying of cancer, she asked me to buy two adjacent spaces in a local cemetery. She’s now in one of them, and I own the one beside her. So I do have my real estate taken care of, though I have no idea where that deed is, or any contract. And I’ve made no further arrangements, even though I’ve already lived the three score and ten that are the days of our years.

  My parents were better about this. Their specifications were clear. Plain pine boxes, a dress tent with 25 chairs, family will witness lowering of casket, a temporary marker. Eternal Hills had all the instructions and carried them out for my father. When the time came for my mother’s funeral, there was next to nothing for my sister and me to decide.

  Both of them had signed authorizations for “Minimal Preparation of Remains,” which meant washing the hair and body and “setting the features” (closing their eyes and mouths, if needed). Minimal also included any suturing and aspiration, which meant suctioning the excess fluids and gases from the body. This, too, was spelled out and signed off. No embalming. A separate signed statement acknowledged that the point of what they were buying was simply to make them more presentable for viewing, though there was no viewing planned. They also acknowledged that Eternal Hills “will not impose any charge for this minimal service,” though, as someone once said about any no-charge service, “the hat’s in there somewhere.”

  *

  My mother’s handwriting was shakier on the outside of an envelope I found with my father’s death certificate. She had written a note to herself: “Norm’s social security, change to Regina.” Inside the envelope, a “To Whom It May Concern” letter from Dr. Bloom, in support of a notarized Power of Attorney. “This is to certify,” Dr. Bloom’s letter began. It misstated my father’s date of birth but got the rest of it right, mostly. “Mr. Perkins is gravely ill and is not expected to survive. He cannot give consent either verbally or written due to the above conditions and severe dementia.” The severity of dementia might have been an exaggeration. It might have been more accurate to say that my father was no longer able to successfully withhold his consent.

  Did my mother behave callously, putting him against his wishes in the small group home where he would die within a year? I certainly thought so. I was unhappy with her about it. I was unhappy with myself, too, for not doing anything about it, in part because my mother was in charge, so I told myself it wasn’t my place, and in part because it was easier to do nothing. When I visited my father at Alta Vista Manor, I would take him out for a while. I took him for the French Dip sandwich he wanted at Coco’s.
  “Your mother won’t let me come home,” he told me, as we sat in a restaurant booth across from each other.
  He didn’t seem angry. He certainly wasn’t feeling that fury he had felt three years before when the Department of Motor Vehicles refused to renew his driver’s license. He was outraged that they had made him take a driving test. Even though his driving at ninety-two was exactly as concerning as it had been in my childhood, the State would not pass him. But that had happened two very difficult years ago. At Alta Vista Manor, he seemed resigned. Life had beaten him down, and he knew he wasn’t going to win.

  A color xerox of my father’s flat grave marker was in envelop with Bloom’s letter and the Power of Attorney. Beloved Husband Dad & Grandpa Forever in Our Hearts. Patti and I used the same formula for our mother’s marker when the time came.

  *

  Sometimes the truth you think you know is as tight as a knot and nothing will unravel it. Time and distance can help. The time records my mother kept for the caretakers she had hired after my father’s fall were on dozens of loose sheets of unlined paper. Names, hours, dollars owed – – eleven months of managing, when he was at home and disabled and disoriented. Now, from a distance of years, what was I seeing? Multiple caretakers are needed, as the requirement turned into round the clock care. Schedules shift, solutions must be found for unexpected days off. She was in effect forced to run a small business – assigning tasks, keeping time, writing checks. She was CEO and CFO. She was HR as well. She did the vetting and the hiring. And my father was difficult. He was more given to complaint than appreciation. He would get up in the middle of the night, refusing help, and fall again. And my mother was almost ninety years old.

  Like a child, I always saw her as powerful, so I held my mother responsible for my father’s unhappiness. Now, thinking of her as she was that November, with my father still at home and her adult children elsewhere and leading their lives, I can wonder: how she had been able to handle it for so many months, all by herself. And who were the selfish ones?

  How did she keep it up with it all? It turned out she couldn’t.
  There was nothing callous about it. What it was, was too much, and after eleven months, my mother gave up.
  I did ask her why my father couldn’t have just stayed home as he wanted.
  “I thought I would die,” she said.
  I didn’t understand. My attitude was more “how could you” than “why did you.”
  But then my mother and I always had a relationship bookended by misunderstandings. And probably not only bookended, but misunderstood chapter by chapter.

  *

  I would have liked all of this – my recollections, the accounting, the recounting of what was found in the rolltop desk– to sound a sunny note. I would have liked all of it to have that sunshine. Tone of voice is often the difference between likeability and its opposite, no matter what is actually said. But there’s no help for it here. I was valedictorian of my high school class. So maybe my natural voice is valedictory. I intended to throw out everything I found, and I went through it only to dispose of it, but my own disposition got in the way.

  Why sift through every paper and paperclip, every tax return or greeting card, notebook and address book? Why think about any of this? And then, why think twice about it, to say nothing of spending hours and days going through it all? Why not throw it all away immediately? I am home now. I can see outside my window two enormous grey receptacles that the Dallas Department of Sanitation provides – those two ninety-six gallon polyethylene resin carts with wheels. But I didn’t want to use them, at least not so fast.

  I wanted to catalog whatever my mother had left in her desk. I knew it all needed to be gone, but I needed to examine it first. I wanted to notice the small facts and try to find in them some larger significance. I’ve read Proust, or as much of it as I can bear. I am grateful that the famous madeleine appeared within the first handful of pages, which was some reward. So, going through the Eternal Hills contracts or the caregiver timesheets that my mother had failed to throw away was something I could do. I wasn’t treasure hunting. It was not an archeological dig. No tools were required. Just time.

  I suppose I was also looking for insight into my parents’ attitudes about property and legacy and death, since few of those thoughts had been shared explicitly with me when they were alive, in part to uncover my parents’ thoughts and in part to consider my own. Most of us no longer keep a whitened skull as a memento mori on a table in our study or on a shelf in the den. We keep things out of sight because we want them out of mind. Still, at some point, we have the contents of desks, cabinets and closets, belonging to others or ourselves, in rooms we need to clean out. We need to do it, or someone one else will.

  *

  “Family photos.”
  Didn’t that used to be the typical answer when people were asked what they would take from their burning homes, if they had only a moment to grab what they valued most? Probably not anymore. Those family photos are saved already, they reside in the cloud. Visual documentation seems so much a part of life now, not just photos but videos, the relentless posting on social platforms. That was no part of my parents’ lives. They never owned or used a computer. They had no position on Windows versus Mac. Reluctantly, and only when they were both in their nineties, they accepted a cellphone. It was for emergency calls when they were out of the house, or for long distance calls. They never took a picture with it. And they were skeptical that a long-distance call no longer incurred a toll charge.

  So after their deaths, there were no passwords to wonder about and no online profiles to look into. But there were almost no printed photos in the desk, either. Just two.

  My parents took lots of black and white snapshots when my sister and I were children. The color slides my father shot on Kodak film are mostly scenes from the cross-country car trip we made in the summer of 1962. On the way from Los Angeles to New York and back, he took pictures of the chair lift we rode in at Jackson Hole, a vista from the Badlands, the siding on his childhood home in Chicago, and a park in Philadelphia, where his brother Lester and my Aunt Jo lived. But those slides were in boxed carousels, as was the old projector, inside a closet on Delos Way. In the rolltop desk, there were only two photographs. One showed my mother and father at a party for their fiftieth anniversary. That was in 1998 at the Little Europe restaurant in Oceanside. It was the last of my mother’s extended family gatherings–the last not including the funerals. Aunt Diana and Uncle Earl were there, Harold and Hazel, Aunt Dottie and a boyfriend, and everyone’s adult children, the cousins who still lived in Southern California.

  The other photo was much older. It was black and white, square, and about the size of a post-it note. Four children, older than toddlers but younger than pre-teens, are all dressed up and posing on a sidewalk. Two boys, two girls. The taller boy stands behind the younger boy, the two girls are arranged the same way. The younger boy and girl, both in front, are holding hands. I had no idea who they were. A car parked across the street in the distance could have been from the nineteen twenties. One side of the street is tree-lined, the other entirely undeveloped. I guessed my mother’s childhood in Los Angeles and took a picture of the photo with my cellphone and texted Patti, attaching the image.
  “Dad and his brother Lester,” she texted back.
  She didn’t know who the girls were though. Maybe our father’s cousins, who would be our second cousins, from families we had never met or heard of.

  *

  Not everything needs to be life or death. If there’s a fat, faded manilla folder with durable power of attorney for healthcare forms and other sobering matters, another folder labeled “Bridge” can hold tally cards, the names and scores written part of a secret language “for two table progressive and three table progressive games.”

  My mother and father played as partners for a while in the regular bridge games held at the Ocean Hills clubhouse. They were imperfectly compatible, as they were all the sixty-two years of marriage. My father took his time to make a decision before he bid, and this annoyed my mother. She was faster, believed herself to be smarter, and eventually found her friend Jeanne Green to be the better partner.

  *

  What to make of an empty wooden box? It was small enough to be a snug fit for index cards and must have been my father’s. He had written sequences of numbers on five strips of paper that were taped to the underside of its lid, each of them labeled with a brand name: Arco, Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Union. Credit card account numbers. Why would he have so many credit cards for different branded gas stations? Couldn’t he simply have used a Visa or Mastercard? Depending on the age of the numbers, no. The Visa card wasn’t around until 1958; Mastercard or its predecessor, the Interbank Card Association, not until 1966. Gasoline credit cards on the other hand were introduced in the 1920s, and the wooden box, its varnish faded, the sides smoothed from handling, looked like something that might have been around that long as well. Maybe my father had used it in his Chicago boyhood to store his baseball cards. It’s possible. Baseball cards have been around even longer, since 1868. When my father was growing up, the roster of his Cubs included a pitcher named Abraham Lincoln “Sweetbread” Bailey, and a second righthander, Grover Cleveland Alexander.

  *

  Contracts that detail the purchase of our properties in this life or cemetery arrangements for the home in our next, birth certificates and marriage licenses, receipts from transactions, check stubs, credit card statements — these can function as the most truthful of diaries. They only record our deeds, without commentary. They express no feelings.

  True, their wills had changed over time, and I could read something into that. In the 1987 originals, each of them appointed the other as executor, and I was the sole successor executor. That must have been the period when my sister was still drinking and married to Duane, the former neighbor and Westinghouse executive she left her husband for. When Patti left California with Duane and moved to Pittsburgh, she left three children behind, the oldest just a teenager. But that second marriage ended, too, after Alcoholics Anonymous, where Patti met Joe. In 1992, when Duane was history, my parents changed their wills and named both of us successor co-executors.

  In my mother’s desk I found hundreds of “return address” stickers for Ms. Regina Perkins. In a hundred years, she could never have used them all. She kept a bright yellow ruler from Hawthorne Savings, which must have been carried from Los Angeles to Oceanside, stowed away in the desk when my parents moved. Also making the trip, a nine by twelve envelope addressed to the Palms-Rancho Park Branch public library.

  My mother worked part-time hours in public libraries on the west side of Los Angeles. She was a substitute librarian, although she had never studied library science or gone to college. She must have been substituting the day in 1974 the envelope from the UCLA Department of Music arrived at the Palms-Rancho Park branch. As a child of the Depression, she liked to reuse things, and the Palms-Rancho address was scratched over, replaced by “Perkins – Health Records – Family.”

  These health records are a curiosity. They included my “negative Mantoux report,” following tuberculin skin tests in 1963 at Orville Wright Junior High School. Invented in France in 1910 by Charles Mantoux, the Mantoux test, which involves injection just under the skin and then checking the reaction, is still in use. My Mantoux results were signed by Thomas O. Lawson, school principal, a name that resurfaced from a deep ocean. Also coming up from those depths, Dr. Harris, my childhood doctor, whose office address on a card that listed our vaccinations was in Beverly Hills. My sister and I had been protected from the measles, chicken pox, mumps, and small pox. We received Salk 1 & 2 polio boosters in April and May 1956, and all of us, parents and children, had the Sabin Oral Type 1 in 1962. I received my fourth poliomyelitis vaccination that same year.

  Our mother noted our identifying marks. Mine included a brown birthmark “on the back of shoulder,” which I’ve never seen and know nothing about and was only a modest surprise, since most of us are unaware of what’s behind us. I had “one scar at base of nostril,” which I’m well aware of. I was four when I acquired it, after my sister tripped me on a curb. I have had measles, red mumps, chicken pox, and scarlet fever, which also apparently left a scar, this time on my forehead, which must have vanished into my skin. As for Patti, she got away with only having measles, both red and German mumps, chicken pox, and a tiny red birthmark on her left leg.

  My mother kept her own health conditions secret from her children, though Patti and I were both adults and married when she had surgery for ovarian cancer, according to the date she wrote down. Her note said that she took “chemo pills” for a year. What she didn’t do was take me into her confidence. She may have told Patti, depending on which marriage her daughter was in at the time.

  Her other tribulations: In 1984, slipped disc; 1985, a lump removed from the little finger on her right hand; 1995, a damaged heart valve. A damaged heart valve? How had that even been discovered, and what if anything was done about it?

  I already knew about her bouts with kidney and gallstones. Kidney stone, September 1962. I remember that one specifically. We were in the house that we had recently moved to, on Belton Drive.

  My father’s share of health troubles included colon cancer and a temporary colostomy in his middle sixties, as well as three heart angioplasties and two strokes. Cholesterol and triglycerides, both high. She also mentioned that his mother died at 90 (heart), his father at 83 (pneumonia), and that he had a cousin who was a manic depressive.
  Which cousin is a mystery.

  *

  “Dear Mrs. Regina,” began a letter from CARE about that charity’s World Hunger Campaign. “By the time you finish reading this letter, 20 children will have died from hunger and preventable diseases.” In the sidebar, a photo of one such child.

  Charities heavily solicited my mother as she aged. Do the direct marketing gurus target the elderly? It likely boils down to fishing where the fish are. At a certain age, our tax laws make withdrawals from IRA accounts a certainty. Perhaps life savings are much easier to go after from those whose lives are expiring. Perhaps people in their eighties and nineties have had all the time they need to discover that their children are undeserving, and they may as well give some of what they have to strangers.

  I found the acknowledgement from KPBS, the San Diego public television station, of my mother’s donation of the family car. Her AAA card for 2017, with Member 52 Years embossed on it, would have been of little use, since the car was already gone. She did hold onto the disabled person’s “parking placard” that had hung from its rearview mirror. The placard was re-issued to Norman Perkins in 2017, seven years after his death, allowing the caretakers driving her to Ralphs or Walgreen’s to park in a handicapped spot.

  Until only a few days before her death at ninety-six, my mother continued to record weekly payments to the new caretakers – Teresa, Margarita, Alma, Maria — tallying hours and writing checks. What had begun ten years earlier, with other names, to help her with my father, became the center of her everyday life.

  Other records thinned during the seven years my mother outlived my father, as did the life that she lived. Aside from tax returns, which merited their own cache, the encyclopedic offerings from Elizabeth Hospice in her last year, and drug product information sheets, the rolltop desk contained mostly odds and ends. One oddity: a Parking Violation Reminder Notice from the Anaheim Police department. It was dated September 5, 2017, which was more than year after the donation of her only car to San Diego public television. Apparently, either the station or whoever bought the car at auction had failed to transfer the title. As far as the Anaheim police were concerned, the white 1998 AMC was still my mother’s responsibility. She received a Parked In Red Zone ticket demanding $272 and stapled it to the letter from KPBS, which testified “your donation was sold for $2,200.”

  *

  The 2010 return was the last for Norman Perkins and Regina Perkins, married filing jointly. It was also the last for Irving Horn. My mother switched to Kathyrn Bowles, who lived on Athos Way. Irving Horn might have been my father’s guy, but my mother preferred working with a woman. Kathy was also less expensive. Hard to imagine a smaller bill for tax preparation than her $150 charge for the 2011 tax return, a receipt my mother kept in a folder with the 2012 return. For 2010, Irving had billed $165, plus an additional forty-dollar fee added on for “computer.”

  So, $205 total. Kathryn Bowles was the kind of person whose formal letterhead included a lengthy quote from a Dorothy L. Sayers essay, The Lost Tools of Learning. It was at the bottom of the initial engagement letter my mother signed, right above a fax number. “We who were scandalized when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight propaganda with a smattering of subjects.” That was strange on a letterhead. One doesn’t normally look for social opinions from a tax preparer. But, so be it. I met Kathryn after my mother’s death and hired her so she could prepare the 2017 taxes. We never discussed failures of education. And since higher education had provided me with a valuable student deferment, I was never sent anywhere to fight. When the draft was replaced by a lottery, I drew the perfect number. That is the only lotter I have ever played, and I won. My war was only on television.

  *

  My parents’ total income for their last joint filing year, $71,894.

  So much of everything we do is about money. We say it isn’t, but it is. No surprise, nearly every desk drawer held records of getting and spending. A set of American Express credit card statements bound with a rubber band showed that my parents bought their food from Stater Bros Markets and Albertsons, but, twice a month, from Nucci’s, the Italian Café. The flavor of daily life was still fresh in the stale checkbook registers. There were checks for six dollars to Founders Duplicate Bridge, a fee to the Ocean Hills Library, payment for a soft water service, the check to Mutual of Omaha. The parade of purchase and obligations – caretaker salaries, doctor visits, auto insurance — belonged to the procession of financial transacting that occupies us practically to the very last day of our lives.

  Keeping financial records is the prudent thing to do. It seems evident, though why this is so isn’t as clear. Nobody is asking us for proof of what we bought. Bank statements and register booklets and even cancelled checks — the desk was infested with them. Then again, I have paper trails myself. I still want the paper, even as so much of transacting has become electronic. An ancestor probably still wanted the stone tablet after animal hides came into use. If my parents were dinosaurs in this regard, I am the dinosaur the day after the giant asteroid struck the Earth.

  Kathryn Bowles was the same. A retired IRS agent, she was the one who gave my mother a printout I discovered in one of the tax folders. It advised retaining records. According to the guidance, Federal law requires “you must keep your tax records for as long as they might be needed for the administration of the Internal Revenue Code.” How long might that be? “You might find them helpful indefinitely.” Indefinitely has turned out to mean no longer than a month after I emptied the desk in the garage on Delos Way, returned home to Dallas with the contents, and started discarding.

  The 2010 return folder revealed something I had never seen: my father’s death certificate, one of the multiple originals the state provides upon request. A death certificate is a clipped, nothing-but-the-facts, police procedural kind of communication. Place of death, Alta Vista Manor on Marazon Lane. Cause of death: Cerebral vascular infarct, atheroschlerotic cardiovascular disease. I’d never known the medical cause. It never occurred to me to ask about it. My mother was in charge of my father, and in those months he was at Alta Vista Manor it was only the event of death that I expected, not an explanation for it. So now I saw the official causes stated plainly. The certificate also revealed something more. It required that someone fill in “Time between cause and death.” Apparently, the cerebral vascular infarct, that interruption or blockage of the blood to the brain resulting in a stroke, occurred three months before death. That was news.

  It compelled me to go back twelve years and stop at the three-month mark before the end of August when my father died. There I am, lounging around my swimming pool. Days are growing hotter at the end of June. I’m jumping into the pool, and not just on the weekend but after work as well, because it’s light until eight in the evenings and still very warm. On the Fourth of July, I’m in Southlake, the suburb where my girlfriend Debra lives. We are in Southlake Town Square, and the mayor is wearing the same loud red, white and blue shirt he wore the last Fourth of July, and on the one before that as well. He stands in the gazebo, speaking before the piped music and the fireworks start. I’m not sure what the mayor said that particular July. I am positive however that my mother never mentioned that my father had suffered a stroke the month before at Alta Vista Manor. The next time I saw him was during the week of August 13, which is my mother’s birthday, when I typically made one of my visits to Oceanside. He wasn’t doing well, but then he hadn’t been doing well.

  *

  How did things go for her, in those years after my father’s death? Mostly as you would expect for someone bending toward the end gradually, undulled mentally even at the very last, but not given to recognizing that gift, much less to celebrating it.

  Some of us accumulate medical and related devices as we age, but in that regard my mother was lucky. Her needs and devices were small. They fit in cubbyholes, and in that long, narrowest desk drawer that perched right above the knees.

  I found a Visonic Limited plastic pendant with a button, on a beaded necklace. My mother wore it around her neck for use in a “Help, I’ve fallen and can’t get up” moment. As far as I know she never pushed the button. When I opened a hardshell case nearby, I discovered the pair of used hearing aids, which were not used much. My mother in her last years was less concerned with hearing than with being heard. There was the small porcelain handbell that was used to summoned a caretaker. Margarita might have answered to it, or Teresa, when one of them was watching TV in the kitchen while my mother was in her bedroom, reading books from the Ocean Hills library. The bell had Pittsburgh, City of Bridges as a legend around its porcelain curves. A price tag was still stuck on its insides. It might have been a souvenir from a long ago visit to my sister, who lives in Baden outside Pittsburgh, or a gift from her.

  *

  With apologies for the formula, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who want control, and those who want to lose control. My mother’s approach to dying and her readiness to die were comprised of elements of each. Both wishes were intertwined. What had she seen in her life that fed her repeated concern with managing the end of her life? The thought of being kept alive but powerless horrified her, so she preferred dying, despite its loss of all power forever. I’m sure it had to do with seeing her mother for so many years in the nursing homes. Sally Reegler from Galicia, bedridden in Los Angeles nursing homes that always seemed to smell of urine — after a massive stroke, Nanny had stayed alive but miserably so, sharing that misery with my mother when she took her turn visiting every week.

  My mother had a “California Declaration,” witnessed by two Ocean Hills neighbors. “I want to receive as much medication as necessary even if it may hasten my death,” she wrote. She was entirely healthy at the time. Two years later, age ninety-three and in the same relative good health, she took her Declaration from a desk drawer and wrote further on it, “Do not keep me alive by machines or artificial feeding.” This time she faked the witnessing, by adding, “Decisions made by me and witnessed by my son Mark Perkins and daughter Patricia Perkins,” though neither of us were there.

  *

  My mother was ninety-four and for the most part doing well when she insisted on having morphine in the house. Morphine sulfate – “take half to 1 tablet, every 2 hours as needed for pain or for shortness of breath.” The morphine sulfate was kept in the kitchen, locked in the refrigerator, where it stayed without use. What she did take nightly was lorazepam, 2 mg tablets, “one tablet by mouth at bedtime.” And although anxiety is not a terminal illness, she also had Dr. Bloom sign off on her eligibility for hospice long before it was required. The hospice team came to the house, checked on my mother’s steady good health, and billed the state. She must have been a moneymaker for the Elizabeth Hospice, “serving San Diego and the Inland Empire.”

  My mother worked the system. Hospice is presented as a six-month service for those who are dying and disinterested in further treatments. In attitude, my mother qualified, but the services she used covered a time period of eighteen months before her death. In the first twelve months, she was prescribed cozaar for high blood pressure, lorazepam, prochlorperazine, bisacodyl, levsin, morphine sulfate, haloperidol, melatonin, guaifenesin, ativan, amlodipine besylate, senna, and tramadol. The State of California picked up the cost for the weekly hospice visits throughout.

  “Product information sheets,” most of them from Ralph’s pharmacy, provided not just information about a drug but also recipes for Potato Skins with Buffalo Chicken and other meal choices, with tips from “your Ralph’s Dieticians.” Prescriptions for Nystatin, used to treat fungal skin infections, instructed “Apply under left breast two times a day.” There was product information for the 14 mg tabs of morphine sulfate, 14 mg tabs, but also for haloperidol 1 mg tablets, to be used by mouth, under the tongue, or rectally every 3 hours for nausea, paranoia, or delusions. Bisac-Evac 10 mg suppositories, as need for constipation. Hyoscyamine .125 mg tabs –crush one tablet and place under the tongue every 4 hours as needed, for excessive oral secretions. Much of this was an “end of life” regimen, but most of the dates on the prescriptions proceeded my mother’s death by many months.

  On my now frequent visits to see her on Delos Way in those months, she was always up and around.

  “Why am I still here?” she would say.
  That was her refrain. She would say it while she walked around the dining room table just for exercise, or arranged her pill routine at the kitchen table.
  I poked back at her.
  “You’re still living, we’re both still living, what’s the difference?”
  “You don’t understand,” she said.
  I’m sure that was true. It has been true of me about people generally all my life.

  At the very end, as she rounded ninety-six and headed for home, it was all needed. Prochlorperazine – every 8 hours as needed for nausea. And always lorazepam, one or two by mouth every 4 hours as needed for anxiety, agitation, or nausea. Unlike my father, my mother managed the death she wanted, in her bed, with her children in the house with her. She was sleeping when her breath came to a stop. I sat nearby on the bed, talking to her while she was sleeping and for some moments until I realized she was no longer alive. So, she made it work. She had arranged to be treated for nausea, paranoia, delusions, anxiety, agitation, constipation, and pain. Successfully all the way.

  *

  Elizabeth Hospice’s 27-page Patient and Family Handbook was a somber keepsake in the rolltop desk. Her team – nurse, social worker, hospice aide, and chaplain – had all signed it on its first page. The topics that the handbook covers “for you and your loved one” are comprehensive. Shared responsibilities, levels of care, additional services, home safety, minimizing infection risks, medical disposal in the home, and more. The section on emergency planning, which recommends having a flashlight, blankets, canned food and a can opener, seems to have little to do with dying, but it’s a reminder that larger catastrophes do occur even while you and your loved one are having yours.

  Some sections are richly emotional. In “A Guide for the Caregiver,” a tabular checklist uses the heading, “What you might be feeling” (“I am tired, scared and alone” “I am willing to do all I can, but don’t know if I’m able”) and then, to the right of each potential feeling on the list, how hospice might help. My mother must have experienced the emotions of both patient and caregiver. My sister and I were only occasionally there, we lived in other cities. Her hired caregivers were all hourly help who came and went. They might have felt tired sometimes, but it’s unlikely that they were scared and alone.

  The Handbook is honest and very direct. In the table titled, “What can I do for pain and comfort issues?” it offers a list of “common situations,” including constant fidgeting and moaning, complaining about pain, becomes cranky, and running low on paid medication. It doesn’t sugarcoat. It’s frightening, because it doesn’t disguise what may be coming. Another table asks, “What do I do for breathing issues?” Then it spells out the scenarios: shortness of breath, gasping, breathing very fast, clothes are too tight or hot, strange breathing noises, gurgling. On the right side, under “things you can do” (it presumes a family member or other civilian), there’s advice: “Breathing noises are common. Breathing may become more labored, noisy and irregular, but this does not mean that the patient is having distress or discomfort.” It recognizes situations when the living may be more distressed than the dying.

  Page after page presents “common situations” and “things you can do” –the tables like table settings for a meal in hell. “What can I do for stomach, bladder or bowel issues?” “What can I do for unwelcome changes in behavior?” These “changes in behavior” include anxiety, confusion, agitation, and restlessness. The dying may keep talking about needing to do something without saying what or be somewhere without saying where. They may be angry, shout hurtful things, have hallucinations, or live in what the Handbook calls “dream world.” Among the things one can do? The guidance resembles the advice a marriage counselor would offer: Acknowledge the experience. Try not to argue. Try to respond respectfully. Don’t take it personally. Soft, relaxing music is also suggested.

  The final table in the sequence asks, “What can I do for the last hours?” The answer in the column off to the right: “Always speak as if he or she can understand everything.” Is there wisdom behind this? None of us ever understands everything, but the person dying may understand better than those left behind.

  The Handbook also had helpful information about medication and pain. If someone’s dying, it says, don’t worry about them becoming addicted. They won’t become dependent, in part because they won’t have time to. Also, it’s just not true that morphine will make a dying person stop breathing. The Handbook then concludes the same way everything medical does these days, with the required privacy notices and the paragraphs about how to complain to the appropriate regulatory agencies.

  *

  It’s possible that the very moment of death is the most self-centered in our entire lives. But in the time before that moment, and there are usually years, even if death turns out to come suddenly or by surprise, we have plenty of time to think about others. Who’s next in line, and what will they need to know? As for our children, it is hard to stop thinking of them as children, who will need help figuring things out. My mother probably thought that way. She left lots of helpful notes in the desk. She provided phone numbers and instructions about Social Security, Medicare, the Veterans Administration, and Cox, her cable TV company. She circled a phone number for the Los Angeles County employee organization that promised a $500 death benefit, which Patti and I could apply for after we presented “satisfactory evidence showing that the expense of burial had been paid.” On the business card of a financial advisor at Morgan Stanley, the printed name, Martin “Sully” Farfel, was scribbled over. A current advisor’s name was written in.
  Sully Farfel must have retired. Or probably she outlived him.

  Not every note left in the rolltop desk came from my mother. Someone else left notes that were either meant for or written by a member of the Elizabeth Hospice team. “Hasn’t had food since Thursday, two spoonfuls cranberry on Friday, Saturday wanted water but wasn’t awake.” My mother died on a Thursday. These observations from her last week mention the lack of bowel movements and “more urine than she took in.” Her morphine sulfate in the refrigerator was finally being used. This is how it goes, this watch over body functions, and the administration of what can mitigate discomfort and ease the way forward.

  I guessed that these were Teresa’s notes. Teresa Markowitz wasn’t hospice, she was one of the caregivers my mother hired for herself, after my father’s death. Teresa took care of a number of Ocean Hills residents. For my mother, she shopped, cooked, and did light cleaning. They watched TV together, and she kept my mother company. She put up with my mother’s criticisms as well, as she told me once.

  “We all do,” I said.

  In Teresa’s case, her patience may have been a practice. I noticed on visits home that Teresa wore one of the twisted metal bracelets that identify you as a spiritual follower of Paramahansa Yogananda. (It’s sometimes referred to as the three-metal astrological bangle. You can also get the nine-gem bangle, the “navaratna,” which is supposed to be more powerful, but I’ve never seen one of those.) Yogananda, the Indian monk who started Self-Realization Fellowship, wrote about bracelets in his Autobiography of a Yogi. He also lived the last decades of his life in Southern California, developing his ten-acre Lake Shrine in one of the most idyllic locations in Los Angeles, where Sunset Boulevard meets Pacific Coast Highway on the way to Malibu. I knew something about it, because one of my childhood friends became a regular there when we were seniors in high school. My buddy wore the bracelet, too. It so happens that Self- Realization Fellowship has a second multi-acre property, where Teresa went on retreats — this one on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Encinitas, twenty-five minutes down the coast from Ocean Hills. The Fellowship has a genius for real estate.

  *

  In Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda has plenty to say about death. “Though the ordinary man looks upon death with dread and sadness, those who have gone before know it is a wondrous experience.” Or, “Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die.” There’s less said about mourning, although deducing his attitude might seem obvious. The fact is, different religious traditions see mourning differently and prescribe different periods for it. Hindu, thirteen days. Eastern Orthodox, forty days. Jews, seven days, thirty days, a year. Episcopalians, nothing specific. And practical matters can have their own demanding schedules. A “Survivor’s Checklist” included with the sales literature from Eternal Hills told what needed to be tackled within four specific time intervals: Immediate, Within 30 Days, Within The Next 60 Days, Within Six Months. The immediate tasks are compelling. Notify relatives and friends, investigate whether there’s a prepaid plan or a burial insurance policy, and select an attorney to review the will. Then you have sixty days to do the review. Or possibly ninety, if you start Within the Next 60 Days after the Within 30 Days period. Even more compelling, Within Six Months concludes with “Update your own will.” So the process serves as a memento mori.

  Eternal Hills gave us a stack Mourner’s Kaddish cards. The ones from my father’s funeral must have gone somewhere. My sister left the new ones in the rolltop desk, along with the shopping list she made for after our mother’s funeral: paper plates, hard-boiled eggs, fruit platter, veggie platter, turkey/roast beef and cheese platter, water, sodas, cookies, crackers, plastic, all of it from Costco. These are notes of the living, for the doing. Life is so often a matter of having the right supplies.

  I already mentioned that we were both on Delos Way at the moment our mother died. That was late in the afternoon. I was the one in the bedroom. Immediately after, hospice needed to come out and approve before Eternal Hills could pick up the body. There was a release form. I’m not sure what happened right after that, although I was there. The social arrangements, the Costco list, did I help with any of it? Or did I fly home, with plans to come back for the funeral days later, bringing Debra and my son with me? I must have. Patti must have stayed. Maybe Joe was there already, since it was January and cold enough to want to be out of Pittsburgh. Was he in the house the day my mother died? I really don’t remember. I also don’t understand my ability to forget such a simple circumstance. It’s a weakness of mine, or sometimes a superpower.

  *

  It’s done, I’ve gone through everything in the rolltop desk. Getting a desk hauled away and donated or trashed – that was the easy part. And now everything in the drawers and cubbyholes is thrown out as well.

  Has all this disposal been of nothing but tax returns and real estate transactions and a tiny porcelain bell? What of grief, has it been disposed of? If not, in which manilla folder or desk drawer was it stored? My grief was in there, I looked for it, but didn’t manage to find it, as much as I might have wanted to throw it away.

  But I’ve done what I wanted to do. I’ve told about what the desk contained, which is a story only in the way a catalog or a telephone directory tells a story. Did I didn’t mention it yet? There was a telephone directory in the rolltop desk as well. The 2017 Ocean Hills directory from my mother’s last full year had her name only, since my father had been dead seven years by then. Still, it seemed wrong, though my surprise was so brief it could be considered a partial understanding. That said, I never think of the house on Delos Way in Ocean Hills as anything but theirs, plural. It’s still theirs, even though I own it now. Even though their furniture – rolltop desk included — is finally gone. Gone too is the wall that separated the dining room from the kitchen. It has been replaced by the open space that Patti and Joe preferred, the two areas divided now by a granite-topped island with a stainless-steel sink recessed in it. At least Delos still has plural ownership, because there’s my sister and me. Our names are on a document we registered.

  *

  My mother will always be at Eternal Hills. So will my father. In fact, I’m thinking about it for myself. If I can manage my death as well as my mother did, and then die in the summertime, I may well already be in Oceanside for my last breath. Maybe I can talk further about this with Jacquelyn Lechowicz, the woman whose business card was stapled to my father’s contract, the one who asked whether my mother had any connection to the military. What is Jacquelyn doing now? Was she, like my parents, still at Eternal Hills?

  I looked for her online and there she was, with a LinkedIn profile, a Final Arrangements Advisor in Oceanside, California. My mother has been dead four years; my father, twelve years. It’s now September 2022. Jacquelyn appears in a second link as well, which I clicked on. She is named as the beneficiary of a gofundme campaign set up by Nicole Lechowicz – her sister, or her sister-in-law, or maybe her mother. The campaign has raised $15,344 from over a hundred donations so far. Its cause: Eric, Jacquelyn’s five-year-old son, who is in the hospital right now. According to Nicole’s narration, the cancerous tumor that was “on the base of his brain” has spread into his brain and spine. In the months ahead, Eric will receive high dose chemotherapy and stem cell rescue.
  What will happen to him?
  That’s the future and not yet documented.

• The Catalog of My Discarding

  There’s news, there’s history, and there’s memory. History is a text, but memory, that’s something inside us. History records what it considers important. Memory has no such requirement. What deserves to be remembered is the same as what’s remembered, however unimportant, or even untrue.

  Dolores died on a Sunday morning. The day after her death, O.J. Simpson’s home in Brentwood was offered for sale at an auction. That was the lead story, above the fold and upper right, in Monday’s Dallas Morning News where Dolores’s obituary appeared. And the Associated Press reported that Bosnian Serbs had given a hero’s funeral to war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Dallas County was tackling a worse-than-usual mosquito problem. The paper also delivered a single-page insert on heavy stock for VoiceNet, which was a paging service.

  The news of the day can disconnect us from what is actually new in our life. But only at first. Gradually or suddenly, we take it in, and we come to understand what has happened to us. In my case, however significant the experience of that day was for me, I understood it was common. As I stood at the window in our upstairs bedroom on a Monday morning, I could only see rooftops and treetops, and I knew that out in the neighborhood, in the city, and under however far the skies extended, people were breathing their last. And those who cared were keeping them company.

  After Dolores died, what I wanted most was her continued presence. Since that was impossible, I settled for substitutes. Her voice continued to answer the phone in our house when no one was home for months after the funeral. The storage boxes with her papers and keepsakes, the trunks that preserved her clothing, the Hon filing cabinets with albums of photographs, the newspaper from Monday, July 14, 1997, these made it much further; in fact, all the way until a few months ago, some twenty-five years later, when I decided it was long past the time to clean it all out.

  The months I spent going through these leftovers in the storage room off my garage, my purpose was double-sided. There was the task of discarding. As much as possible, everything needed to go. But there was also the prospecting, the sifting through for a glimmer, a gold flake, a nugget.

  *

  When I found a TIME Annual 1997 The Year in Review in the storage room, I removed its bright jacket. The full cover photograph of Princess Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey shows a coffin covered with blooming flowers, carried by guards wearing colorful uniforms. What was left was the slate grey hard cover, as somber as a headstone. The editors of TIME had it right, I suppose, even if they exaggerated when they said that the entire world mourned after the Princess of Wale, died in a car wreck on August 13, 1997. And they confessed the reason, though overstating it, when they asserted that “people everywhere” had been exposed to years of media coverage of Diana.

  “Princess Diana’s death was one of those large events that happen in an instant….” So the editors of TIME put it. The instants of the deaths of Diana and Dolores had only been separated by fifty days, a gap from July 13 to August 31. That summer, I found it hard not to resent, however irrationally, how the earlier instant seemed to be caught in my mind in a backwash from the later one. Diana certainly isn’t on the cover of my year in review. But I don’t need to take it too personally. Mother Teresa also had her notice in TIME’s 1997 The Year in Review. She died on September 5, less than a week after Diana and only a day before the royal funeral. Mourning for her was mostly confined to a crowd in Calcutta.

  Truly, no need to take it personally. Over fifty million people died in 1997, and TIME’s 1997 The Year In Review has a paragraph for only a handful of them. The Milestones section comes at the end of the book, after the tribute pages for Diana, two pages for Mother Teresa, and a single page for Jacques Cousteau. The editors of TIME’s “honor role of other notables” unspools from Eddie Arcaro to Fred Zinnemann. It includes Colonel Tom Parker, a carnival barker who discovered Elvis, and Richard Berry, the composer of Louie Louie. Schoichi Yokoi also died in 1997. He was the Japanese soldier found defending his cave on Guam, nearly thirty years after the end of World War II. Gerda Christian died in 1997. Young Gerda was Hitler’s devoted secretary. She had made it all the way to eighty-three, after declining the poison pills that the Fuhrer gave her in 1945 as his parting gift.

  TIME 1997 The Year in Review is a coffee table book. Its authorship is collective, attributed to “the editors.” I sat with it on the floor of the storage room off my garage, reading from the jacket cover flap. “Years, like people, have personalities,” it says. It says the year 1997 was notable for its “highly emotional tone.” It declares with confidence that “the keystone event of the year was certainly the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales….” It takes no great sensitivity to understand that certainly is an adverb easily misused. Or to acknowledge that a collective truth simply may not apply to the individual. On the back of the jacket, I saw a montage. Six photos. Only one is Diana. The other five have simple captions, all in present tense from the editors of TIME, as though these events from twenty-five years ago were somehow still happening: Mother Teresa dies. Tiger Woods wins the Masters. The comet Hale- Bopp passes. Pathfinder lands on Mars. A sheep is cloned.

  I must have bought this book. Did I actually buy this book? I must have, in 1998, I don’t remember. It had been buried for twenty some years under the lid of the same plastic trunk that hid the July 14, 1997 edition of The Dallas Morning News, the get well cards bound with rubber bands, the sympathy cards, the high school annual from Our Lady of Victory in Fort Worth, and dozens of faded manilla folders. I was finally going through the storage trunks, the Hon cabinets, and the bankers boxes on refrigerator shelving in my storage room. This was not a labor meant to spark joy. I was not moving into assisted living or otherwise downsizing. The intention is to throw things away, but the point is to remember, if only for an instant.

  ii

  “What’s in your wallet?” Haven’t you heard that question asked a thousand times in the commercials for a bank credit card? A few days after the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death, I came out of the storeroom with Dolores’s red wallet. Its cracked and peeling plastic skin was not doing well. Inside, the multiple pockets were as she left them, full. I found the white business card, blue type, all lower case, for Dolores’s clinical psychology practice. Laminated photos of Ben and Eden, our son and daughter, who were thirteen and eleven in 1997; they were half those ages in the photos. Also, a folded prescription from an ophthalmologist, and a baker’s dozen of other cards — from an interior designer, a PPO, a blood donor identification, a Museum of Art membership. Our son’s player’s card from Mavericks Basketball Camp. A membership card for the American Psychological Association. There were receipts from The Children’s Collection for four pairs of khaki pants, and for trousers and shorts paid to Circle Ten Council, Boy Scouts of America. A library card, a health club card, more photos of Ben and Eden, a business card of the Director, Hotel Metropole, Lisboa, Portugal. A driver’s license that expired “on birthday 1982.” Her mother’s driver’s license, which had expired in 1977. A folded note for Robaxisal – 2 tabs 4x/day and Utram, 1 every 4-6 hrs for pain.

  I did find a nugget in one of the pockets. It was a scrap torn out of a New Yorker from the Goings On About Town section. The Magnificent Andersons was playing July 11 and July 13 at the Museum of Modern Art on W. 53rd in Midtown. There was no year in the text that Dolores had torn out, but she had underlined the phrase Dolores Costello, the fragile blond beauty of the silent era. She told me once that her star-struck mother had named her after Dolores del Rio, but I may have misheard. She could have said Costello, that fragile blond beauty. The dates of the two screenings were coincidences almost mystical – July 11, which is Dolores’s birthday, and July 13, a day she died.

  And there was some actual gold in the wallet. In a tiny manila envelope no bigger than a business card, I found a gold cap from one of her teeth. Why she had been carrying it with her in her wallet, I have no idea.

  iii

  “Just scan it all, digitize it.”
  That’s what a friend told me over dinner. We were discussing this project of mine, to throw away the papers that Dolores left behind, and the records I saved from the months of her illness, and whatever else I had kept safe for the past twenty-five years. I remarked how difficult it was, both to keep it or to discard it.
  “Just scan it all.”
  My friend seemed to think my problem was the physical space the materials occupied. But the problem was metaphysical.
  He suggested I consider how much people a thousand years from now might learn if we archived our personal papers, even our store receipts, tax records, love letters. He said I should take a boxload to the public library, as a contribution to history.
  “They’ll take it,” he said, “That’s what they do.”
  The archiving of ephemera makes no sense to me. Instead, I want to believe the opposite. Don’t we need to have the sense to leave the room, and to take our things with us, if only to make room for others? When we hike in the wilderness, isn’t the rule to pack out whatever we bring in, to leave no trace? Why leave anything behind?

  Archive is an ugly word. Noun and verb, it is what’s kept and also the place of the keeping. It has an odor of the historical. It is covered in dust or preserved in amber. Yes, there are National Archives, which sounds important. But then again, my everyday email can also be archived.

  One side effect of the digital pill we have swallowed is that anything can be archived. We are no longer hampered by the limitations of shelf space. So our judgment of what to save is clouded by the Cloud. Is everything online now, or does it only seem that way? At one site, Archives of Our Own, we are invited to “store memories, create collections, and more.” That and more is a mysterious quantity, vague but limitless, like infinity plus one.

  What of mine, then, is not worth archiving?

  What qualifies to be thrown away?

  iv

  It’s a Saturday morning. I am opening up another banker’s box in the storage room, one of many stuffed with Dolores’s manila folders.

  Dolores kept manilla folders with five-year plans and official papers that had her signature on them above a typed Dolores Dyer, Ph.D. There were minutes from committee meetings and reports prepared for task forces. She had meetings, speaking engagements, symposia, programs and presentations. All of them came with flyers – handouts on a sheet of colored paper, sometimes a pamphlet. She presented at the YMCA Wednesday Noon Forum. Free of charge, brown baggers welcome, bring a friend. At a 5 th Annual Singles Fair in 1987, she provided an answer to a question that might have been equally puzzling to anyone married: How to Know And Get What You Want Sexually.

  Dolores favored Ziploc bags for keepsakes. Not the sandwich size, but the quart bags. I know we attended the symphony on May 14, 1994, because I found tickets stubs she had sealed in a Ziploc. And not just the tickets (Section B, Row B, Seat 23 and 24), but the program as well, and a newspaper clipping about the concert. On page 52 of the program, Louis Lane, the conductor that evening, stared at me from his black and white headshot. Dolores knew Louis, he was a friend, and she had asked him to sign on page 52. She must have then “shown the kids,” who would have been nine and eight, before bagging the program, because one of them had drawn a moustache on the photo.

  Speak, Dolores. What did you think the future wanted with your ticket stubs and concert program? You saved a Weekly TV Magazine from our local paper, also in a Ziploc. I tried to tune into your thoughts about the week beginning August 15, 1976. Did you keep the magazine for the faces of David Brinkley and John Chancellor on its cover? The story inside complains about “those familiar voices telling us what we already know.” Live coverage of the Republican National Convention was starting on Monday, on all three networks. Tuesday night, for those in need of a respite, the local ABC affiliate offered The Captain and Tennille, with special guest Art Carney.

  In a thousand years, maybe our descendants would in fact value some of this as evidence of the lives we led. The Ziploc bag might be a museum piece, labeled a disparaged byproduct from the age of fossil fuel.

  Catalogue raisonne is a more handsome phrase than archive. It belongs to the world of art and scholarship, indicating a list of an artist’s known works, the titles, dimensions, and what is called provenance. The International Foundation for Art Research even maintains a comprehensive list of catalogue raisonnes. A catalogue of the catalogues.

  Other than what I am writing now, there will be no catalog of what Dolores put in her manilla folders or her Ziploc bags. The flyers and the ticket stubs are not works of art. Still, I think there was a creative impulse behind all of it. Her art was conceptual, the notion that the events in her life were worth remembering.

  v

  The people we spend our lives with also have lives without us. That much is obvious. In addition to our daily separations, we have our separate pasts. With Dolores, that truth seemed even truer, because she was a generation older than I was. We had a twenty-two-year difference between us. Nonetheless, she facilitated the illusion that whatever preceded me didn’t matter. It was flattery, I suppose.

  So it was with surprise as I worked in the storage room that I found clues to the time before my time in her life. They were hidden in one of her folders, or sealed in her Ziploc bags or within one of the dozens of her discolored kraft envelopes. Photos, letters, a legal document, a discolored postcard.

  It was 2022, twenty-five years after Dolores had died of cancer. She still seemed to require further attention from me. Not only our life together, but her life apart.

  The first part of Dolores’s life fell in a chronological space between my parents’ childhood and my own. She had come into her teens during the 1940s. There was war in Europe and the Pacific, but if it left an impression, she never said a word about it. I found a kraft envelope with photos of her from those days, some with unidentified strangers in the picture. Black and whites, old times, cars that belonged to long-ago roads.

  I wonder who she thought she was saving these photos for. Perhaps if someone told us exactly when to do it, we would be able to dispose of all our keepsakes ourselves, presumably right before the end. Maybe the day before. We could do without them for that one last day of our lives.

  I knew that Dolores had been an only child. I knew, though with no clarity, that her father had disappeared early on. She had also told me that Frances, her mother, had shipped her off to Oklahoma to live with another family for months at a time. No details, and nothing more about the mystery of those days in Oklahoma. But at the bottom of a banker’s box I found a clue, a pale green numbered receipt that had the watermark of a financial instrument. It was time- stamped, June 14, 1942. Receipt For Remitter, to detach and hold. In handwritten script from the days when penmanship was prized, someone had filled the spaces alongside Sent to, Address, and For. A payment for Dolores Dyer’s board had been assigned to Mrs. Chester Halley, Minco, Oklahoma. It was possible, I suppose, that the Halleys were relatives, and that Frances had paid a relative for boarding her twelve-year-old daughter. I saw a handwritten end-of-term date, June 14, 1943. One year.

  It wasn’t too difficult to look up Mrs. Chester Halley in Minco, Oklahoma. The late Chester Halley and his wife, Lucile, both appeared in the online obituary of their older son, Wayne Baker Halley, who had graduated from Minco High School and went on from there to Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee and then to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. Wayne spent his life in the church. He served as a music minister in Baptist churches in Kentucky and Florida. He had been a charter member of The Centurymen, a male chorus of Ministers of Music, all Baptist, performing throughout the country.

  Wayne would have been 17 in 1942. Dolores might have had a crush on him. Just as likely, he on her. No mention in the obituary though about any of that. Or about Wayne going off to war, no landing at Normandy or fighting on one of the smaller islands in the Pacific. Among his survivors, a brother, James, was still alive and still in Minco. Eleven years younger than Wayne, James would have been six in the summer of 1942. Would he remember Dolores from eighty years before? She had her thirteenth birthday that summer in Minco; he might recall her blowing out the candles on a cake, if that had ever happened.

  I could call him and ask. It was 2022, and James is a wheat farmer in Minco, though the operations are now in his son’s hands. At 86, he would have time to talk, especially this year, when heavy rains have left the wheat harvest at a standstill.

  I could call James, but calling would be crazy.

  vi

  The blue plastic trunk, as big as a footlocker, had red side latches that snap into place. They had not been unlatched since whatever was inside had been put there. No treasure in this chest, but I did find clear plastic boxes of costume jewelry. And lots of clothing, all of which I recognized, even after so many years. The clothing was folded neatly, if a little compressed, the jackets and blouses still on hangers. I piled it in front of me on the concrete floor.

  My hours in the storage room off the garage had dwindled to only two or three a week. Like many projects that start full speed ahead, this one was losing momentum. My discarding required more energy than I had. And no matter how far I went, there was always further to go. There were days when I was convinced that the only way to get to the end of this journey was to abandon it. Also, it was August, and my windowless storage room sweltered, a sweatbox even with the garage door open.

  I told myself I had arrived at a new understanding. I wanted nothing more to do with yesterday, I was done with it. I would seize the day and let go of the day before.

  This was a feeling that came and went.

  For the search term hoarding, Google offers a People also ask feature on its results page. People ask what is the main cause of hoarding, is hoarding a mental illness, and how do you fix a hoarder. These questions that people also ask do not produce definitions of the disorder. And some of the online descriptions of hoarding are so gentle, hoarding hardly seems disorderly. For example, “People with hoarding disorder have persistent difficulty parting with possessions.” Who doesn’t have that difficulty, I might ask. “Attempts to part with possessions lead to decisions to save them.” So far, not so bad. But then the description fattens, with the appearance of the phrase “compulsive hoarding,” and that tips the scales. Make an appointment with a doctor, I was advised online, “if you often trip or fall over materials in your home.”

  My hoard of Dolores’s papers, photos, clothing, and other artifacts of her life, illness, and death was not actually in the house. The storage room off the garage was not underfoot. So, there was no risk of tripping. And since the room off the garage had a solid door, what is stored could also be kept out of sight. I had never minded the plastic trunks or the storage bins that are sized by the fluid gallons. Likewise the Hon two-drawer filing cabinets that were stacked one on top of the other. Or the twenty banker boxes, most on shiny refrigerator shelving, some on the concrete floor.

  Truth be told, more than twenty banker boxes.

  I suppose I didn’t want to throw things away because, you know, memories.
  “Life is a ball of yarn.”
  A therapist told me that, when we were talking about my difficulty throwing things away, since everything seems to be connected to everything else.
  “Life is a ball of yarn.”
  Fair enough, I thought, it’s a ball of yarn. But it’s also the cat playing with it. And sometimes it’s not yarn, it’s something thinner, a thread. And best not to pull on a loose one, because things can unravel.

  What did I need to get rid of now? Maybe the albums of photographs that were in eight horizontal drawers of file cabinets. Hundreds, thousands of them, from those days when we actually had our rolls of film developed and printed at the drugstore.

  I decided to never mind the photographs.

  Then there was the clothing from the blue plastic chest. I had already given some of Dolores’s clothing to the Genesis Women’s Shelter, along with her purses of all sizes and materials. Shoulder bags, clutches, plastic, leather, hide, suede, felt, straw. Some weeks ago, after going through a different plastic tub, I drove two full bags to the shelter, waiting in the lines of cars at the rear entrance; people were using charity as a way to clean their closets, and I suppose I was, too.

  The pile of clothing on the floor in front of me now was the clothing of the dead. Ferragamo boots, spikey purple heels, a mink hat from an era before mine, a knitted black shawl, a golden Ann Taylor jacket. There were blouses with pads sewn into their shoulders.

  It’s a phrase that can be taken two different ways, the clothing of the dead There is what was worn in life, but also what is worn in death, in place of a shroud. Dolores had certainly been clothed in her coffin, and I must have chosen what, but all these years later I don’t remember what. Maybe her night gown, for that longest night ahead. On the other hand, the clothing that I was discarding felt very much alive.

  It was like touching a shed skin. And astonishing, how the fragrance of it had remained behind. Could this be a hallucination? Olfactory hallucination is indeed a thing. It has technical synonyms and near synonyms, which is typical in medical science, where you cannot piss, you have to micturate. Phantosmia – hallucinating a smell – can be caused by a head injury or an upper respiratory infection, other trauma, brain tumors, or simply by aging. But phantosmia is smelling what isn’t there. Parosmia is similar, yet not exactly the same. It’s smelling something that is there, but doesn’t smell the way it should. As when you put your nose to garlic and smell rose or lilac. None of that was what I was experiencing in the storage room. When I buried my face in the familiar sweater of a woman long gone, it smelled as if she were still alive.

  A coat, a sweater, a blouse, a snood. Discarding the clothing of the dead feels far more personal than putting papers in the trash. It bordered on creepiness. In the pocket of one jacket, her eyeglasses, for eyes that no longer see. I put both jacket and glasses in a trash bag, one of the thicker, bigger bags that I use for the brown leaves in winter, after they fall from the red oaks and the sycamores in my yard. There were scarves and belts, one of the belts still with a store tag on it and never worn. Would the women who used the Genesis shelter ever wear one of these tops with shoulder pads? Maybe so. It was a fashion that had returned before, and might well again.

  The article of clothing I associate most with Dolores isn’t a blouse with shoulder pads, or a scarf, or a jacket. It is as the pillbox hat was to Jackie Kennedy, but it isn’t a hat, either. It’s her slippers. I found a pair in the storage room, still kept in its shoebox. The box was branded Jacques Levine on its pale purple top, Made in Spain. Dolores bought them over and over throughout the years of our marriage. You can find their current incarnation on jacqueslevine.com, where they are pretty much unchanged. According to jacqueslevine.com, Jacques Levine “has created fashion slippers for women of all ages” since 1936. The pair in the box may have had some rot, but it had not gone out of style. Time has not passed. Click on Classics at jacqueslevine.com, and there they are, seemingly the same, “pleasantly pleated for a classic look.” Leather upper, leather lining, suede sole, a wedge heel. White, and available for $138, tax included. According to Jacques Levine, the slippers are still made in Spain. Maybe today by the grandchildren of someone who made the pair in my storage room, or by a more recent immigrant from North Africa.

  I can tell myself there is absolutely no need for me to keep the white slippers. Or the pair of she-wore-them-all-the-time Ferragamo boots that were buried under some blouses. Or Dolores’s rarely worn spikey high heels in a clear plastic shoe box on a shelf in the storage room. I get it, they need to go. Still, it is a struggle. And I don’t really want an answer to the questions people also ask. I don’t want the answer applied to me.

  *

  “You shall have to clear out the old to make room for the new.” So God tells us in Leviticus, chapter 26, referring to grain, and promising both leftovers and an abundant harvest as a reward for obedience. A medieval commentator explained it this way, “The threshing floors will be full of the new grain, but the storehouses will still be so full of the old grain that you will have to move it somewhere else to put the new grain into them.” It makes sense. But what does it mean when you clear out the old and have nothing new to replace it? I had no new grain, so to speak, for the threshing floor of my storage room. All I was going to have would be empty boxes and shelves and trunks. Eventually I will hear the echoing call to move into smaller spaces that I could fill. I will move from this house to a condominium, from condominium to hospital room, and from there into my own permanent storage, a box in the ground. Maybe that was the underlying explanation for my desire to keep so many things, unseen in storage. Keeping them was keeping death at bay.

  Death is certainly a way of clearing space for something new.

  vii

  When I met Dolores in 1974, she was already Dolores Dyer, Ph.D. But there was an earlier time when Dr. Dyer was only one of many possibilities. She was a Catholic school girl at Our Lady of Victory in Fort Worth as a teenager. She was a pregnant high school dropout at fifteen, a newlywed for a year, a divorced single mother, a wife again for seventeen years, and then a thirty-three-year-old getting her high school diploma around the same time her child did. In 1966, with a B.A. in English from North Texas State, she was a thirty-seven-year-old grandmother. It seems that she was undecided about where to go from there, judging by the number of vocational interest tests she took in 1966 that I found in a manila folder in the storage room, inside a banker’s box crowded with her manila folders. There were four of them. Five, if I count the one she took twice.

  The Kuder Preference is meant to measure what an individual likes or dislikes and to compare it to the preferences of those in various careers. Dolores learned that her interests were shared by lab techs, meteorologists, and officers in the Marine Corp. The Strong Interest Inventory boasts that it’s backed by more than eighty years of research into how people with similar interests are employed. When Dolores took the Strong, it had only twenty years behind it and listed thirty-one occupations, starting with Artist and ending with Sister Teacher. Dolores took the Strong test twice, the second time using a form labeled “for men.” That form had nearly twice as many career options on it, including “advertising man.” The Profile Sheet for the California Psychological Inventory had 462 true or false questions that were meant to produce a description of the test-taker’s personality. There were scales to measure dominance, capacity for status, sociability, social presence, self-acceptance, independence, empathy, responsibility, socialization, self-control, good impression, communality sense of well-being, tolerance, achievement via independence, intellectual efficiency, psychological-mindedness, flexibility, and femininity – masculinity. Dolores scored above female norms, except for self-control and good impression. On the Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory, one of her highest scores was for Milk Wagon Driver.

  The Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory, meant “to help you decide if you are interested in the same things as men in various jobs,” was the most fascinating, mostly because Dolores preserved both the form with its questions and the actual filled-in circles of her answers. I sat on the floor of the storage room with its pages in my hand, as though I had found papyrus from Tutankhamun’s tomb.

  Like the impossible riddles the hero might be asked in a fairy tale, each question presented three potential tasks, and Dolores had to fill in a circle for two of them. An L circle for Like, a D circle for Dislike. For example, the first question offered these three options: a. Catch up on your letter writing; b. Try to fix a kitchen clock; c. Discuss your philosophy of life with someone. Dolores liked discussing her philosophy of life and disliked trying to fix a kitchen clock. For question two, she disliked typing a letter for a friend and liked taking a broken lock apart to see what was wrong with it. On question five, she liked watching an appendicitis operation and disliked attending a lecture. On question twelve she disliked making a model train and liked making a radio set. The third option of question twelve was repairing a clock again; Dolores seemed consistently opposed to working on devices that kept time. On question twenty-six, she was unwilling to conduct research on improving airplane design but happy to do an experiment to prove the earth is round. She preferring making drawings for a newspaper to checking stock in a storeroom, writing a novel rather than fixing a wristwatch. A course in biology was better than one in cost accounting, and she would learn to use a slide rule before she would varnish a floor, fix a doorbell instead of sorting mail, cook a meal rather than change a tire on an automobile. So it went, often if not always mysteriously. Why would she like replacing shorted wires but dislike reading gas meters? I suppose it’s hard to make sense of the choices on this test just as it is in life. On question fifty-seven, Dolores disliked repairing tor4n clothing but liked adjusting a carburetor. Her only other option on that question was polishing an automobile. This, too, is how life is. Sometimes bad choices are all you have, but choices must still be made.

  At first, she seemed to pick the more physically demanding choice, but by the time she got to question eighty-eight she may have been tired. By then, she preferred lifting weights to addressing envelopes. And by question one hundred and eleven, she even changed her mind and liked repairing a clock. But why did she think it would be better to re-upholster an old davenport than to work in a laundry or to develop better recipes for baked goods, which were the three options for question one hundred and thirty-nine? In total, there were one hundred and fifty-eight questions on the Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory in 1933, each with three choices – one to like, one to dislike, one to never mind.
  If only life were so simple.

  When Dolores took all these tests, she was already in her thirties. Maybe she thought she had no time to choose the wrong occupation and start over; she needed science, or something quantitative. I discarded the tests, and I tore up the manila folder, too.

  viii

  A memory: Dolores and I were at a party. It might have been New Year’s Eve, I don’t know what year, I don’t remember where. Someone at the party informed Dolores that a former husband, Sam Geeteh, had passed away.
  End of conversation.
  Dolores and Sam had been married for seventeen years. No matter. She didn’t ask any further questions, nothing about when, the cause, nothing. Whether Sam was alive or dead seemed to require no further attention from her.

  Going through photographs and letters Dolores saved in her manila folders reminded me that my knowledge of her was incomplete. About prior marriages or boyfriends, if any, I was in the dark. She had permitted me the presumption that none of it mattered, but all of us will allow ourselves our secrets and their mementos. Exhibit A, found in a faded kraft envelope in a manila folder in a banker’s box, a souvenir photo from Pappy’s Showland. Undated, but from the era when strip clubs used to be burlesque clubs, and an evening out that might have begun with Henny Youngman would conclude with a woman in costume getting nearly naked on a stage. Dolores was of that era.

  Pappy was Pappy Dolson, who opened Pappy’s Showland with Abe Weinstein at 500 W. Commerce in Oak Cliff across the river from downtown Dallas in 1946. It was a showy club, towering over the street. Henny Youngman did play at Pappy’s. Bob Hope did, too, along with the strippers, part of burlesque, as it was called. In the souvenir photo, two couples are sharing a table. The men wear suits and smoke cigarettes. And there’s Dolores, leaning into the man she’s with, her arms around his neck. She looks no older than a teenager and may not have been. Nobody looks all that happy. They seem somewhat resigned, caught by the camera, the men accepting that the Showland photographer is going to sell them an overpriced souvenir.

  Dolores’s keepsake was in a cardboard sleeve with Pappy’s logo on its cover. You can see the same sleeve and more or less the same photo – though of course the couples are different – posted by the nostalgic on Pinterest and Instagram. Abe Weinstein has his history as well. He appears in the Warren Commission report, though not because of any connection to Pappy or the Showroom. Weinstein also owned the Colony Club, two doors down from Jack Ruby’s seedier Carousel Club.

  *

  I found old postcards collected on long ago trips to Rome, Mexico City, and Las Vegas in the same Mead clasp envelope that had hidden the Showland souvenir. Also, two love letters. Or, one was a letter, the other was just a note. This note, signed Joe on a blue prescription pad, came from the offices of Drs. Rothschild & Somer, Diagnosis and Internal Medicine – Diseases of the Heart. “Darling,” Dr. Rothchild wrote on the blank line after For. He then filled in the space next to Rx: “Just a quick line – I am always under pressure around here. I hope you have some use for the enclosed odds & ends. They are terribly costly!” Dr. Rothchild had turned his prescription pad into the equivalent of a gift card.

  Who was this Dr. Rothschild who specialized in diseases of the heart? The waters of the past are murky at best, but when I type and click, his obituary rises to the surface: Joseph Eli Rothschild, 1912 – 1978. Son of Abram, or Abrasha, born in 1882 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Married to Miriam Rothschild (born Zesmer in 1916). Four children.

  Dolores had kept a note from a doctor. The letter she had saved, in an envelope postmarked Australia, was more effusive. And its two pages must have been part of some even longer message, because they began, “But now, after 2 hours on this letter, I must go.” It then went on. It mentioned a wife, five children, and the need to “overcome all the practical problems.” It declared, “I love you. I need you. If you come here, I won’t let you go back.” The sign off also had drama. “Please love me, Peter.” This Peter had sent his mix of pleading and demanding via airmail to Miss Dolores Dyer in 1972. Fifty years later, I put his letter back in its envelope and noticed the P.O. Box return address. If Peter in Australia was using a P.O. Box to correspond with Dolores, that might have been his solution to one of the practical problems of having a wife and five children.

  So Dolores had or seemed to have had affairs, in two cases with men already married. One in the neighborhood and one in a different hemisphere. I wonder, is it easier sometimes to unravel the mysteries of the dead than of the living, since you are free to rummage in their past and come to conclusions, and the object of your inquiry has no ability either to correct you or to misdirect you? It’s all supposition, I suppose.

  It’s also a cliche, the discovery of love letters after the deaths of sender or receiver. It’s a human interest story and always good for a popular feature. “She found long-lost love letters hidden in her attic…” ( Washington Post). “Vancouver man finds 80-year-old love letter in wall” (Globalnews.ca). “Found! A 200-year-old love letter” (Glamour). And there are also the variant stories, which are mostly about a lover letter that finally reaches its destination. “A love letter finds its recipient after 72 years…” (cnn.com). “Love letter lost for years returned to 90-year- old widow.” (ABC7.com).

  A related genre, the advice in magazines, blogs, social forums, and elsewhere about what to do with such letters. “Should We Keep Old Love Letters?” Natalie Perez-Gonzalez provides guidance in her blog. Another teasing headline, this one on quora.com: “I found a hidden box of love letters written to my wife before…” People weighed in on the hidden box. From the seventeen responses, only six voted for “put the box back in the closet.”

  *

  Dolores saved two other letters the manila folder. When the Elvis Presley stamp came out in 1993, she mailed letters to our own address – actually, she sealed two empty envelopes, there were no letters – one addressed to our daughter and one to our son,. Each of the envelopes bore an Elvis stamp, cancelled and postmarked January 8, which was the date it was released after the first day of issue ceremonies at Graceland. Dolores may have thought it would become a collectible. It turns out, the Elvis stamp isn’t rare. In fact, Elvis is the top selling commemorative postage stamp “of all time” according to the U.S. Postal Service. As an actual stamp, it’s worth the twenty-nine-cents face value. If you try selling it on Ebay, it’s worth even less than face value, despite its depiction of the famous face of Elvis, tilting toward a microphone. In the same folder, she also preserved a receipt that said “Bear.” It was from Art Restoration, a business that repaired broken Wedgewood vases or Lladro figurines. “Brown Teddy Bear,” the receipt said. The specific job: “Reconstruct nose – may not match surface exactly.” Our son had a favorite stuffed animal. Its repair must have been urgent, since a five- dollar rush charge was added to the twenty-dollar estimate.

  Elvis envelopes, Bear receipt, Dr. Rothchild’s prescription pad note and the pages from Peter’s letter—it all went into the trash.

  ix

  Nothing in the room off my garage had the breath of life, but much of it seemed nonetheless to have a life of its own. It resisted its own destruction. In this regard it displayed some of the characteristics of those malevolent dolls in a horror movie. When the inanimate has a will, it’s terrifying; or, at the least, creepy. Take the bankers boxes for example. There was nothing of use in them, mostly papers in manila folders. So where was my sense coming from that I was losing something by emptying them? The boxes were a weight. Perhaps I was afraid some part of me would float away without them.

  I took my time with it. It was an uncomfortable task, even as the swelter of August turned into fall weather, when it seemed even more unreasonable to be buried inside a storage room. I would work at it for an hour and then take refuge in the backyard. Outside, resting on the cushion of a chaise, I might look up into the outstretched arms of a red oak tree. I could see birds half hidden in the branches. What did these birds possess? What did the squirrels, who chased each other around the tree trunk? Were they holding on to nothing because they had no ability to do so, or because they had more understanding, or more faith, or whatever the equivalent might be, for birds and squirrels?

  In October I stopped completely. It was too nice outside to return to boxes and bins that had already waited twenty-five years and could wait a little longer. The task had become like many other projects. It seemed necessary, but it was a fragile necessity. Stop for a while, and the obligation loosens, the determination softens. There’s always an arbitrariness in what I decide to do. It’s easy to lose purpose, which becomes a proof of purposelessness.

  The year turned. I returned to the task. I brought two manila folders into the house and placed them on the dining room table. Both were stuffed with papers, pages of email correspondence from a “colon cancer discussion list,” print outs of my research on diets and treatments, communications with doctors, and progress reports from the five months after the initial diagnosis. These folders looked their age; they were brown around the edges and spotted on the covers.

  *

  Found in the first folder: a sheet of plastic, the size of standard paper. It showed four skeletal images, right and left anterior, left and right posterior, taken at Baylor University Medical Center on February 18, 1997, at 10:47 in the morning. Dyer Dolores, code letters, and, at the bottom, “output” produced at 12:32:59 by a Polaroid Helios Laser System. These pictures may be the ones that come closest to depicting what the body, formerly Dolores’s, looks like today in its place at the cemetery on Howell Street. She had been in a tube for the scan. The two images on the left, top and bottom, showed an outline of her flesh. She looked heavier than I remembered, certainly fleshier than she would be five months later. On the right, two images that were skeletal, almost ghostly. Her spine, which seemed to be curving to the left, was pictured from the back, arching up to her skull.

  Time has tentacles, the years touching backwards and forwards as well. If only this 1997 diagnostic had been done years earlier. It could have been. Polaroid had shipped its first Helios dry processing laser in 1993. In 1999, it sold its Helios imaging system business “for an undisclosed price” to another company, which shut it down.

  *

  Those months of 1997 from the middle of February to the middle of July were full of science. The two manila folders were full of it as well.

  I found a physician’s progress report, the faxed copy so faded it could hardly be read. And an endoscopy report from February 1997, faxed and faded. And then the February report from the operation, separate from the initial colonoscopy that had produced the initial diagnosis of colon cancer, and less hopeful. Preoperative diagnosis: Abdominal pain, left ovarian cyst, and an obstructing mid transverse colon cancer. Postoperative diagnosis: left ovarian cyst, endometriosis of the uterus, intra-abdominal pelvic adhesions and obstructing mid transverse colon cancer with metastatic disease to the mesentery, retroperitoneum, going up to the pancreatic area.

  It went on to name components of the operation, using language that carries its own kind of dread: laparotomy, lysis of adhesions, removal of left tube and ovary, extended right colectomy and mobilizations of the splenic flexure with an ileotransverse colic anastomosis. It named the surgeon and the assistant. I paused over the names. The anesthesiologist was Sigurdur S. Sigurdson, MD. Sigurdur Sigurdson was someone’s little boy, all grown up now, a doctor. I read the three-page, single-spaced description of Findings and Technique: “intubated…Foley catheter…abdomen and vagina and perianal and perirectal area prepped with iodine…knife went through…it was felt we would be completely unable to resect all these, because it was wrapping completely around the superior hemorrhoidal vessels and going up into the pancreatic areas as well…Bookwalter retractor…the mesentery was closed…good anastomosis was noted….”

  On it went, in a fog of precision:

  “…the knife went through the subcu as well as most of the fascia. Some of the bleeders were then coagulated with electrocautery and then entered into the abdominal cavity…. Right at the mid transverse colon was a large long cancer through the wall. Also, it was down the root of the mesentery, going along the middle colic vessels, down to the superior hemorrhoidal vessels as well and then going retroperitoneally all the way up to the pancreas. There was a large area of conglomerate of metastatic disease in this area, beginning to look like lymph nodes. If it was lymph nodes, it was totally taken over by cancer. It was felt we would be completely unable to resect all these…”

  The use of “felt” seemed off to me.
  Departments of Radiology and Medical Imaging had their say. The heart size was normal. The lungs were clear. The bones were intact. The Department of Pathology reported. There was chemistry, parasitology, virology, hematology, all the math of the dying body, within the normal ranges or outside them. It was as though the impersonal had been multiplied by the indifferent to produce the inevitable.

  After Dolores received them, I faxed the pages of reports to two doctors who were at UT Southwestern. My note is on the fax cover page: “Sending you this information in hopes you will be available for a consultation. Referred to you by Melanie Cobb.” Melanie was Ian’s mother. Ian Cobb was one of our son’s best friends, both of them odd boys, bullied by classmates at the middle school they attended for children with “learning differences.” I always thought Melanie was odd herself. But she was also a scientist, a biochemist of some distinction and on the faculty at UT Southwestern.

  I don’t remember any subsequent consultation though and found no paper record of one. it’s possible the facts didn’t merit one.

  *

  In March, Dolores began chemotherapy. She was passed from the surgeon to the oncologist and also to a pain specialist. Dolores had never used my last name, but I notice that on notes to Dr. Vera, the pain doctor, she presented herself as Dolores Dyer Perkins. A xerox of a handwritten note was in the folder. “I have not had to use the Dilaudid prescribed on Saturday, along with Lortab #10,” she wrote to Dr. Vera. “I try to stay a little ahead of the pain with the Lortab #10s. Consistently the pain is greater at night. I started the chemotherapy, 5 Fluorouracil Leucovorin, this Monday.”

  We collected information on the chemicals. We read all the “drug sheets” as though they were prophetic scripture. From the sheet on Fluorouracil – Adrucil, or 5-FU: “Fluorouracil disrupts the growth of cancer cells, which are then destroyed.” Fluorouracil belonged to the group of drugs known as antimetabolites. Lots of side effects, some more common, some less. “Leucovorin may be given to stop the action of Methotrexate or to increase the effects of 5- Flourouracil.” On the drug sheets, leucovoin was sometimes called folinic acid. Everything had its name, its market name, and even a nickname.

  Under the umbrella of a desk lamp and in the glow of a screen, I looked up the locations of clinical trials for “colon malignancies” around the country. That were nine in Texas that February. Dolores was bedridden after her initial surgery, so travel other than local for chemotherapy would not have been easy, and there seemed to be no good alternatives anyway. Still, I printed out the information. Twenty-five years later I was finally getting around to discarding it.

  I threw out the abstract “Altered Metabolism and Mortality in Patients with Colon Cancer Receiving Chemotherapy,” from the American Journal of the Medical Sciences. The Center for Alternative Medicine Research in Cancer at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center had something appealing enough to send to my printer; it was probably the word “Alternative.” So did an article about hydrazine sulfate. “Since hydrazine sulfate provides relief of a spectrum of cancer symptoms…” I wrote down the source on my print out: Syracuse Cancer Research, Dr. Joseph Gold, 600 East Genesee St. Syracuse, NY 13202.

  The manila folder was full of such alternatives, all roads not taken. The “selenium summary” began with the reassurance that selenium had been used for treating cancers as far back as the 1940s. Nonetheless, the best it could report after a “review of the literature” was that selenium “may play a role.” Pages were written in the language of a country so foreign no tourist would ever be able to learn it; antineoplastons, peptides, amino acid derivatives, and carboxylic acids were on the vocabulary list. A Dr. Burzynski was treating “only those patients that can be enrolled in protocols and clinical trials” after an initial deposit of $6,000, which was required before consultation, followed by twelve monthly deposits of $1,000 “for miscellaneous supplies.”

  My print out from Infoseek, one of the rivals for Google’s market in 1997, reminded me that I had searched for thymic protein A. Among the leads on its results page: “Pig skin graft on a mouse, made tolerant through a thymic transplant.”

  Drug & Market Development listed seven drugs under New Approaches in the Treatment of Advanced Colorectal Cancer. Its promising slogan: “Bridging the gap between R&D and marketing in the pharmaceutical industry.” But Dolores had already agreed to a clinical trial of 5-Fluorouracil with Dr. Pippin and Texas Oncology. And fluorouracil was on the New Approaches list anyway. I wondered about the other six on the list — Irinotecan, Marimastat, Oxaliplatin, Raltitrexed, Tegafur, and Zidovudine. Three paragraphs in the New Approaches text reported on a single 5-Flurorouracil study with 14 patients. “In the 14 patients, all of whom were evaluable, the overall objective response rate was 36%, with one complete response and four partial responses. Median duration of response was nine months and median survival was 16 months, with a one-year survival rate of 64%. To date, six patients have died.” It was not a ringing endorsement.

  The truth of it is, the folder was full of dead ends. After the discovery of her stage four colon cancer, the most reasonably optimistic expectation that Dolores had was for another five years—to be, as her surgeon Dr. Jacobson had put it when he came to visit her in recovery at the hospital after the initial surgery, “at the far end of the bell curve.” That five-year hope turned out to be five months. The first month bedridden after a surgery, and the last month bedridden from increases in lorazepam and morphine.

  x

  As the stream of science became a trickle, it emptied into a cesspool of miracle cures and promotions that I also collected. Dr. Julian Whitaker’s Health & Healing newsletter informed me that Dr. Burzynski’s Trial Is A Farce. Dr. Burzynski had legal troubles, either for treating patients with “antineoplastons” or perhaps for his business practices. Health & Healing was sticking up for him. The screamer on the back cover of the newsletter hinted that the trial was part of a conspiracy: Antineoplastons, and Why the Cancer Industry is Threatened.

  I don’t know how I got on the Whitaker list, but I know why. When there are no realistic alternatives, fantasies are appealing. The envelopes with Whitaker’s newsletters arrived with my name printed on the mailing label; they were not addressed to “resident”. Same with a sales sheet from Bishop Enterprises, BeHealthy-USA, which was pitching the One Life formula. Like all good direct marketing, it used the word free and made a very special offer. Thanks to “a generous benefactor” who had provided funding, new customers could receive their first bottle of the One Life formula absolutely free (“one per family”). Another letter promoting “the all- natural healing secrets of Dr. David Williams” had its own “fantastic deal” (12 monthly issues of the newsletter at $39.95, marked down from $69.95); if this wasn’t good enough, then its “best deal” was even better ($79.95 for 24 monthly issues, marked down from $139.95). I had circled the headline from Dr. David Williams: “The safe and proven all-natural cancer cure from the ocean.” His letter was about shark cartilage. I have no idea what cartilage is made of, or what its medicinal properties are, or how much of it the average shark has. As I discarded these pages, I was casting away sin, if only the sin of false hope and foolishness.

  *

  Cancer was caused by parasites according to an article published by Sterling Rose Press, P.O. Box 14331, Berkeley CA. The article was an interview with Hulda Clark, author of The Cure for All Cancers. Hulda Clark had found “the combination of herbs that will kill all the parasite stages.” That was the critical challenge, killing every one of the stages. “Clinically,” according to Hulda Clark, “drugs don’t do that. Eggs need one kind of treatment and the larvae need another kind. Also, you need three herbs together to kill all the different stages.”

  And so on. I had indeed printed out and saved pages of this interview, including excerpts from The Cure for All Cancers, which was for sale. Here they were, in the manila folder.

  One paragraph had the bold title You May Not Have Time:

  “You may not have time to read this entire book first if you have cancer and are scheduled for surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment. You may wish to skip the first pages which describe how a parasite and a solvent cause cancer to develop. Go directly to the instructions on eliminating the parasite with herbs (Cancer Curing Recipe, page 19) or with electricity (Zapping Parasites, page 30). Using the herbal recipe along with the zapper is best. It only takes days to be cured of cancer regardless of the type you have. It does not matter how far progressed the cancer is—you can still stop it immediately.”

  With their names of herbs and specific procedures, they pages read like incantations out of Shakespeare, either from the witches in MacBeth, or Prospero on his magic island:

  “Take the green hull surrounding the nut of the black walnut tree…a tincture extracted using grain alcohol, not the ordinary extract, which uses water. While waiting for it to arrive, get the two other herbs ready: wormwood and cloves.”

  Hulda Clark insisted that wormwood was a necessity. “The amount you need to cure a cancer is very small, yet you cannot do without it.”

  And the cure?

  “One 30 cc bottle of pale green Black Walnut Hull Tincture Extra Strength. One bottle of wormwood capsules, or a cup of Artemisia leaves gathered from a friendly neighbor’s shrub. One bottle of freshly ground cloves. These are the essential herbs you must have to cure your cancer.”

  There were a few other ingredients that might also be used “to kill the intestinal fluke” — red clover blossoms, pau d’arco, laetrile, and wheat grass juice. Ornithine, Hulda Clark wrote, “improves the recipe.” And she cautioned that the parasite produces a lot of ammonia as its waste product, and this was toxic, “especially to the brain.”

  Yes, there is the futility or clinging to hope, but also the impossibility of doing otherwise. This is some of what I did when I was helpless but wanted to help anyway. I stayed up late under a circle of lamplight reading about the hulls of walnuts and shark cartilage and selenium. Ultimately, for no reason – or, for the same reason that Dolores began taking lorazepam, which was to control the anxiety that is one of the side effects of being alive.

  Finished with the two manila folders I had brought into the house, I decided to look into Hulda Clark. I wondered what had she had been up to these past twenty-five years? It was easy enough to find her at drclarkstore.com. That’s the exclusive store for her cleanses. The Cure for All Cancers had been published in 1993. After that, Hulda Clark went one better and published The Cure for All Diseases. On Wikipedia, Dr. Clark is a Canadian naturopath, author and practitioner of alternative medicine, who claimed that all human disease was related to parasitic infection and asserted that she knew how to cure cancer by “zapping” it with an electrical device that she marketed. Wikipedia also noted the string of lawsuits and an eventual action by the Federal Trade Commission, after which Dr. Clark relocated to Tijuana, where she ran a nutrition clinic. Not that it’s a disproof of anything, but Dr. Clark died in 2009, in Chula Vista, California. The cause of death? Cancer.

  xi

  Dolores had no interest in wormwood or intestinal flukes. Instead, she spent time during March and April making notes on the remodeling project that had been going on intermittently at our home. She remained in the day to day, on both the work of managing her physical discomfort and participating, as much as possible, in the life of the household. She must have known she was going to die, but didn’t consider this a reason to not go about everyday life. This may have been courage; it could have been she didn’t know what else to do.

  Her notes about the remodeling were in another manila folder, in a different bankers box. They were detailed. She had seven separate comments for the contractor on one of the bathrooms. For example, Switches for heat lamp and shower and light will be above sink on right as enter bathroom, one for light above sink, second for light above shower, third for heat lamp. And, Shower to have two tile walls and two glass walls, with opening at top of door for air.” And, A band of green around the tile walls of shower – four tiles high – the top is at five feet from the floor.

  She didn’t neglect the kitchen, either, or the room behind the garage, which she labeled the cabana, following our architect’s usage. Its woodwork would be terra cotta colored, its walls a blue #753, the trim color for baseboards in the adjacent bathroom would be #035, with white rods for curtains. She was specific.

  Living or dying, she was making plans, if only for others.

  On April 1, 1997, Dolores wrote three pages of remodeling notes I was to fax to the architect. Nick, she wrote, check out these please.
  What followed were numbered handwritten comments for various areas of the house – Family Room – Bar – Cabana – Bath. Each section started over with a new number one. At the end of the areas by name, a category called Leftover, with a single, unnumbered comment: That ironing board!!

  Dolores concluded page three saying that she’ll fax anything else she thinks of later.

  Later? When could that be?

  I found a faxed sheet with an architectural plan. The faxed plan was a blur, but her comments in colored marker are clear. Be sure light good for reading over couches. 2 flush medicine cabinets with mirror doors. Subzero, decent size sink with disposal – hot water dispenser.Check boxes of tile in the garage. She offered such wisdom as watch height of faucet – too high splashes over counter. She was into it.

  Under the heading Bar, this comment:

  Bookshelf to left by TV – need doors or part doors – do not want to look at shelves of videos on display. Then, Add door into garage – plan opening carefully & door must be tight against bugs and cold or hot air.

  There were drawings labeled Now and one labeled Better, as she detailed what she wanted as a work surface in an office.

  All this in April, after surgery and chemotherapy with no good result; and, I thought, after the vanishing of any realistic hope as well. Dolores would be dead a hundred days after these written comments. So the effort was either wishful thinking on her part, or caretaking; delusion, or the healthy behavior any of us might engage in if we are unwilling to stop living as long as we are alive. Given that all of us are under a sentence of death, perhaps we are all mirroring her behavior.

  Dolores’s notes to the interior designer were equally detailed. They covered such issues as whether or not there should be a small cabinet above the microwave, how far the microwave might stick out, and whether appliance surfaces should be brushed aluminum, polished, or black.

  She picked the pulls on cabinet drawers, chose wall colors, and decided on fabric for reupholstering a sofa. She wrote out a furniture list, with budget numbers alongside couches, chairs, benches, a console, a table, a buffet, lamps, the carpet upstairs, and a rug under a dining room table.

  She kept tear outs from architectural magazines, those publications where the full page photograph is opposite two additional color photos that are stacked and separated by a double caption: ABOVE: “Splashes of indigo play off the soft, sandy background colors and evoke the impressive ocean views,” says Hallberg of the master bedroom. On the side table, left, is a Persian bowl from Quatrain. BELOW: Adding tranquility to the center courtyard is a reflecting pond filled with koi.

  It’s a vision of paradise, and perhaps a distraction, which is what imaginings of Paradise have always been.

  A get well soon drawing by our eleven-year-old daughter had somehow found its way into the same folder. Whatever Eden made of her mother’s illness during those months, this was as close as she got to expressing it out loud.

  *

  It isn’t true that the end of life necessarily prompts a person to think about eternity, or higher matters. How high the band of green tile would be in our shower seemed to be as far as Dolores needed to go. She did have friends who worried for her, and told her so, since she had converted to Judaism for my sake and was less connected to Christianity than she might have been in two of her prior lives, first as a Catholic schoolgirl and later an Episcopal housewife.

  Early on, her responses to their “what about eternity” fears were of the “it’s above my paygrade” variety. One of those girlfriends came to visit Dolores in late June, when Dolores was bedridden again. She encouraged Dolores to pray. She was concerned for her afterlife, because Dolores did not know Jesus.
  “Do you believe in God?” she asked. “Do you believe God can do anything?” She was sitting on the side of the bed, holding Dolores’s hand.
  Dolores changed the subject. She may have been following the philosopher’s advice – whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. Just as likely, knew she wasn’t going to survive colon cancer and understood that thoughts about life after death would be of no practical use. I never discussed it with her. Her voice was never like an echo from someone faraway, further up the mountain. All of our conversations were down to earth, some literally so. After the initial surgery, when she was stuck in bed recovering, and well before starting any clinical trial, she asked me to secure a burial spot for her at a cemetery on Howell Street. She also requested that I purchase my own spot next to hers, which I did.
  “Show me what it will look like,” she asked
  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I can only show what it looks like now.”
  I went to the cemetery and took pictures of the ground.

  xii

  Dolores was delighted to be Dr. Dyer. Surely I could not throw out her Doctor of Philosophy diploma, which she had professionally framed, encasing it in a fat lucite rectangle. Ditto her identically framed “license to practice” from the Texas State Board of Examiners, and the fifteen-inch square of needlepoint, framed the same way, all three of them in a pile on the storage room floor.

  This needlepoint keepsake was nothing institutional. Someone had done a lot of work stitching or needlepointing or embroidering or whatever it was. They had stitched the name of her business on a homey sign: Dr. Dolores Dyer, Psychologist. Below that, four other embroidered images that represented the tools of her trade. A stack of books with the word Freud on one of the spines. A maze that a rat might have run. Two circle faces, one smiling, one frowning. Last, a yellow telephone and a Kleenex box with tissue protruding from it. Someone had done a lot of work. Whether this was a gift or Dolores had commissioned it, I don’t know. It was a keepsake I have no reason to keep. I should discard it. But Like Bartleby, I would prefer not to. Throwing it out is one of those decisions that will eventually be made, but not now, and probably never, at least by me.

  *

  Dolores’s doctoral dissertation, one hundred and eighty-four pages, waited its turn on a shelf in the storage room. It was a hardbound volume. It was even harder to imagine why anyone would ever want to read it again. Family Interaction Research: A Methodological Study Utilizing The Family Interaction Q-Sort has already had its fifty-year shelf life. The five members of the Committee that approved and signed it in 1971 were its only fit audience. It’s possible that David S. Buell had read it as well. He was the “very special person” named on the dedication page, which was otherwise blank.

  I looked through some of the dissertation. It began with an overview. “The emphasis in psychology and psychiatry has been shifting from the study of the individual to the story of processes in family systems, in which the individual’s attitudes and behaviors are learned.” So, shifting from individuals and relying more on the direct observation of families – in a way, the approach of the Kardashians. Dolores’s dissertation presented a “measuring device” for this new research: The Family Interaction Q-Sort. It was a name with all the resonance of the Flux Capacitor in the Back to the Future movies.

  In her dissertation, Appendix C was the actual Q-Sort tool. There are 113 statements that an observer is to use, ranking each statement in the order of how perfectly it describes the family being observed. They went from Item 1, Family is generally relaxed to Item 113, Conflicts are openly discussed. There are stops along the way at Item 13, Family mood is fundamentally hostile; 71, Child is the most seductive person in the family; 98, Nobody recognizes or interacts with anyone else; 109, Family is normal; and 110, Family is psychotic. Two therapists had been asked to observe twelve families and evaluate them, using the Q-Sort statements. For her thesis, Dolores reported the results in Appendix D: Ranking of Items from Most Descriptive to Least Descriptive for the Twelve Families as Determined by the Q-Sorts of the Two Criterion Judges. The final report was an aggregated result for all twelve families.

  So, what ranked number one overall? It was Item 23, Family is confused.

  That certainly works as a description of family life after Dolores’s death. I flipped through a few other pages in her dissertation, glancing at the charts. By the time I saw the words Kendall’s tau, I had seen enough . The dissertation went into the trash. There I was, in an ocean of paper in the storage room off the garage; the only way to reach the shore was to keep on swimming. To keep reading would only be treading water; it would lead nowhere, other than to fatigue.

  *

  Did Dolores ever use the Q-Sort tool to describe our own interactions? No. That said, there was plenty of observation, testing and measurement to be found in her manila folders. Most often, our son was the subject.

  Our two children, adopted at birth one year apart, were as unalike as two different species. Our daughter was that clever, early reader, an articulate little monkey who won the hearts of every adult. Our son was otherwise. Dolores saved the four-page Burks’ Behavior Rating Scales that Cynthia and Stacey, the two teachers in his pre-kindergarten class, had filled out to provide us a report. I pulled it from one of the bankers boxes. Burks’ Behavior Rating Scales provides 105 “descriptive statements” and ratings from one to five. One means that the teacher has not noticed the behavior at all. Five means the behavior was noticed “to a very large degree.” For the descriptive statement Is overobedient, both teachers gave it a one. They had not noticed this behavior at all. Both wrote a five in the boxes beside the descriptive statements Follows directions poorly, Cannot finish what he is doing, Is easily distracted, Lacks continuity of effort, Is impulsive, Shows explosive and unpredictable behavior, Hits or pushes others, Shows little respect for authority, Displays a don’t care attitude, Attention span not increased by punishment or reward, Is rebellious if disciplined, Deliberately puts himself in position of being reprimanded, Will not take suggestions from other, and Does not try to make friends by acting like other children. Also getting a five: Drawings and paintings are messy. There were descriptive statements that only on their way to a five. Emotional reactions wrong (laugh when should be sad, etc.). Cynthia rated this a three, which meant she “noticed the behavior to a considerable degree.” Stacey gave it a four. She had “noticed the behavior to a large degree.” Appears unhappy was noticed “to a slight degree.” Our son was four-and-a-half at the time. The following year he went to a school that specialized in children with “learning differences.”

  Our daughter’s earliest reports were typically songs of praise. Her indifference to pleasing anyone in authority came later. Her teacher evaluations wavered then, between expressions of encouragement and disappointment.

  In the new school Ben attended, he was “working on skills for slowing down, organizing his materials and working independently.” He “especially enjoys music.” He was “learning to use his language in an appropriate social manner. He has shown improvement in this area. We will continue to reinforce appropriate behavior.”

  Thank you, Miss Banker.

  Dolores filled pages of her own with notes on learning differences, poorly coordinated infants, and hyperactive and accident-prone toddlers. The curves of her handwriting curtsied down the sheets of paper. She may have been taking notes from a lecture – the phrases were full of abbreviations – Can get into probs of trust May interact poorly w/ peers Probs w/being like dad – can’t do sports or what daddy wants…

  She was either continuing her education in order to be more valuable in her therapy practice or was looking for insight into the behavior at home. It was probably the latter, since Dolores didn’t see children in her practice.

  We did test and retest Ben in subsequent years. Not looking for signs, because we could see those ourselves, but for diagnoses. Nothing however was all that clear. At seven years eight months, he was tested before admission to another school. He was “very cooperative.” The letter from the school’s educational diagnostician reports that he “exhibited good concentration.” His evaluations included the vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Beery’s Development Test of Visual-Motor Integration, selected subtests of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistics Abilities, the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery, motor subtests of the Santa Clara Inventory, and other perceptual exercises, auditory discrimination checks, recognitions of colors and shapes and numbers and letters, sequencing tasks, and tasks involving dictation. There were “some issues,” but in the Knowledge Cluster he scored in the 98% percentile for grade level. A summary conclusion: “He appears to be a very nice young man who would profit from our educational program.” Deal closed. In all of this, what Ben did have going for him was Dolores’s love. That had been tested and retested, too, and he always scored in the highest percentile.

  Dolores also saved the records of interviews that Ben sat through in the offices of therapists and educational specialists when he was six years old. There were handwritten interpretations of his scores by professionals. Measures of this and that, in nine by twelve envelopes. All of them needed to be tossed, finding it would do nobody any good.

  *

  In one of Ann Patchett’s essays she tells the story of The Nightstand. In it she receives a call on her birthday from a young man who has bought a nightstand at an estate sale and found in its drawer some of the writer’s memorabilia, including an award from the Veterans of Foreign Wars for an essay she wrote in high school. Ann Patchett is disinterested. She tells the caller he can throw the papers away. “Had I found them in my own nightstand,” she writes, “that’s what I would have done.”

  It is possible that this story is related to another of her essays. She had never wanted children and had none, as she explains in There Are No Children Here. It could be that this lack of interest in children and their future goes well with a disinterest in the past. Many of the things Dolores saved had perhaps been saved for Ben and Eden. Obviously, their baby clothes, their toys. But also family photos, all the photos, hundreds of them, that no one ever looked at. Even if these children, now approaching forty, claim they can no longer remember their mother, or barely can, here in the storage room were the reassuring messages of her love for them on Valentines and birthday cards she had preserved

  Their “art work” and earliest school work took up two entire boxes. This oeuvre started in pre- school, with stick figures and lollipop trees, then progressed to fill-in-the-blank quizzes and maps with Africa or the thirteen colonies colored in. The holidays were over-represented, both secular and from Sunday school. Thanksgiving had its turkey on craft paper, the feathers made with a handprint. Valentine’s Day hearts were cut out and pasted. There were rainbows of construction paper. I threw them out. Also, the portraits of heroes and villains equally. Mario from Nintendo appeared on page after page of our son’s lined notebook, along with ninjas, Batman, and characters that belonged to his more obscure personal mythology. Our daughter’s icons were odder and alien, circles with antennae, and cockroaches from outer space. Lots of the drawings seemed to be little more than scribbles. They had been turned in without embarrassment to first and second grade teachers, who then allowed the work to come home for further praise.

  It was time to clear all these things out. It was past time, for boxes that were packed with homework assignments, all of which Dolores kept. These children aren’t in school any longer. They aren’t at home either.

  Then there were the stacks of monthly planners that Dolores had maintained, the squares of the days filled in with appointments, playdates, lessons, after school soccer, piano lessons, teachers’ phone numbers and names.

  Useful reminders once, no use now.

  Reading the Ann Patchett essay How To Practice, which appeared first in The New Yorker and is now neatly stored in These Precious Days, a book of her selected essays, I am struck by how sunny and untroubled it is, how mature she is, how healthy. The essay deals with paring down, discarding, or giving away household and other items that she has no use for. In a word, decluttering, though most of her things are in closets or within drawers, and she is in no danger of stumbling over them. It might also bespeak an untroubled life, or a writer prioritizing the pleasures of craft and the comfort of her readers over the truth, which is that objects from our past are often kept, and kept out of sight, because they are soaked from their surface down with our feelings. We may even have put some of our sins on them, as though they were the goat in ancient Jerusalem, and we had not quite yet found the time or the resolve to send them into the wilderness to die.

  xiii

  In 1997, years before there was Facebook, the Colon Cancer Discussion List was an online forum. It offered the wisdom of strangers, though their names became familiar over the months of Dolores’s illness. Night after night, I eavesdropped on Angel Howse, Allison McDermott, Nurse Pam, Dick Theriaque, Carleton Birch, Chistopher Carfi, and dozens of others. They were both cast members and people I almost knew. Marshall Kragan rarely commented. He was the list manager. I would print out the discusssions that seemed relevant. And so I collected hundreds of pages of guidance, pleas for help, opinions, and descriptions of treatments. Most of these conversations had sober personalities, but the list itself identified its virtual location as [email protected]. Maelstrom seemed appropriate.

  I looked at the list every night for three months. After that, I must have thought there was nothing more to learn. Or I had given up. But at the start, a Sunday night in early March when I first contacted the list, it was all new.

  “My wife was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer two weeks ago,” I wrote. I told the list that Dolores was recovering from the surgery at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, and that chemotherapy might begin soon. I let them know that her cancer was in the abdomen and scattered and could not be removed by surgery other than what had already been removed “Where in your opinion are the best institutions for a colon cancer patient?” I asked. “Where is the most progressive work being done with colon cancer treatment?”

  The next day, the driest answer, from Marshall Kragen: “Baylor is an excellent hospital.”

  A half dozen other messages arrived. Allison McDermott replied that Panorex is being clinically tried by an oncologist that her father saw in Austin and Dr. Padzur is running a Phase III Trial, 5FU with Levamisole and Panorex. Lori Hope sent a long message about P53, “a gene therapy that should be available for clinical trial in the next month.” She included a link to clinical trials. Nurse Pam said there are lots of places with treatment, but “very few will tackle intraperitoneal mets with anything that has an effect on them.” She recommended Dr. Paul Sugarbaker at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. She provided his phone number. “He removes a lot that other surgeons won’t touch.” Other than that, “Any standard therapy is as good as any other,” she wrote. Linda T also touted Paul Sugarbaker, and she provided the same phone number. Someone wished me good luck.

  Twenty-five years later all of it — Allison and Lori, Nurse Pam and Linda T – is going into the trash. When look up P53, the research begun a quarter center ago does seem to have led somewhere. Studies have shown that the P53 gene is mutated in a high percentage of colorectal cancer cases, perhaps as high as seventy percent. So it may have some use for prognosis, although not as much for treatment.

  Kathleen Allen was more practical. Her advice was to factor in convenience. I should be aware that many colon cancer “recipes” are given weekly, so travel from home can be a dealbreaker. Angel Howse recommended MD Anderson in Houston to me, since it’s “in your neck of the woods.”

  That was day one on the Colon Cancer Discussion List.

  So it went, for the rest of March and April and May. I was printing out conversations between Jerome and Pam and Jim and Benita and Martha and Ellen and Julie. They asked each other about the virtues of IP heated chemo and what, if anything, can accomplish “the full debulking of tumors.” Others wrote that they would of course defer to the more knowledgeable, but then go on to say that they had in front of them an article from the University of Chicago medical school on the use of surgery plus intraperitoneal chemotherapy for peritoneal mets, based on the successful treatment for pseudomyxoma peritonei, at least with “those patients in whom definitive cytoreduction is complete.” Someone else would concur that IP heated chemo is recommended “for high volume, as Ellen said,” and was also most successful for those who can accomplish “full debulking.”

  What was a civilian reading this by himself late at night supposed to make of it? What I could not make were decisions, other than the decision to defer, as Dolores did from the very start, to guidance from the doctors at Baylor. And there was nothing from Dr. Pippin, Dolores’s oncologist at Baylor, about going elsewhere, traveling for treatment, P53, Dr. Sugarbaker, or full debulking. I did tell him about black walnuts, wormwood, and cloves. He thought it was hilarious.

  Almost no one on the colon cancer discussion line was a patient. Most seemed to be wives. Dear Julie, Martha Ward wrote to Julie Edell, “In reviewing past postings I noted that you discussed a Duke study requiring HLA AZ+. Did Alan qualify for this study? We are still waiting for news from Vanderbilt regarding Joe getting into the P53 vaccine trial there. In the meantime he qualified instantly for a phase one KSA vaccine trial at UAB Birmingham. KSA, like CEA, is an antigen expressed on the surface of color cancer cells…” Everyone was on a first name basis. Togetherness might have been the most therapeutic impact of the discussions.

  For spouses and caretakers, certainly. For the few who actually had the disease, it must have been palliative.

  One night, Arvil Stephens weighed in. He was the Director of Research and Development for Sugarbaker Oncology Associates, which specialized in cancers that had spread to abdominal surfaces. “If I can be of service,” he said. He provided his email address. At the end of March, I asked the group a question. How do I talk to our children about what’s happening to their mother? Julie Edell, from mail.duke.edu, responded. She recommended another list that she said would help. I didn’t use it. I didn’t talk much to either Ben or Eden about what was happening. Dolores handled that, she talked to them. In July, when she died at two in the morning, I woke them up, one at a time. The funeral home transport was on its way to pick up the body. I asked each of them if they wanted to get up, to say goodbye, but neither of them got out of bed. They were just too sleepy, or maybe too frightened.

  *

  Dick Theriaque wrote to the group about the risk of buying tickets to fly to Cleveland, where he hoped to participate in a trial using Temozolomide. “It will be a bummer if I get knocked out of the trial before using the tickets,” he wrote. “They’re non-refundable.” Christopher Carfi said his father had tried non-Western therapies. His dad was using vitamin and mineral supplements, doing Tai Chi, visualization. and working with a therapist. He recommended Michael Lerner’s Choices in Healing as the best source of information on alternative therapies. Lerner was the head of a cancer support group called Commonweal, in Bolinas, a hippie-famous town outside San Francisco.

  Linda Thomas provided a link to an article in the Washington Post summarizing the current state of colon cancer research. Bobbie wrote to Kelly about Epoetin Alfa; also, that a scientist from San Antonio has discovered “how to make cold viruses attach to tumors and grow so fast inside of the tumor that it explodes.” Crellin Pauling, who was being treated at Stanford, replied to a query about the side effects of high-dose 5FU: fatigue, dry skin, and diarrhea, controlled with Lomotil. Dolores had her Lomotil as well. Toni Deonier elaborated about side effects. One time his hands peeled; he had the hiccups for two weeks. He also reported that since his diagnosis he has gone fishing in Canada for a week. He wrote about his very positive attitude. On the page that I had printed out, I had underlined “very positive attitude.” At the end of Toni’s message, there’s was catchphrase from Proverbs – A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.

  My print out of a very long message from James Burness began, “Hi, gang. Since several of you have asked how my decision-making process was going, I thought I’d bring you up to date.” James described his fifteen months of trial and perseverance. His psu.edu email also ended with a catchphrase, from Herbert Spencer: Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

  I printed Pablo Lewin’s “encouraging piece of information” – a press release from University Hospitals of Cleveland, titled New Technology Used to Destroy Cancerous Tumors. It was RFA – radio frequency waves. Angel Howse wrote about funding statistics, complaining that “the breast and lung people have associations that lobby for them.” Her emails had their catchphrase, too: This is from the real angel, accept no substitutes. In early June, Tom Gray encouraged us to call our U.S. Representative about the research budget for colon cancer. Nurse Pam, who by this time I had figured out was a chemotherapy nurse, sent a message about “cachexia,” medical terminology for the weakness and wasting of the body from chronic illness. Penny and Oscar continued exchanging emails debating the math on how much is spent per person on research for various kinds of cancer.

  Peter Reali wrote that he has been “lurking in the background reading the mail” and urged us to lobby for more research dollars. Toni Deonier offered his opinion on RFA (“it is not the magic bullet”) and hepatic pumps. Silvio Caoluongo responded to Gloria, “I looked at the pump over a year ago. I ruled it out for a number of reasons. First, let me introduce myself.” He went on to discuss his Stage IV diagnosis from 1995, his colostomy, his Phase II trial of 5FU. He had the authority of someone who was alive eighteen months after diagnosis. He namechecked Sloan Kettering, and, at the end of his message, referenced Michael Lerner’s Choices in Healing.

  On June 12, the last day I looked at the list, Julie Edell at Duke wrote to say what trial her husband, Alan, was in. “A Phase I Study of Active Immunotherapy with Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA) RNA Pulsed, Autologous Human Cultured Dendritic Cells in Patients with Metastatic Malignancies Expressing CEA.” Kate Murphy wrote in support of Ellen Frank, who had written that “wonderful things can happen to us spiritually through these difficulties.” Kate commented on this. “The pastor of our church told me something very surprising the other day. In the Middle Ages, cancer was considered a blessing because it gave you a chance to prepare for death. With lives that were often suddenly ended by violence, cancer brought a different death. This gave me a great deal of pause.”

  The Middle Ages may not offer much as a reference for coping with disease, but I came to understand Kate’s point. After Dolores’s death, I took my daughter and less willing son to The Warm Place, a social service agency in Fort Worth, where they participated in peer group meetings for very young children who had lost a parent. We went for a year and a half. Twice monthly, on weekday evenings. While Ben and Eden were in their age-separated sessions, surviving parents would gather over a potluck meal and snacks. I was in a roomful of unexpected losses. A relatively young wife had left the house one morning and not returned – fatal car crash. Or, at home one Saturday in the middle of yard work, a husband had a coronary. These sudden losses did seem to provoke the greatest distress, while I had had the good fortune to live through a five-month process.

  *

  After staying on the colon cancer discussion line every night in March, less in April, and then less and less in May, I stopped June 12. Now that I have discarded all the pages, and with them all the old names, do you wonder what happened?

  You can find James Burness online. He was the professor of chemistry at Penn State, on the York campus. The James H. Burness teaching award at Penn State York is named “in honor of the late James H. Burness in recognition of his outstanding teaching and service to the campus.” He died in 1999.

  Commonweal is still in Bolinas. It has its website and its slogan, “healing people, healing the planet.” Michael Lerner is still there, too, President and Co-founder. There’s a board of directors, a large staff, and dozens of programs now, from Youth Empowerment to the Integrative Law Institute. Its Retreat Center is located “on a beautiful 60-acre site on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in the Point Reyes National Seashore.” Michael Lerner and Commonweal have not only survived, they’ve prospered.

  Marshall Kragan, who managed the list, didn’t stay on it much longer than I did. He died in 1998, the year after Dolores. A link took me to the website of the Colorectal Cancer Alliance, which started “as a simple online support group” and became the Alliance “through the efforts of forty survivors, caregivers and friends, following the death of Marshall Kragen.” Maybe that was what Nurse Pam, Julie and a number of the rest of them got up to, in what was then the future. In fact it was. You can see their names on the Alliance website.

  xiv

  Dolores was a frequent invited speaker at noon forums hosted by civic and professional groups, women’s organizations, the YMCA, the Unitarian Church. Stress was often the topic, or a related subcategory, such as divorce. So I wasn’t surprised to find pages of notes on the subject of stress in one of her manila folders. “Why do some people expect life changes to be frequent and stimulating, whereas others expect stability and regard change as disruptive of security?” she either wrote or copied. “What determines whether change is regarded as richness or as chaos?”

  Tax accountants, according to her notes, are susceptible to heart attacks around April 15. Widowers in England studied for six months after the deaths of their wives had an overall mortality rate forty percent higher than the average for men their age. I found her xerox of the Holmes Stress Scale, which was developed to measure the relative stress caused — or “induced,” as it says — by changes in a person’s life. Its scale measured stress in “life-change units” – with the death of a spouse assigned 100 points at the very top, followed by divorce for 73 points, then all the way down to taking a vacation, 13 points, Christmas at 12, and minor violations of the law at 11. Get more than 200 points in a single year, that’s real trouble – your life has been disrupted enough to make you sick. Her xerox was out of date. It assigned 31 points to having a mortgage of $10,000.

  Dolores’s notes referenced the Holmes test as a predictor of illness; but then she wrote that the association of life changes and illness is “a dismal view of change,” which it is. She quoted some researcher named Lazarus for the wisdom that stress resides neither in the person nor in the situation, but in how that person appraises the situation.
  In other words, in how you look at it.
  Her notes also mentioned a study claiming that the most stress-resistant people were Mormons, nuns, symphony conductors, and women in Who’s Who.

  It had been a very stressful time from diagnosis in February to death in July. Were there other ways to look at it? Maybe so, but only in hindsight.

  *

  Much of what I found in the storage room came from those months of 1997. Going through it was mind clearing as much as housecleaning. I had never disposed of the leftover medications from 1997 and discovered them in a shoebox marked Dolores Illness. Who decides on the shape and color of the pills we are asked to swallow? There were lots of them, preserved in tinted plastic cylinders with lids that instructed Dolores to Turn Down While Pushing. These pills were long expired, although nothing in their appearance suggested it. They looked as collectible as postage stamps. The Compazine capsule, 10 mg, was an exotic beauty; half marine blue, the other half perfectly clear and revealing a hundred tiny white globes of medicine. The Relafen was a fat, solid pink lozenge. The Roboxin, or methocarbamol, for muscle spasms, had the same lozenge body, only slimmer and white.

  The one Dilaudid was a controlled substance. It had required more than the ordinary prescription. And I remember going to Daugherty’s, the compounding pharmacy on Royal Lane, not to the nearest drugstore, to pick it up. Dilaudid, pale yellow, which leaves its taker deluded. I was in a state of delusion myself those months of at-home care. Not about the final outcome. That it would end in death was really never in doubt. The delusion was more in my understanding of the aftermath. I imagined that things would be okay, or, although changed,

  I had saved pills from each of the medications that Dolores took for nausea, anxiety, and pain. The white – lorazepam, promethazine, prednisone, dexamethasone. The pink – Lortab, strictly for pain. Also, a dropper that was still attached to an empty jar of Roxanol, which is a trade name for morphine sulfate. The outliers in my collection were red darvocet tablets, hotter than pink, but for milder pain. There were three dozen darvocet in two different bottles. These were pills that Dolores had saved herself, after a hospitalization for breast cancer. She had had a mastectomy ten years before colon cancer.

  The pills in their bottles went to a “take-back” bin for unused medications at the CVS on Lemmon Avenue.

  *

  One might hope to go through life with no experience of oncologists, but that had not been Dolores’s fate. She was not one of those people who think that nothing bad can happen to them. She had had cancer twice before. Breast cancer, and then a squamous cell cancer on the tip of her nose. After her death, one of her doctors remarked in passing that Dolores had a “shitty deck of genetic cards.”

  Her manila folder labeled Cancer held the pathology reports from 1987, when she was a young fifty-eight years old. Nature of Specimen: Left breast mass. Infiltrating carcinoma, anterior margin involved. Microscopic Description: Permanent sections of the frozen tissue confirm the frozen section diagnosis showing infiltrating duct cell carcinoma. A second document, about the right breast biopsy, reported more of the same: intraductal and infiltrating duct carcinoma, associated with calcification. The language is what it is. A kind of gobbledygook, with its epithelial hyperplasia. Dolores kept five copies of a report on each breast. Both breasts were removed. Breast cancer was the cancer she had “beaten.” What came in 1997 was declared to be unrelated. But who knows. What she had in her just would not let go.

  The squamous cell cancer was removed by Dr. David Whiting, M.D., in 1994. A simple office visit. She kept the report from that, too, in the Cancer folder. What I remember: Dr. Whiting upset her by using a tool that looked no more sophisticated than a hobbyist’s woodburning pen. It left a red dot on her nose.

  On her death certificate in 1997, the onset of the colon cancer that was the cause of Dolores’s death is “at least five years” prior. Five years is in fact the recommended interval for colon cancer screenings. And in her Cancer folder, I found a letter from December 1992, from the office of Drs. R.M. Jacobson & P. Tulanon, Colon & Rectal Surgery. Dr. Jacobson reported that a barium enema colon x-ray “looks normal.” As did the sigmoidoscopy, or flexible sig, which showed nothing to worry about. “I did see some diverticula,” he wrote, but “everyone gets those,” and “no polyps or tumors could be seen.” An included report from Todd Guinn, M.D., on the letterhead of Radiology Associates of Dallas, P.A., was also reassuring. “Unremarkable barium enema.” And, to the office of Drs. Jacobson and Tulanon, “Thank you for the privilege of seeing this patient.”

  xv

  Milestones, millstones. Winter ended, easy weather returned. The twenty-sixth anniversary of Dolores’s death was four months away. Maybe I could finish by then. I would be done going through bankers boxes, refrigerator shelves, plastic tubs, Hon cabinets. All, or most of it, would have been put in large black trash bags and picked up by Dallas Sanitation. The storage room would no longer be my personal genizah.

  There have been communal genizahs for a thousand years. They are typically the repositories for sacred manuscripts past their sell-by date, worn and faded. Tradition forbade the destruction of manuscripts that contained the name of God, and so those scrolls, books, and scraps, those that were not buried with the remains of the pious, were placed in a genizah, to gather dust and disintegrate. That was the fitting way of disposing of them. Most often, the genizah would be in the attic or the cellar of a synagogue. Genizah is a Hebrew word, or comes from one, meaning “hiding place.” I suppose that is what the storage room off the garage had been for me. It was a place to hide objects – newspapers, amber pill bottles, framed certificates, receipts, photographs – and the memory that adhered to them.

  A genizah that Solomon Schechter rediscovered at the close of the 19th century in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo became famous enough among biblical scholars to become known as “The Genizah.” Some 300,000 manuscripts and fragments – legal, liturgical, personal – were found there. Going through bankers boxes and Dolores’s manila folders, that number of three hundred thousand doesn’t seem very high, given that it represents the accumulation of ten centuries. The guardians of the Ben Ezra synagogue were more selective than Dolores had been. The name of God never needed to appear on anything she saved. Neither did I have any higher principles to guide me in the preservation or disposal of her secular scraps.

  You can find a black and white photo of Professor Schechter online. It’s an image from the next to last year of the 19th century. The professor is at Cambridge University in a room that looks more like an artist’s loft, where a long wooden table serves as a platform for piles of manuscripts. A box on the floor near him and a second table are both covered with scraps. He wears a suit. He sits on a wooden chair, his right elbow on a table, his forehead propped against his hand. He doesn’t look discouraged by the mess, he seems resolute.

  *

  Found and discarded, a selection:

  Folders with executive summaries, five-year plans, and official papers that had Dolores’s signature on them.

  Minutes from committee meetings and reports prepared for task forces she was on.

  A half dozen copies of The Dallas Model, issued by the Adult Mental Health Task Force of the Mental Health Association of Dallas County. Dolores was the chair. “This proposal is only a beginning,” she wrote in the introduction. True enough. The problems the Model dealt with have had no end.

  Dozens of flyers, pamphlets, and brochures from meetings, speaking engagements, symposia, seminars, programs and presentations.

  If Dolores had been one of the speakers, or a “facilitator” for one of the “table topics,” there would be a paragraph about her. She was an expert at A Conference On Parenting and at the Routh Street Center Program on Psychotropic Drugs. At The Women’s Center of Dallas, her workshop was Divorce: Legal and Psychological Aspects. She served on the Planning Committee for The Buck Stops Here, yet another conference about care of the chronically mentally ill.

  She presented regularly at the YMCA Wednesday Noon Forum and saved the colored paper flyers. Free of charge, brown baggers welcome, bring a friend. A typical topic: What Women Have Learned from the “Good Ole Boys” about Networking.

  At the 5th Annual Singles Fair in 1983, she was one of two dozen speakers who made presentations at the Richardson Civic Center. At one in the afternoon in Room E, she provided the answer to a question that would have been as puzzling to the married as to the singles: How to Know And Get What You Want Sexually.

  She spoke on panels for NTARAL, the North Texas Abortion Rights Action League. These presentations were usually at the Unitarian Church. Her paragraph bio on the flyer said she was someone who “has long been an advocate of women’s rights.” It was the eighties. Debates over abortion and appointments to the Supreme Court or actions by state legislatures were the same then as today.

  The time to trash the pink flyer was long past.

  *

  Found and discarded, continued:

  “Stuff” is the right word for what filled the folders and Ziploc bags.

  Dolores had saved a ticket stub to Siegfried & Roy, a delegate’s badge for the 1982 Texas Democratic Party convention, and a two-dollar Lotto ticket.

  A letter from Frances, Dolores’s mother, asking for money. “My house insurance has expired …” etc. Frances had enclosed three drugstore receipts to demonstrate the cost of the medicines she was taking every day.

  Five verses of Amazing Grace typed on a sheet of paper, and a General Admission ticket stub for Mount Vernon.

  A receipt for a Sister Corita Kent print, “Feelin’ Groovy,” $75, from 1970.

  The names of the middle school teachers for different subjects for our children, on two index cards.

  A receipt for $300 from Dallas Crematory Service, for the May 1983 cremation of Blufird Burch, Dolores’s mother’s last husband.

  An Affidavit of Heirship, stating that Frances Burch, deceased on December 24, 1985, left surviving her “one child, a daughter.”

  Index cards with notes for a presentation she gave titled Paint Your Own Rainbow, Taking Care of the Whole You.

  Lists of her spending, month by month, one month per page, for 1976 and 1977. Apartment rent, insurance, Texas Opportunity Plan, phone, laundry, gasoline credit cards, doctors, Neiman’s, Master Charge. Also, a carefully kept checkbook register, and a Master Charge statement from 1977.

  Ticket stub, An Evening Honoring Governor Michael Dukakis and Senator and Mrs. Lloyd Bentsen. A form letter to Dolores from Walter F. Mondale, “Gerry and I want you to know how much we appreciate…”

  Dolores saved “predictions for the 80s” that friends had made at a New Year’s Eve party. One prediction: “The ‘80s will bring a change from the ‘me’ generation to the ‘you’ generation. No longer will women’s liberation be responsible for the breakdown of life in America. ‘You’ will now be responsible.”

  A postcard from David Warrington, one of Dolores’s patients. Both David and his partner Michael died of AIDS in the ‘80s, when they were in their twenties.

  Dolores also left a bag of campaign buttons. She had Vote The Rascals Out, among other campaigns and causes. I threw them all out, except one, a large metal disc the color of brown mustard and coated with celluloid. It promoted the Golden 50th Anniversary of the Dolores Drive-In, so of course Dolores kept it. What wasn’t obvious is where the drive-in was. Its story belonged to the past before I knew her.

  *

  There is something perfunctory about a thank you. But however performative, it still seems necessary. It’s good social hygiene. What isn’t necessary is to respond to a written thank you; once it’s received, the interaction ends there. And retaining a written thank you seems like one step too many. And yet, Dolores seemed to think there was a future reader for any expressions of appreciation that she received, because she saved them. Some of them were fifty years old.

  Dolores was thanked for speaking, for presenting, for serving.

  “Dear Dr. Dyer: It is very difficult to express on paper the appreciation I feel for your caring response after the unfortunate Delta 1141 accident…” This was from the local chapter of American Red Cross, which had requested volunteer therapists to meet with the survivors of a plane crash.

  Every noon forum presentation she made at the YMCA also merited a thank you, most of them from the executive director.

  Dallas Women Against Rape thanked Dolores after she spoke on The Impact of Significant Others in the Victim’s Life.

  “Dear Dolores,” a city councilwoman wrote, “I wanted to express my appreciation for all your efforts in helping pass the swimming pool fence ordinance…”

  “Dear Dolores, Thanks so much for coming to speak at High Hopes on Monday.” High Hopes, a rehab center, used the motto Sobriety, Dignity, Independence. As I looked at the names of board members on its letterhead, they rang feint bells – the wives of the wealthy, the attorneys who might serve them, and educated experts.

  Katherine Reed, program director of the Mental Health Association, thanked Dolores for her help putting a seminar together in 1970. The topic: Changing Morality and Its Implications for the Family. The roll call of the Board of Directors in the left margin of the letter is like the chart of characters in a Russian novel with multigenerational stories. Mrs. Edmond M. Hoffman; her son co-founded the National Lampoon, inherited the local Coca Cola Bottling franchise, and built an art museum in his back yard. Mrs. Fred Wiedemann; her son worked as a male model and was married for a time to Isabella Rossellini.

  Klee Dobra, station manager, KLIF, sent Dolores a thank you for her appearance on a Sunday public affairs program. Klee Dobra? I found his obituary in an online version of Martha’s Vinyard Magazine, with the headline Klee Dobra, Fixture at Edgartown Yacht Club and Reading Room. Klee Dobra had marched with the U.S. Coast Guard band in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade. He played the trombone. His career in broadcasting placed him in radio stations around the country, including Dallas. The comments in his obituary online are generous, even radiant with warmth and longing. Farewell, old friend. So long, dear pal.

  From Jim Hightower, Commissioner of Agriculture, on the official stationery: “Dear Dr. Dyer: The Open House in Dallas was a big hit. Your presence meant a lot to me personally and greatly added to the success of the day.” This thank you was from 1985. Our son Ben was a year old when Dolores’s “presence meant a lot” to the Commissioner of Agriculture. Our daughter Eden was ninety days away from being born. This is the daughter who hasn’t spoken to me in seven years. Ours is a broken relationship, a story about an inability to connect, and thankless isolation. That is one thought that recurred as I tore up and threw away these pieces of paper from the past. No one sees the future. Mostly you can’t change it, either.

  *

  You may think this is all too much. In truth, I’m only telling you a fraction of what Dolores never threw away. She kept stuff. And stuff is the right word for most of what spilled out of her manila folders. These were things that Dolores deliberately saved. I would call them memories, except she forgot all about them.

  Have I mentioned the yellow strip of paper with a homespun message from H.L. Hunt warning about communism and urging shoppers to patronize companies that oppose communism? It was from the early 1960s. Or the two Flo-Thru bags of Lipton tea that somehow made their way into a bankers box? Pull up gently, they instructed, for the perfect cup of tea. Aside from the moustache and yachtsman’s cap, the drawing of Sir Thomas Lipton on these tea bags looked nothing like his picture on the Lipton website.

  Feature stories in the local papers with quotes from “Dr. Dolores Dyer, a Dallas psychologist” were a category of their own. There was a folder with nothing but clippings. Usually, her quoted wisdom was a cup of common sense, sometimes with a bromide added. The science behind it was whatever the journalist could elicit, though Dolores never spent a day in a laboratory or cited a study.

  “Tempers seem to flare more in the heat,” she was quoted as saying, in an article by Linda Little, July 4, 1980, The Dallas Morning News

  That summer of 1980 was indeed a very hot one. Temperatures in the city exceeded one hundred degrees for forty-two consecutive days, from June 23 to August 3. Twenty-eight of those days it was above 105; five of those, above 110. Linda Little’s opening line, “Dallas’s unending heat wave not only has sent temperatures soaring, but tempers as well,” came only eleven days into the record heat. There was another month of it ahead. She reported the opinions of child welfare workers who were very worried about fretful children and short- tempered mothers.

  Dolores was quoted again a week later, but not about the heat. Marcia Smith’s article in the Dallas Times Herald was about bias against women doctors. Dolores was Marcia Smith’s go-to expert psychologist. She was also a patient. In another article, this one on fans devoted to Annette Funicello and Barry Manilow, Marcia quoted Dolores on the dangers of fandom: “Some of us try to identify with the rich and beautiful in hopes it will rub off,” she said. “Problems arise when fans identify so strongly that they lose touch with themselves.” And then Dolores provided the aphorism. “It’s okay to build air castles, but don’t move into them.”

  Will your little girl grow up to be just like Barbie? This one from The Morning News had been published on a December 23, for Christmas shoppers. Quoted first, a male psychologist answered, “Beats the hell out of me.” Dolores was quoted throughout, and she also had the last word: “’Will playing with Barbies do any harm?’ Dr. Dyer wondered aloud. ‘Well, only to Mommy and Daddy’s pocketbooks.’”

  Dolores was a frequent resource in Times Herald or Morning News stories about “women’s issues.” One time, she was also the subject. That clipping was an “older woman younger man” story, where “all names and ages have been disguised.” Dolores was “Betty” in the article. She was a woman who had started a new family in her forties with a younger husband. “Men do this all the time,” Betty says, “and no one pays attention.”

  So that’s what I was doing that afternoon in April in the storage room. I was paying attention, if only for a moment, before throwing the articles away.

  *

  What else?

  Certificates. Dolores had received many and kept many. Possibly every one she ever received, to judge by the thickness of a manila folder labeled Certificates.

  Almost all had gold seals and signatures. They had borders of engravings, patterns and geometric repetitions. The typefaces were often Germanic, or heraldic, as if the Women’s Issues Committee, which recognized Dolores for chairing an event, was memorializing something that had happened in a past of pennants and ceremony, rather than the week before.

  Phrases that were stillborn at the time of their birth lived again on Dolores’s certificates. A certificate isn’t simply dated; instead, it is “given this day.” Often there is a “hereby.” Or a “be it known to all by these presents,” or a “duly” and some other adverb. Typically, an organization – for example, The Strategic Therapy Training Center or The Marquis Who’s Who Publications Board, “certifies that…” Less often, certifiers are aloof. Their names are at the top, away from a statement that begins, “This is to certify that…” The American Association of Suicidology took that approach. So did a local community college, after Dolores had completed a workshop in neuro-linguistic programming.

  Almost all the certificates in Dolores’s folder had something else in common, aside from gold seals and lots of capitalization. They were “in recognition.” “In Recognition of Distinguished Service and Lasting Contributions to the Dallas Psychological Association.” “In Recognition of Your Unique and Exceptional Contributions to Suicide Prevention and Crisis Intervention.” “In Recognition of Exemplary Personal Service to the Survivors, Families and Emergency Workers of Flight 1141.” What is recognition? It can be as simple as knowing who someone is. Everyone wants to be recognized in that sense. It was dreadful when dementia came for my father and took his ability to recognize his family. We disappear a little ourselves, when the minds of those who love us disappear. But certified recognition is something different. Dolores received it, and she kept the certificates to prove it.

  I threw out twenty, thirty, forty of them. I don’t know what value Dolores attributed to all this, how seriously she took it. In the same manila folder with the rest of the gold seals and engraved borders, I found a certificate from the Imperial Palace, a Chinese-themed casino in Las Vegas. Its borders were not engravings, they were drawings of bamboo shoots. It certified that Dolores “has completed our highly esteemed course in gaming and is a number one, most honorable player.” Instead of a “hereby” or a “duly,” the Palace offered bad grammar: “Confucius say, ‘Having gaming certificate in hand like having dragon by tail.’” Still, its gold seal with ribbed edges was as shiny as any of them.

  Dolores also kept her To the World’s Greatest Mother on Mother’s Day, with #1 Mom embossed in the center of its seal. “This is to certify,” it says. “Dolores Dyer has been named World’s Greatest Mother in recognition of her fantastic fortitude, plentiful patience, and wonderful wisdom.” It was a certificate “signed” by our children in May, 1989. I must have bought it, since they were three and four years old at the time. I have my own version somewhere, though not in a folder or a bankers box in the storage room. It’s a World’s Greatest Dad, which I certainly wasn’t.

  xvi

  TIME’s 1997 The Year in Review wasn’t the only place that Princess Diana appeared in the storage room. I also unearthed a Diana and Charles Royal Wedding tea towel that someone must have given Dolores. She had sealed this coarse, folded Irish linen towel in one of her Ziploc bags, and the towel was also in its own cellophane wrap, with a “Made in Ireland” sticker on it. Prescient, the color images of Diana and Charles were separated, each in a gilded oval frame. Date and location of their televised royal wedding had been screen printed on the linen in curvy script. 29 July, 1981 – St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. There must have been millions of these souvenirs sold. Forty some years later they can still be bought for under ten dollars on eBay. As a memento, a tea towel; for practical use, maybe a dishcloth.

  xvii

  This is to certify that, the Certificate of Conversion stated, ahead of the blank space where Dolores Dyer was filled in. Her Certificate of Conversion wasn’t from the certificates folder, but from one labeled Conversion . I found her letter, probably required, that traced the steps that had led to her decision to convert to Judaism, including being baptized at age six under the guidance of a Southern Baptist aunt and boarding in a Catholic convent. Those two details were new to me. Episcopal services followed the birth of her first son. Then ten years of marriage to a second husband who discouraged any interest in religion. I came years after that. Her conversion was dated November 6, 1984; so, five months after Ben was born. I suppose adopting a child allowed her to see the two of us as a permanent structure. Or at least, the bricks were there. Converting was part of the mix in the mortar.

  *

  If you had asked me, I would have said there wasn’t much to the conversion process in the Reform tradition that Dolores went through for my sake. I knew there was a class. As I threw things away, it seemed there was more to it than I realized. Her folder was fat with course materials she had saved. Reprints, handouts, a reading list. And she made notes on most of them.

  The class syllabus covered Birth, Death, Marriage, and Conversion. Did Dolores take it more seriously than being Baptist, Catholic, or Episcopalian? I don’t know, but she made notes as if she were studying for the test. Some notes were historical (Abraham 1st Jew). Some were linguistic ( Shemot/Exodus, first word used as name of book). Some seemed random (792,000 letters in Bible). I found a full page of her notes on keeping Kosher ( Fleishman’s unsalted doesn’t have whey, Oreo cookie has lard), which we never did.

  If I placed her notes like stones on a path, they would lead in no one direction. Blue and white are the colors of Israel, she noted. And also, Levites, the high priests, have no land of their own. Confirmation began in Kassel Germany 1810. Maccabees Sadducees Pharisees. Kiddush, Kiddushin, Kadosh, Kaddish –holiness equals set apart. Elijah’s chair.

  Dolores kept the reprints of eight pamphlets in a series called The Jewish Home. They covered holidays, Sabbath candle lighting, and other basics. She saved the calendar that provided the hour and minute to light Sabbath candles in time zones across the United States, beginning September 1984. This may have been overkill for our household, where Sabbath candles were never lit. Still, she held on to it, along with the stapled Vocabulary of Jewish Life handout that provided transliterations and definitions (chah-zahn, Cantor). The Patriarchal Family Tree handout began with Terah, Abraham’s father. It was relatively simple, but still a mouthful, with questions and answers on it that would stump most assimilated Jews. What tribe did Moses belong to? Who was King David’s great-grandfather?

  The question of who was born Jewish and who required conversion merited its own page in the folder. Under Reform, Dolores wrote Very good case in Bible for patrilineal descent. Moses married a non-Jew. For the Orthodox, it was all about the mother. If the child is the Pope and mother is Jewish, Pope is Jewish. One of her handouts compiled the comments of the Sages on conversion. Rav Lakish said, Oppressing the proselyte is like oppressing God. The Sages were overwhelmingly positive about it. She noted that some saw the convert as in a different category than one born into the tribe – a higher one.

  Dolores also kept course assignments that she had turned in and received back with comments from the teacher. One assignment asked her to name aspects of her life she thought belonged under Ordinary and to make a second list under Extraordinary. Under Ordinary, Dolores wrote: my life span, getting married, having children, my work. And for Extraordinary: my life experiences, my marriage, my children, my potential for impacting my community. She lined up the two lists so life span was across from life experiences, marriage across from marriage, having children across from children, and work across from impact. Her ordinary things and her extraordinary things were essentially the same things. She saw the extraordinary in the ordinary. The teacher noticed. “That’s lovely,” she commented, drawing red arrows that pointed to the parallels.

  *

  The class schedule and list of participants in the folder presented two mysteries. First, Dolores wasn’t on the participant list. Second, the classes were Wednesday evenings from mid- September 1984 through March 1985. Dolores’s Certificate of Conversion certifies that she “has completed a course of instruction in Judaism,” but date of conversion was in November only six weeks after the start of class. Perhaps Dolores got course credit without staying until the end. Her second husband had been Jewish as well. She may have received credit for time served.

  In the end, the process was as informal as the welcome the rabbi in charge gave her at the ceremony in his office. “If you want us,” he said, “we want you.” The Conversion folder suggested she was serious enough, and what it held can have the last word on its way to the trash –syllabus and pamphlets, notes and assignments.

  xviii

  From the spillage of manila folders:

  Two letters from The University of Texas Austin, one from June 6, 1966, the second from November 3, 1966. The first began, “Dear Miss Dyer, I am very sorry to report that the faculty of the Department of Psychology has voted that your performance on the Qualifying Examination was not satisfactory.” The second began, “Dear Miss Dyer: I am pleased to report that the faculty of the Department of Psychology has voted that you have passed the Qualifying Examination without condition.” Both conclude with “Cordially yours”.

  A receipt from 1996 with details of our charges at the Blanceneaux Lodge, in the Cayo District of Belize. Arrive, March 7; depart March 9, two adults, two children. The room charge had been paid for in advance, so the bill only listed bar and restaurant purchases: two Cokes, one ice tea, two Sprites, one ice tea, one bottle of beer, one draft beer, one glass Cabernet, three ham sandwiches, one chicken sandwich, one special, one pomodoro, hot chocolate, glass milk, Caribbean coffee, two desserts, milk .

  A sheet of paper dated August 1994 with nothing on it other than heights and weights. Fifty pounds, three feet eleven and half inches. Seventy-seven and a half pounds, four feet seven and a half inches.

  Two one day passport tickets to Disneyland. Child tickets, “Good for unlimited use of attractions.” These tickets are pink.

  Three yellow index cards. On one side, typed sentences from the Family Interaction Q-sort work. (The child is most like his mother. Mother is the family scapegoat. Many defensive maneuvers requiring much energy.) On the other side of all three cards, lists of names that Dolores must have been considering in 1984 (Asher, Elia, Micah, Simon…). For some of them, she added “meanings” (Devin- a poet; Eben – a stone).

  A receipt from May 19, 1997, Baylor Medical Center Cafeteria. 1 tuna sandwich, 1 chips assorted, 1 fountain drink large. The same day, a receipt from Prince’s, the Prince of Hamburgers. Prince’s was a neighborhood drive-in. To say it was an institution is an understatement. Founded in 1929 by Doug Prince, a hat salesman who lost his job in the Great Depression, it’s gone now. It has been replaced by a strip shopping center. But it was still on Lemmon Avenue in May of 1997 when Dolores went back into Baylor Hospital for “further testing.” She was confined to the room while I ate a tuna sandwich in the cafeteria. She requested a hamburger from Prince’s. So I went and got it for her.

  Seven business cards: Larry Larkin, Broker, specializing in acreage in Santa Cruz; David Lipsky, Attorney at Law, Law Office of Lipsky, Blickenstaff & Fenton; Kikuchi Corporation Apparel and Cosmetic Products; Southwest II Gallery, Susan Jaffe, Director; Jed Riffe Rolling Thunder Skates, Inc.; Marvin Saul, Juniors Restaurant Delicatessen Catering; Bill Smith, East Dallas Automotive, Mike Smith President. Why were any of these cards kept? What were they doing in her manila folders?

  Gone but not forgotten is a formula of praise on markers for the dead. In so many cases, the things that the living keep represent the opposite: Forgotten, but not gone.

  A St. Patrick’s Day card from one of Dolores’s patients. Inside the card, an uncashed check for forty dollars. The check, from 1979, was not the only uncashed check tumbling out of Dolores’s folders. I found one for $500 dated 1983. In a sense, much of what Dolores saved was an uncashed check, an attempt to pay the future in the currency of the past.

  Ticket stubs, Dallas Symphony, May 14, 1994, Louis Lane, Conductor, Earl Wild, Piano. A postcard from Louis, who was conducting in South Africa. It was a picture of a white rhinoceros. “Things are still lovely here for the right people,” he wrote on the back. An honest comment, but in his voice, a compound of sarcasm, weariness and acceptance.

  Dolores kept a form letter from 1977 sent to her from the Congress of the United States House of Representatives, James M. Collins, Third District, Texas, whose office received notice of any marriages in the district and followed up with a letter of congratulations. We were married that year. This form letter could win the prize for most likely to be discarded immediately, but it had survived for nearly five decades.

  A handwritten letter to Dear Dolores came on the official Texas State Senator letterhead from Lloyd Doggett’s wife, Libby. Dolores was thanked for raising money in 1983. I also found the invitation to the fundraiser. Dolores was listed as a “Hot Doggett” sponsor. Her effort to “unseat” incumbent Republican Senator John Tower failed, but Lloyd Doggett did get himself elected to Congress in 1985. Forty years later he was still there. Like the egg-sucking dog, those who have a taste for political office rarely lose it.

  A flyer for a program on Adolescence – Making Sense Out of Chaos. On that same program, in 1976, Leonard Kirby presented Biofeedback, the Yoga of The West. Dolores shared offices with Leonard. One day when I was there, Marshall McLuhan visited the office. I can’t remember why he was in Dallas, and why at Dolores’s office. Leonard wanted to hook him up on biofeedback. McLuhan refused.

  A program for the 16th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Suicidology in 1983. Dolores was listed on the host committee.

  A newsletter from the Women’s Issues Congress. Dolores was a steering committee member and a task force chairwoman. The newsletter reported that “Dolores Dyer convened the Legislative Committee …”

  A letter welcomed Dolores to the Advisory Board of the Women’s Center of Dallas. “Your term is three years and officially begins on…”

  I get it, Dolores. If it has your name on it, you kept it. Forgive me for not doing the same.

  *

  A full-page newspaper ad in 1983 included Dolores’s name, along with hundreds of others, marking the tenth anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision.

  In September that year, she appeared on “The Human Factor with Dr. Fred Labowitz.” This was a television show on the new local cable service. She kept the promo.

  Her name appeared on a temporary committee for “an important new women’s political group.” This was the Dallas Area Women’s Political Caucus. She agreed to “join us in welcoming to Dallas First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton” in 1996.

  Flyers for events that were years apart crashed on the floor of the storage room. Many of them had carried the same topics. The YMCA Noon Forum Holding Down Two Jobs – Career and Home, was echoed by a Women Meeting Women event, Dividing The Pie, or How to Handle Home and Career. Titles from fifty years ago could easily be reused. In 1976, there was Positive Approaches to Crisis Intervention. You can be positive there will be crisis and the need for intervention tomorrow.

  Businesses wanted speakers on Male/Female Business Relations: Wonderful or Exasperating, or on The Emotional impact of AIDS on the Family. Church locations were popular. Loving Relationships Woman’s Seminar was a program at Highland Park United Methodist Church. Church Women United Leadership Day at East Dallas Christian Church. Growth as a Person, a Partner, and a Parent , at Mount Olive Lutheran Church. Anything that mentioned homosexuality was usually at the Unitarian Church.

  Divorce was an evergreen topic. Titles varied. The Question of Custody: When Parents Disagree. Or Separation & Divorce Crisis. Mary Miller, Dean, Southern Methodist University, mailed Dolores about Yes, There Is Life After Divorce, the adult ed class she taught in 1977, the year we were married.

  Another folder contained more rosters of the committees Dolores had served on. Most were advisory. There was the Advisory Board Sub-Committee for Suicide and Crisis Management, the Advisory Council of Oak Lawn Community Services, the Advisory Board of the Dallas Regional Chamber. Her name appeared on rosters of the Dallas Civil Liberties Union and the Mental Health Association. She kept the lists where her title was simple “member” — the AIDS subcommittee, the Human Services Commission, the Women’s Issues Committee of the Dallas Psychological Association, the Dallas Women’s Coalition.

  Anything with her name on it. Was it a sense of self-importance, a need for affirmation, a fear of anonymity, an insecurity? All the saved rosters that I threw out. Maybe Dolores was like the proud mother who keeps every blue ribbon, report card, school honor and local mention that her child ever received. That may be the secret to it. Her own mother had shipped her off to relatives in Oklahoma, and Dolores had learned to be her own proud parent.

  xix

  Among her papers in another bankers box:

  Page after page of quotations, written out on unlined paper in the perfect handwriting that a young woman used to practice in Catholic school. This kind of thing:

  Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.
  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  There was Pearl Buck and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Helen Hayes. The horses’ mouths included Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Even more improbably, a quote from Marcel Marceau.

  This one, also, next to last:

  Rainier Maria Rilke – Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

  And the very last, attributed to Thornton Wilder:

  There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love.

  There is a market for inspirational quotes. Also, a subgenre of motivational quotes, which are mostly for salespeople.

  Dolores had her own pet sayings. She liked the rhetoric of “Don’t let hanging back hold you back,” which was unattributed. She also cribbed from Brother Dave Gardner. Her “Let those as not want any not get any, and let that be both their punishment and their reward” came from Brother Dave. So did her “Never stand between a martyr and his cross.” Brother Dave, who studied one semester at a Southern Baptist college and made his first of eight comedy albums in 1959 with RCA , turned to drugs and alcohol after his career declined; they were both his punishment and his reward.

  Dolores also wrote down the lyrics to a song from the musical Mame on three pages of a pocketsize spiral notebook. I found it sealed in a Ziploc bag. She had copied every word, including the promise that on the last day of your life you’ll be smiling the same young smile you’re smiling now. All you had to do was open a new window, open a new door, travel a new highway that’s never been tried before.
  And so on.

  *

  Dolores saved playbills and programs. Her Mame playbill was from the performance with Angela Lansbury at the Winter Garden Theater in Manhattan. That was in 1967. I was a high school freshman while Dolores was learning that “Life is a banquet and most poor sons-of- bitches are starving to death.”

  She must have been in Los Angeles to see Hair at the Aquarius Theater on Sunset Boulevard in 1969, the year I graduated at Westchester High School. She had the playbill. I could read Trends for Twelve Signs for 1969 on its inside back page, with horoscopes from Aries through Pisces.

  She saved Beauty and the Beast at the Palace Theater in New York and Andrea Chenier at the Metropolitan Opera. Bobby Short was still playing at the Café Carlyle, when she heard Tosca at the Met. The memory existed only in the Stagebill that I was discarding. She saw Sam Shepard’s Buried Child at Theatre de Lys, with Marie Louise Wilson, a star from the sitcom One Day at a Time. Also, Nicholas Nickleby at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1986. I was there with her for those last two. I didn’t remember driving to Houston for Turandot, but Dolores kept the Stagebill as evidence. In a folder of its own: a twenty-eight page plus cover brochure for Siegfried & Roy, Superstars of Magic, in Beyond Belief, An Amazing Spectacle. I don’t remember going to that either, but I must have, wide-eyed, at the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The brochure still had its gate-fold tear-off postcard order form for souvenirs, available via Sells-Floto Inc.

  For Dolores, the ordinary act of attendance was worthy of commemoration. In the Stagebill for a Dallas Symphony concert with the violinist Midori, Dolores crossed out Midori, Violin, and wrote “Didn’t show” on the program. From the Dallas Theater Center, she saved the Stagebill from The Oldest Living Graduate. The play was part of the Texas Trilogy by Preston Jones, a member of the local resident company who became a local sensation after the trilogy was picked up for performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and went from there to Broadway. The same might have explained the program from a Theater Center production of D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game. His play had already won a Pulitzer, but the sensation was the playwright, who lived in Dallas. Dallas was preening. The city’s marketing materials were never without the phrase “world-class” somewhere in the paragraphs.

  I tossed dozens of saved programs from the Dallas Opera. One for Tosca in in the 1970s; another for Tosca in 1996. That was the last opera we attended together. Dolores was devoted to opera and I went along. She said opera was the only music that made the hair stand on her arm, which is peculiar praise. On a program for Carmen she wrote Victoria Vergara substituted for Teresa Berganza. Sitting on the floor of the storage room, I had to wonder, why? Why did she save it? And why record the substitution? She wasn’t the historian of mezzo-sopranos, unofficial or otherwise. There was no reason for her to note who did or didn’t appear in a production of Carmen in 1983. But she must have had her reasons.

  xx

  Of all the common instructions, “remember” may be the one least followed, and “remember me” the variation least obeyed. Some would deny it, pointing to their children or to their grandchildren. But what about in a hundred years? Surely being forgotten later rather than sooner is a difference without a distinction. Almost nobody is remembered for long, though most want to be. The reasons for a desire that is almost certain to be frustrated is a subject for much speculation by psychologists. Some say it’s “death anxiety” that drives the desire to be remembered. That could be why people write memoirs, and leave heirlooms, and fund the capital campaigns that put their names over the entrance of the new natatorium at a private school. It could be the reason I’m writing this now. An article in the journal New Ideas In Psychology offers an explanation. It says that people want to be the hero of the story they tell themselves. Since it’s impossible to actually experience the permanent loss of consciousness that is one of death’s side effects, no one can imagine it. Sleep is not the perfect analogy, though many have made it. With sleep, we have dreams. We also wake up. But death? It’s the perfect pairing of the unimaginable with the inevitable. So, leaving our story behind becomes a crutch we use to imagine the future without us. We keep old receipts, certificates, and print outs. If we can’t be remembered, we can still picture the full manila folders that might be found, even if by a stranger.

  I have another question. What permits one life to be forgotten and another remembered? Someone leaves without a trace, another does everything she can to be tracked.

  During the months I was going through boxes in storage, an article from the ghostwriter of a book about the life of Gloria Swanson appeared in Vanity Fair. Gloria Swanson was a somebody – a star, at one time the biggest in Hollywood. Her lovers were as famous as she was. It was a life big enough that Swanson on Swanson, her “autobiography,” could be written by somebody else. Swanson was also a pack rack. “She had saved every article, interview, clipping, program, invitation, and letter, enough to fill hundreds of boxes, which she kept in storage.” And her “stuff” was saleable. She did sell it, to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. So, no different in kind from the clippings, programs, invitations and letters in Dolores’s manila folders, but much different in how it was valued.

  On the other hand, there are memoirs of nobodies. I have a softbound book on my desk that was written by one. These Things I Remember is an edited translation of a notebook that had been handwritten in Hebrew by Eliezer Mordechai Altschuler, a Jew from Suwalki in northeastern Poland. Born before electricity, married at fifteen, earning a living in the cloth and shoe trades, trips to “the Holy Land,” and a visit to London once; and for the most part his story recounts little more than the series of his complaints about difficult relatives, the inadequacies of his employees, and the shady dealings of his competitors. He died at home in Suwalki, “an impoverished and lonely death in 1920,” as the blurb on the back cover says. Nothing notable, except maybe this: the society and the way of life Eliezer Mordechai Altschuler describes was extinguished by the Nazis. And so, like all rare commodities, it has accrued value that it might not otherwise have. The telling is not for everyone, which is why the paperback on my desk was published by Lulu.com, and not by Random House, publisher of Swanson on Swanson.

  Memory is a kind of fiction. It’s a reimagination of our past. We make it up, whether it’s distant or recent, and whether the make-up is applied to enhance the beauty of the past or, like some Halloween masks, to simulate our monsters. Almost the same times that Altschuler was recapturing the arguments and Sabbaths in a small Jewish town, Proust pretended to remember life in fictional Combray. He layered a thousand and one details, writing sentences that take nearly as long to read as the events they describe might have taken to happen, had any of them actually happened. The characters in Proust are also nobodies. Swann, Odette, Mme Verdurin, Dr. Cottard – what did any of them do to deserve being memorialized? People may question almost every aspect of reality – is it all a dream, does any of it matter, and, if so, to what end? I may believe that Gloria Swanson’s life was more interesting than Eliezer Mordechai Altschuler’s. But one thing it would be foolish to assert is that Altschuler would agree. Just so, Dolores never needed a justification for thinking that any mention of her name on a flyer, an agenda, a thank you note, or in an article in a local newspaper deserved to be saved.

  xxi

  Dolores was neither famous nor almost famous, but because of a custody battle between Mary Jo Risher and ex-husband Doug, she came closer than most of us will. Her name is in a book. There was a character based on her in a Movie of the Week. For three years, from 1975 to 1978, Dolores was limelight adjacent.

  Dolores’s notes from her therapy sessions with Mary Jo, her partner Ann, Mary Jo’s younger son and Ann’s daughter remained in the folder labeled Risher Case. I tore them up. Also in the folder, an ink drawing of a shark chasing a swimming woman with a request for contributions to the Mary Jo Risher Fund at the National Organization for Women. Dolores had saved the Friends of Mary Jo Risher tee shirt and the photo button. And a Love Is For All booklet, with a “Dear Troy” note from the author handwritten on the inside cover. Folded inside the booklet, a letter to Dolores from Troy Perry, founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. Reverend Perry requested the booklet’s return, since it was a personal gift. Any return would be almost fifty years overdue.

  I found a pristine People magazine in the Risher folder, too, which I haven’t thrown away, though there must be hundreds of them “in the archives.” Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors are glossy on the cover of this January 19, 1976 edition. The $6 Million Couple! TV’s bionic beefcake and wife. Also making headlines, though not so large: Holy Vibes from Seals & Crofts and Tracking the La Guardia Bomber.

  Photos of Mary Jo and Ann were on pages 51 and 52, alongside the story. “Mary Jo Risher, in the eyes of her friends, is an attentive and loving mother,” it begins, “but a Dallas jury of ten men and two women awarded custody of the former Sunday school teacher’s 9-year-old adopted son, Richard, to his father, Doug. The reason: Mary Jo is a lesbian.”

  Dolores had taken the stand at the trial. She was as an expert witness for Mary Jo. She testified that homosexuality was “just another lifestyle.” Doug Risher’s attorney had his expert as well, who had a different point of view. And by the time Mary Jo and Ann had broken up three years later, someone we knew had written By Her Own Admission, a book about the case, and ABC had turned it into A Question of Love, The ABC Sunday Night Movie, with Gena Rowlands and Jane Alexander portraying Mary Jo and Ann, despite ABC’s disclaiming any connection to the trial. According to the network’s press release that Dolores kept in her Risher folder, ABC’s televised drama was only “based on factual events,” and, naturally, “names have been changed.”

  That was how Dolores became “Dr. Tippit,” played by Gwen Arner, who was also almost famous and maybe more than that. Gwen Arner testified as Dr. Tippit in A Question of Love. She played a judge in an episode of Falcon Crest. She directed episodes of The Bionic Woman, The Paper Chase, The Waltons, Fame, Dallas, Dynasty, Law and Order, Beverly Hills 90210, and Homicide: Life on the Street. She was a professional. Her last directing credit came a year after Dolores’s death, when Gwen was sixty-three. It was for the last of the twelve episodes she directed of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

  In the press release for “The ABC Sunday Night Movie” of November 26, 1978, the entire cast was named. The release was on the kind of coated paper that used to arrive through a fax machine. So the names were faded, but there was plenty of fame still clinging to them. Ned Beatty played ex-husband Doug’s attorney. He cross-examined Dr. Tippit six years after he was abused by hillbillies in Deliverance and two years after personifying corporate amorality in Network. He was listed under “starring”. So was Clu Gulager, who played Doug, and Bonnie Bedelia, who was Mary Jo’s attorney ten years before she was Bruce Willis’s wife Holly in those Die Hard movies.

  Gwen Arner was only a co-star. She had distinguished company though. Marlon Brando’s older sister played one of the characters. Jocelyn Brando, one of the first members of Actors Studio in New York, where she studied with Elia Kazan. She played on Broadway in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms and in Mourning Becomes Electra. She was Glenn Ford’s wife in The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang. Acting royalty, in a way. She even appeared in The Virginian, alongside Clu Gulager.

  Into the trash, the press release, the People, and their folder. Tossed as well, a review that was also in Dolores’s folder.

  Sexual Medicine, a serious medical journal that seemed to have no business commenting on an ABC Sunday Night made-for-TV movie, reviewed A Question of Love . It disparaged Dr. Tippit, citing this cross-examination:
  Husband’s attorney, played by Ned Beatty: “Would you want your child to be raised in a homosexual family?”
  Dr. Tippit: “I couldn’t answer.”
  In the reviewer’s opinion, Dr. Tippit’s effectiveness as an expert was destroyed by “her inner ambivalence” about homosexuality. She was “unreliable.”

  There’s still a signed copy of By Her Own Admission in the storage room. It is inscribed For Dolores. As for Gifford Guy Gibson, who wrote the book and the inscription, he is buried in the Beit Olam section of Sparkman Hillcrest. Dead at 52 in 1995, two years before Dolores. While Guy was working on the book, Dolores and I used to visit him and his Hungarian wife Ildi at their place in the Manor House, the first “apartment high rise” in downtown Dallas. That was when living downtown and in a high rise were novel and signified that you were either poor or sophisticated.

  I did see Guy’s book for sale in paperback once. It was in a bookstall on the street in Mexico City, with a blurry color photograph on its cover and a much spicier-sounding title, Juicio a una madre lesbiana.

  xxii

  One of Dolores’s manila folders was labeled “material related to Dallas Psychological Association complaint correspondence.” A former patient had made an eight-page, single spaced, typed report to the Ethics Committee of the Dallas Psychological Association, claiming that Dolores had crossed an ethical boundary by involving her in “social, personal and family” activities, all of which was true. Dolores did that routinely. She invited patients on shopping trips or to public events, joined them at their parties, even welcomed them in our home. She would talk to them about her own life as much as theirs. She was a therapist who didn’t see the harm in that. Patients who met me sometimes acted as if they already knew me, because they had heard my name in their fifty-minute sessions. I thought it was strange. But then I am reticent. Dolores, on the other hand, was unafraid of engagement. She befriended the pharmacy assistant at the drug store, she knew the family at the dry cleaners. Her former patient had left Dolores and gone into therapy with a someone new who did not share Dolores’s approach to the therapeutic relationship.

  There was no result from the complaint other than an instruction from the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. It told Dolores to “familiarize yourself with your ethical responsibilities as a psychologist.” She was further instructed to review Board Rule 465.36 (c) (1) (Q). For my review in the storage room, there was a cover letter, a letter from the complainant, and some savory supporting material, including statements from the former patient’s former husband, her lover, and her mother, all of which had been provided to Dolores as part of the process.

  “These are serious allegations,” according to the cover letter from the Chair of the Ethics Committee. The folder also had Dolores’s response to the Ethics Committee. “I want to express my extreme distress about the way a client complaint was handled,” it began. The prize for drama goes to a letter the former patient sent to the Committee in support of the formal complaint. It recounted years of dysfunction, severe anxiety, two hospitalizations for depression, and then, out of the blue, “One thing I am worried about,” she wrote, “is receiving a call from her husband. He will be extremely irate about this, and this man does have a temper.”

  I had no idea I had appeared in the cast of characters, even though I had no role.

  xxiii

  Keep those cards and letters coming in . In an earlier time, the hosts of radio shows would say that on air. They would read postcards and letters from listeners as free material, filling the air time between paid messages from Winston or Chevrolet. The cards and letters rolled in. That usage, too, might puzzle learners of English as a second language. Pieces of paper are not usually rolling.

  For Dolores, cards came rolling in both before and after her death.

  There were hundreds of them in the bankers boxes. The majority were get well cards and sympathy cards, but I also threw away the few birthday cards she received in July from people who didn’t know the situation – from the dentist’s office, for example.

  Many of the get well cards came with handwritten notes, which were added to the wishes printed by American Greetings or other card companies. After word got out about the seriousness of her diagnosis, there was cheerleading (“you are the strongest woman I know”), requests to be told how to help (“If there’s anything I can do”), and language about the inadequacy of language (“I don’t have the words”).

  Cards offered old-fashioned sentiment. They were straightforward. Get well cards that were jokes were also common, with the set up on the cover and the punch line on the inside. Laughter was not the best medicine. It’s not medicine of any kind, although the senders meant well. To wit: “To help speed your recovery, I wanted to send you some chicken-noodle soup!” The cover is a cartoon of a smiling chef holding a soup bowl and spoon. Then, on the inside: “But the stupid chicken hasn’t laid a single noodle!” Drawing of a hen, beads of sweat above a reddish comb. “Anyway, hope you’ll get well real soon!” Maybe this does comfort the sick. It is a confession not of dopiness on the part of the sender, but of helplessness, and in that it is truthful.

  “An Apple A Day Keeps the Doctor Away”, according to American Greetings, from its Forget Me Not series; then, on the inside: “…if you throw hard and your aim is accurate.”

  All of them had their bar codes, pricing, and the card’s provenance on the back. They told of the graphic designer in house at Gibson Greetings in Cincinnati, or the writer, freelance, a stay- at-home mom. They also shared in the mystery of international trade, with pricing gaps between U.S.A. $2.85 and Canada $4.15.

  Cards from married women never came just from them. They came from their husbands and the children, too. Though of course not really. So Sue B’s We love you wasn’t entirely true; whether Sue really loved Dolores or not, surely Craig and their two boys, who were both under ten, did not. There’s no reason they would. And when people have faith that you will come through, do they? It’s meant as encouragement, it’s saying , I want to encourage you. I do understand that approach. I used to tell both of my children how capable they were, even though they might not have been. In terms of having the character and good habits that determine success in so many endeavors, they actually had less than they needed. They may even have been below average in that combination of qualities. Still, encouragement seemed better than silence. It felt like the right thing to do.

  Is it fair for catastrophic misfortune to provide a “teachable moment” for the children of friends and neighbors? I could force myself to smile at the childish printing on a note that came with a flower arrangement left on our doorstep. Dear Dr. Dyer, we hope your cheer and joy return soon. I could also resent it. If a mother down the block wants to send her neighbor flowers, do it as a mature woman, not as the opportunity for your ten-year-old to earn a gold star. But then I might not have been the best parent so am probably wrong about this.

  Ana, the fifteen-year-old daughter of friends, had asked her mother to drop off a card with a Frida Kahlo painting on its cover, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. Ana’s message, “I hope you can get back on your feet soon.” Dolores was confined to bed for the rest of February, but she did get back on her feet in March and April, and from then from time to time. Ana included a P.S., saying she would love to babysit our children. “They are lots of fun,” she lied.

  A card from a different friend’s teenage daughter, another pretend adult, came in the mail. This girl wrote, “Everything will work out just fine.”

  On a card with a handwritten note from our own daughter’s advisory class, her eleven-year-old classmates wrote their names down in two columns. One child added a smiley face.

  A day after the funeral, our home was open for a prayer service. After the prayers, friends were invited to say something if they chose. One couple had brought their fourteen-year-old, who decided to demonstrate her thoughtfulness. If we had to choose between a world where no one dies, she said, and a world where no child is born, we would choose the new child. That may be so in the abstract. At the time, however, I would have preferred this chubby fourteen- year-old never to have been born, if that could have kept Dolores alive.

  I discarded a card from Rosemary at the Verandah Club, where Dolores exercised in the indoor pool. We miss you in class. Hope you’re back with us soon. Also, the card from Tina, who did Dolores’s nails. in addition to the you are in my prayers, Tina wrote, “This card is good for a pedicure. Call me.”

  Charlotte Taft sent a card with photos of her place in New Mexico, inviting Dolores “if you ever want to get away…” But Dolores wanted exactly the opposite in those months. What she wanted was to stay.

  Cards came with gifts. An envelope had tenderloin written on it, and there was a gift notice from Kuby’s Sausage House inside.

  Before the school year ended In May, the teachers at our children’s private schools still received the gifts that mothers always gave. I don’t remember, but Dolores must have somehow gotten it done. In return, she received a card. “Dear Dolores, Thank you so much for the beautifully fragrant tuberose soaps…. The note concluded “…you and your entire family are in my prayers.”

  Some of the cards had messages with a “what about me” sensibility, which I did find strangely comforting. One of the next-door neighbors, a doctor’s wife who was hovering in her late eighties, wrote: “Dear Dolores: Just to let you know that I am thinking about you daily. It will soon be six months since my accident. I am now using a walker but it is hard to get around, and will be months before I can drive. Fondly – “ Another neighbor brought over a lasagna but then mailed a follow-up card to apologize for it. It seems she had made two lasagnas, kept one for herself, and then discovered “it did NOT taste good.” Her note was an apology “to Dolores and family.” “This is very embarrassing,” she wrote, on a card received in July.

  I found a “thinking of you” card that declared, “You are being remembered in a mass at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows.” It promised that a votive candle would be lit at the shrine. Signed Fond memories, Linda and Tom, it was addressed to Dolores and postmarked July 3, ten days before she died. Do you tell someone before the end that you know it’s the end?

  Obviously, it isn’t always obvious how to say get well, especially if you don’t know enough about the situation. I would think a get well card would only go to someone who is seriously ill. But the recommendations for messaging don’t seem to support that. Seventeen Magazine promotes “67 Get Well Wishes to Show Them How Much You Care.” Looks like you forgot to eat an apple a day is among the sixty-seven. So is You’re so great even germs like you. Such phrases might do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do. An outfit calling itself spoonfulofcomfort.com advises “How To Say Get Well Soon Professionally.” Hope your recovery is short and sweet, stay strong, take extra good care of yourself, get some rest, you have my thoughts and prayers, let me know if you need anything, and feel better soon. Those aren’t terrible. But spoonfulofcomfort.com also includes a phrase that would not be very thoughtful to say to someone who has been diagnosed with stage-four color cancer: You’ve got this.

  *

  I went through the collection. There seemed to be a natural sequence to the sentiments. First came the notes that had accompanied flowers brought into the room at Baylor Hospital. Then the commercial get well cards that arrived at the house during the five months between surgery and funeral. Most of those came in the first two months. These included the ones intended as humor, the wisdoms in rhyme, the get-well-soons, the you’re in-our-thoughts-and- pryer, and the tell-us-what-we-can-dos. Last, the cards that came after. That pile was smaller. But altogether, and bound with rubber bands, the stacks were as large as a stumbling block on the floor of the storage room.

  The count:

  Thirteen notes, the size of business cards, to the hospital room with deliveries of flowers — thinking of you, with wishes for a speedy recovery, thinking of you with love.

  Sent to the house, one hundred and twenty-two get well cards.

  After the funeral, one hundred and six more, In sympathy.

  *

  Letters received during the months of illness merited a pile of their own. Sentences from any of them could be pulled out and inserted into others, like beads on the same necklace. My fond thoughts are going out to you, one says. Another, I want to join all those others who are sending you warm wishes. Or I was shocked and saddened to hear of how serious your health problems are. And, I am praying that a change for the better comes to you very soon. Not everything was stock. Someone who must have been in therapy with Dolores revealed, “Over the past two years I have learned quite a bit about your sadness as well as your joys.” What sadness, I wondered. He also wrote, “I feel as if I know Mark and the kids,” and then in italics added, “ if you weren’t making them up as you went!” This patient and his wife were both praying for Dolores.

  My sister, Patti, sent a long letter with a formulaic start. Just wanted to let you know my thoughts are with you. Patti “just wants,” as if she isn’t making too much of a claim for herself, or on Dolores’s time, which may be short. Another writer’s goal was for Dolores to “just know” that she was praying for her. This letter had come was from a former daughter-in-law, whose teenage marriage to Dolores’s older son was thirty-five years in the past.

  *

  Dolores just wanted to answer all of the cards and letters. Also, the missed phone calls, and the food deliveries. She did her best. In between surgery and a clinical trial, and again in the month before her discomfort increased and had to be countered by higher, fog-inducing doses of morphine and lorazepam. I found her Add to ‘Thank you’ sack instruction on a post-it note that was still stuck to the UPS delivery card that had arrived with a Harry & David basket. ָAlso needing to be tossed: the leftover printed thank you message she had dictated. It was a justified paragraph on a small rectangle of grey paper. Stacks of them were inside a bankers box, bundled in disintegrating rubber bands.

  I hope to thank each of you personally when I am better, for the prayers, the cards, the gifts, the flowers, the food, the crystals, the helpful information, the Chinese good luck pieces, the herbs, the books, the words of encouragement and all the good wishes you have sent to me. For now, I am sending this note to tell you how very much your thoughtfulness and your warm wishes have comforted me and brightened my days. With love…

  I don’t know who helped enclose them in the thank you cards that Dolores wanted mailed, or how many went out. Maybe I did, I can’t remember. She intended them to go to everyone who had written, called, or come to visit in those months. Her note was sent “for now,” as a stop gap, ahead of a future “when I am better.” But I don’t take that as evidence that Dolores was hopeful of recovery. More likely it was something simpler and more durable, a signature of her character.

  Dolores made other efforts to communicate in writing, throwing off as best she could the covers of medication. Mostly, those letters were never delivered. “Dear Joan,” she wrote on lined notebook paper. She was addressing a friend who had brought flowers. “I’m watching your struggling lilies that everyone admires. I’m not able to write well because of the morphine, but the choice is either to take it and stay pain free and hasten my death, or …. Every day brings more clarity to my life and helps all of us accept the finality of it.” So, despite the deteriorated penmanship, misspellings and cross-outs, this was clarity.

  I found an earlier version of this same “watching the struggling lilies” letter, too. It was incoherent. She did manage an instruction, probably to me. “Clean this letter up,” she wrote, and “I can’t think well this morning…”

  An unopened envelope, unable to forward, return to sender. On the front, a 3 May 1997 postmark and a cancelled 32-cent stamp. The stamp is a stunner. One of the very first triangle stamps, it was issued to commemorate a stamp exhibition, San Francisco’s Pacific 97, and shows a mid-nineteenth century clipper ship. The envelope was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Peter Lau on Monterry in Renton, Washington. Either a wrong address, or a past address, since the Lau’s were Malaysian Chinese in the States on student visas. I opened it to read the note inside. Do pray for us, Dolores wrote. I am seriously ill with colon cancer. She was addressing Peter’s wife, Jasmine, who babysat for us years before, when Peter was a theology student at Southern Methodist.

  You hear sometimes of people who have cancer hiding it. Dolores did the opposite. She wanted to contact everyone she could to tell them the news of her illness. I found lists of the messages left on our answering machine. Each name with a time of call and the call-back number.

  Dolores managed to make phone calls until the end of her illness. Some of them might have been drug-addled or slurry, which somehow led to rumors spread by our daughter’s classmates that she was either an addict or a drunk. It seemed best at the time to ignore the cruelty of pre-teen girls.

  She left a post-it note Talk to Nicky’s mom. Ann P., Nicky’s mom, was taking Nicky and his brother Clayton to her lake house for a weekend and had asked if our son might also need to get away. I haven’t thought of Nicky in a while. He was a wild one, even at thirteen, never one of Ben’s best friends, just another neighborhood kid. He left Dallas a year or two later to live with his father and died at twenty of a heroin overdose.

  xxiv

  There was no cure, but also no timetable, and a murky difference between hope and wishful thinking. What was the right thing to do, what was the best thing to do, what was the only thing to do? How much time do you devote to looking for answers? If like Dolores you thought of yourself as a scientist, you took the booklet the oncology office gave you, Chemotherapy and You: A Guide to Self-Help During Treatment, and spent a percentage of your precious last hours reading it. The booklet was in the box marked Dolores Illness. I could see that she used it, because she had written on the cover: Call MD temp above 100.5, chills, bleeding, no aspirin, Tylenol OK. She listed a 24-hour phone number for Dr. Pippen, or his nurse, or the answering service, ext 8377. She wrote a recipe for mouthwash on the inside cover. Also, the instruction rinse mouth 4-5 times daily. On second thought, maybe she didn’t use up any of her time reading this booklet, which was produced by the National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute. She only used it for scratch paper.

  She had bedside visitors. There were home healthcare nurses as well, though she never formerly entered hospice, remaining instead on the experimental protocol through Dr. Pippin, the oncologist, until the end. There was also Dr. Vera, the “pain doctor,” who shared that common concern about the overuse of medication. Luckily, one of my fellow dads in Indian Princesses was a physician who was also a pain specialist, and he advised and interceded to help Dolores get the pain relief she needed. You might hope to go through life with no personal connection to a pain specialist, but it can be useful.

  So this was the course of action. Dolores would work with Dr. Pippen at Texas Oncology. She would do a course of eight treatments of 5 FU and Leucovorin. Then, a CT scan to see if tumors were shrinking. If not, there was another trial to sign up for. That was the plan.

  I continued to make compilations of others possibilities anyway. As a result, I had another seven pages to discard of handwritten alternatives, none of them taken. These seven pages were a dogpile of drug names, doctors, cities, tips, and book titles. They were a stream of consciousness, but the water is no deeper than puddle, even if too muddy to show any bottom. Temodal, Temozolomide, Tomvoex, Hycamptin, Topotican, Tomudex, Capsitabcen –the drug names I wrote down had the strange syllables of Mesoamerican deities. A colon cancer vaccine via Johns Hopkins. Dr. Devine at Mayo Clinic. Tomas Andresson, ginger tea bags, interferon, panorex. I wrote down advice that no one would want to follow. Seven helpings of fruit and vegetables daily, eight glasses of water daily. And, always, recommendations for further readings. Michael Lerner’s Choices in Healing. Patrick Quillan’s Beating Cancer with Nutritrion. Anne and David Frahm’s A Cancer Battle Plan. All these books are still for sale twenty-five years later and still selling.

  This was a fraction of it, and only page one.

  Other actions on other pages included refraining from the news or any bad news, never drinking chlorinated water, visiting a park to reconnect with nature, clearing the mind by concentrating on the breath, and listening to music. Also, eating broccoli, adding garlic, and replacing meat with soy protein. I had put asterisks beside refraining from the news or any bad news, just to add emphasis, the way a student might color a certain sentence in a text book with yellow marker to prep for the test.

  There’s healthfinder.gov, and bcm.tmc.edu, and icsi.net. Anything with a web address seemed authoritative in 1997. It seemed leading edge. I jotted down Call 1-800-4-CANCER for the latest in diagnosis, treatment, clinical trials and support.

  I wrote “see ISIS Pharmaceuticals,” which had nothing to do with Islam. I added monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic vaccines, and antisense drugs to the list. Anti-sense describes so well the hopes of those five months.

  Introgen Corp in Austin and P53 therapy were on the seven-page list. So was matrix metalloprotenase inhibitors, British Biotech PLC, Agouron Pharmaceuticals. And Canseaneit, vaccine status report Dr. Puck, Immunotherapy Corporation.

  As I tore up these pages in the storage room, one by one, it was obvious, they were gibberish. But had any of it meant more then?

  BE POSITIVE was on the list – I had written it in all caps. The next line items: Endostatin, UFT, Emily’s friend in LA — whatever and whoever that was.

  On these seven pages I was still falling for Julian Whitaker, who sold his supplements and other alternatives. Radio therapy was associated with John MacDonald in Philadelphia; I had the phone number with a 215 area code by his name. And hydrazine sulfate, Dr. Joseph Gold, Syracuse. And antineoplastins, Dr. Burcynski.

  On another page, nine more possibilities. Some were novel, like HOH, human growth hormone. Others, just ordinary produce; carrots, cabbage, and cauliflower were on my list, as were broccoli, beans and peas. I put an asterisk by Oral Chemotherapy, CPT11. “It will either kill you or cure you. Dosage control is critical.” I was quoting Loy Allen, one of the e-mailers in the colon cancer discussion group.

  Yet another page, with fifteen more cures and treatments. Some of them were repeats from prior pages. I must have forgotten that I already had them. But a few new ideas were also taking their bows. Vitamin E, megace as appetite enhancer, mitomycin, Edelfosine, and Depsipeptite, which someone in the cancer discussion group had recommended trying after 5FU and Leucovorin fail. I also referred myself to an article in Atlantic Monthly, “Vaccinating Against Cancer.”

  Finally, the last of the seven pages. This last page had my notes on Gerson Therapy, which involved coffee enemas and a juice diet, along with a theory that people with cancer have too much sodium and too little potassium. The therapy required drinking thirteen glasses of juice a day, all of it made fresh from organic fruits and vegetables. Then, coffee enemas, to remove “the toxins.” It was nothing approved by the FDA, but it had its champions. None of the seven pages were dated, but this last page must have been the last of my listmaking efforts, because it included calling hospice about afternoon volunteers. It also listed Roxanol, which was underlined. My note said that Roxanol, which is morphine sulfate, was for the “opioid tolerant.” The very last line was about a CADD-PCA portable pain pump, and the need to remove furniture from the building on Wycliff where Dolores had her office. It must have been the middle of June by then.

  *

  Dolores’s business as a psychologist, and at least some of her delight in being Dr. Dyer, had come to an end. Her professional efforts concluded with a statement she approved on office letterhead:

  To My Patients

  My continued health problems force me to make a decision I had hoped not to make. I will be closing my practice as of May 20, 1997. I have enjoyed my work so very much but now need to give all of my energy to my health and my family. Your records will be available for review at my office. I refer you to Dr. Kirby or Dr. Tankersley at the office. Either will be glad to assist you. Yours truly,
  
  *

  At some point, rescuing the dying turned into dealing with living. And life was all about practical matters, tending to the day, anticipating tomorrow. I could be of use to Dolores when she was sick in bed by flushing out the port in her chest and injecting lorazepam. I could also wash our dishes and transport Ben and Eden to school and pay bills, though none of that was anything out of the ordinary. The hours in the evenings trying to learn how to “beat cancer” had been a pretense, something done to satisfy a need of my own. I wanted to think of myself as someone who would do whatever it took, even if none of it amounted to much. In fact, none of it was ever tried – not P53, not radio therapy, not walnut shells and wormwood, not even the broccoli. We never went to M.D. Anderson, which was only a few hours away in Houston, or to UT Southwestern, which was in our neighborhood. Instead, Dolores had the standard treatment, 5FU and Leucovorin, which was what she wanted, and we accepted as a fact of life that happened that nothing worked or was going to work, as we managed the months of dying.

  *

  “Dr. Redford Williams, a physician and researcher at Duke University Medical School, wants people to pipe down and listen for a change. ‘Hostile people can’t seem to shut up. Research clearly shows hostile personality types are four to seven times more likely to die by age 50 in all disease categories,’ he says.” This was in a newspaper article from 1997 that I must have thought was worth saving, since I found it in the storage room. I was feeling pretty hostile myself as I removed it from a bankers box, reread it, tore it in two, and then in two again, and threw it out. Four to seven times more likely to die? Really? It was preposterously vague, and even more ridiculously specific. I wonder whether the phrase “research clearly shows” might have no more weight than the opinions of the four out of five dentists who recommended sugarless gum or picked Crest or Colgate in the TV advertising of an earlier era. This article’s title was Silence is golden, but it may also be therapeutic.

  *

  There were other folders, also full of “science.” I had taken scissors and cut out as surgically as I could an article that appeared in the New York Times in March, 1997, reporting that “the biotechnology industry is poised to deliver a host of cancer drugs in the next two to three years. Some of them promise to extend lives…” It offered a graphic with the names of different cancers, drug companies, and their drugs, positioning them next to the corresponding body part on a visual outline of the human body. For colorectal cancer, Centocor was the company named. Its drug with promise was called Panorex. I wondered what had happened with it over the past quarter century. It turns out that Centocor was valuable, but Panorex was not. Wellcome in the United Kingdom had taken an equity position in Centocor. Then Centocor became a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. As for Panorex, an article in the Philadelphia Business Journal, August 19, 2002, under the headline Centocor: Now Bigger Than Ever, reported in passing that Centocor “pulled the plug on Panorex, after it performed poorly in late- stage clinical trials.”

  Dolores would have been unable to wait in any case. For her, the late-stage result was only a few months off.

  *

  Death was approaching. As an amateur watching it happen, I was coming ashore from the choppy sea of scientific language, medical studies, and products with many more syllables than Crest or Colgate. The “study” that Dolores had signed up for was expected to continue until April 6, 1998. She was there for the start, but flunked out long before graduation day. The title of the study: A Phase II Trial of LY231614 Administered Intravenously Every 21 Days in Patients with 5-FU and Irinotecan-Refractory Colorectal Cancer. Dolores had given her permission, as far as it went. She was asked to sign that she understood that she was taking part in a research study “because I have cancer of the colon that has not responded to treatment or is no longer responding to treatment with drugs used to treat cancer.” In fact, there were no prior failed treatments; after the surgery, being on the study was the only option presented. So it was not so much accepted, as submitted to. “I understand there is no guarantee that I will benefit from participating in this research study. I understand that I may receive no direct medical benefit and the drugs I receive may even be harmful.” The multi-page document, which I removed from a manila folder, was full of understandings. It described the study Dolores participated in, but not the experience of it. I saw that the Consent to Participate was unsigned on the document that I tore up.

  *

  Mixed in with Dolores’s notes to herself, a prescription receipt, 6/3/97, Opium Deodorized. Warning: Causes Drowsiness. This was for “oral administration.” The tincture was prepared without the natural, nauseating odor, by adding a petroleum distillate. I found the card with June appointments at Texas Oncology, PA, the Infusion Clinic on Worth Street. 6/3/97 Lab, 6/10/97 Lab, 6/16/97 Lab, 6/17/07 Lab; all the appointments were for 1 pm. Also, a phone number – Bobbie, for nails. Manicures, or the wish for them, even when life was slipping from her hands. And a blue laminated “prayer card” from Baylor University Medical Center, with a line of Psalm 118, “This is the day that the Lord has made let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

  xxv

  Frances Cargill Walther Burch was living with her seventeenth husband, Blufird, when I was married to Dolores. Their dilapidated two-story house on Elsbeth in the Oak Cliff area was just down the street from a ten-unit building where Lee Harvey Oswald had lived with his wife Marina and their daughter. I found a folder with a cache of photos of Frances, along with other keepsakes that Dolores had kept to herself. There was a faded Family Register, with a few blanks filled in – Husband, Mr. Leon Dyer, no birth date given; Wife, Mrs. Francis Cargill, born February 24, 1909. That helped me make sense of a tiny tarnished spoon I had uncovered a month before, which had 1909 engraved on its bowl.

  A photo in a cardboard frame showed Frances as a stunning young beauty, posed with her head turned and tilted slightly down. It was a professional sepia-colored portrait. She had a feint pink blush applied to her left cheek. The Sincerely yours, Frances Cargill written on a slant over her chest and turned shoulder seemed like a relic as well.

  Frances was twenty when Dolores was born in 1929, a hundred days before the crash on Wall Street. Whatever roaring had happened in the decade when Frances was a teenager, it was coming to an end. Still, Frances remained a bit of a vamp all her life. One of the photos Dolores saved showed the two of them. Frances must have been in her early thirties. She looked as distant as a someone can be, for a mother who has her arms around a daughter, her only child. Along with the photos, I found a formally printed program for Piano Recital, Our Lady of Victory Academy, High School Department, May 13, 1943, 7:45 P.M. There were thirty girls on the program. They were listed in order of performance. Unfortunately, Dolores Dyer, beginner, O Sole Mio was second on the list, which meant her mother would have twenty-eight more performances to sit through after Dolores finished.

  The program preserved a message that Frances had written on the back and passed to a friend during the concert, like a schoolgirl passing secret notes in class: “I’m bored stiff,” she complained. “It’s hot. Let’s go down to drug store and get some ice cream before we go home.” We’ve all been there. A parent at a school concert, when our child is done and we still have to listen to all the other prodigies.

  In the same folder, a page from the Thursday, December 26, 1985 Dallas Times Herald. Half of the page was a Toys R Us Values Galore ad. Dolores had written on it twice, in very large print, Don’t Throw Away! An overreaction to a day after Christmas sale? Local Area Deaths was below the fold. Under the headline, Frances Louise Walther Burch, 77, of Dallas, died Tuesday. Graveside service will be at 10 a.m. today at Grove Hill Cemetery.

  A mother’s obituary may be hard to let go of, however unsentimental you are, or no matter how difficult your mother might have been. A “Deed to Burial Rights” at Grove Hill Memorial Park identified the location of Frances’s grave. As far as I know, Dolores never visited. I also threw away the receipt for the gray granite marker we bought for the site at Grove Hill where the cremains of Frances Louise Burch were buried in a pink plastic box. The marker was inscribed with name and dates and, above the name, Dolores’s Mom.

  *

  Newsletters, awards programs, congratulatory notes, acknowledgments of donations, another letter on the stationery of the State of Texas House of Representatives, invitations to award presentations – all of them naming Dolores somewhere, this very special person in the life of the Center or in recognition of long-term commitment or a perfect example of a Woman of the 80’s. The perfect example paragraph was from a Member Profile that appeared in a newsletter from the Verandah Club, the health club where Dolores went to water aerobics three times a week.

  Some of the odds and ends were odder than others. Dolores saved two color advertising inserts from the newspaper. They promoted I.C. Deal Development Corp’s newest apartments, which included the Tecali, where she lived in the early 1970s. “New world influences in the Spanish architecture of the Tecali conjure visions of Old Mexico’s timeless grandeur.” Why hold on to this boilerplate? Maybe she knew I.C. Deal, who made a fortune in real estate, started an independent oil company, and was ranked one of the top 100 art collectors in the United States, according to Art & Antiques magazine. His obituary in 2014 described him as a champion athlete who died from complications of childhood polio.

  *

  It may seem cluttered, but the world of what we leave behind is as vast as space. And cold, too, in the emptiness between past and present, and the void of meaning between the objects and their subjects. What about Dolores’s wooden plaques on the shelves in the storage room? There were two stacks of them. Why does anyone want a plaque in the first place? They are ugly and often heavy and sometimes in awkward shapes, rectangles and shields, with protrusions. On one of the shelves alongside the plaques, a small block of marble with a message of appreciation on a strip of metal. And a chunk of glass, with Dolores’s name engraved on it. These are the kinds of objects you can’t even put out on the table at a garage sale. At the same time, it feels just as disrespectful to put them in the trash, where they belong.

  In another bankers box, framed photographs of Dolores from her childhood, her girlhood, her young motherhood as a single parent, and from the time of her earlier marriages. A photograph shows her in a snug black evening dress and heels and pearls. She posed at the foot of an elegant stairway, as if about to ascend, her hand on a polished wooden rail. The printed legend up the side of the photo: Photographed on board RMS Queen Elizabeth. This was a trip I had heard about. Her son Mike, a teenager then, had gone with her.

  Mike is still alive, as is his son, Michael, who has never married and is nearing fifty himself. Biologically speaking, it’s the end of Dolores’s line. She was an only child who raised an only child who also had only one child, the end. I put all the photos of young and younger Dolores in an envelope and mailed them to Mike, who lives in Hutto, which isn’t far from Austin. And I included every photo that I found of Frances, his grandmother. They can be his to dispose of. I am keeping the frames, though for no reason other than they would have made it a more cumbersome package to mail.

  Those empty frames will do well on a garage sale table.

  xxvi

  Gone, your childhood photos. And gone the June 1974 “News and Views” newsletter of the Community Council of Greater Dallas, which announced that the Commission on Children and Youth, funded by the Junior League, intended to look at the child as a “total functioning human.” You were the project director. You were the one the newsletter said “will be glad to answer questions.”

  Wherever your name appeared, you underlined it. Dallas had two daily newspapers then. Your name was in both. For The Dallas Times Herald, now defunct, your picture was taken with Judge Lew Sterrett, whose name is on the county jail off the former Industrial Boulevard, which is Riverfront Boulevard now, renamed after a Calatrava bridge was built over the river that separates downtown and the affluent north from Oak Cliff and the poorer, darker south.

  You saved an invitation from Mrs. Adlene Harrison, Councilwoman, on the city’s letterhead, inviting you to become of member of a citizens’ advisory committee. You even kept a copy of your response. You accepted. Both invitation and response went into the trash, on top of a Membership List of the Commission on Children and Youth, with its names of so many somebodies.

  Dolores, I’m clear cutting the forest of paper you left. You left it for someone. Twenty-five, now twenty-six years later, I am someone else.

  A signed card for membership in the Society for the Right to Die fell out of a manila folder Dolores had marked Vita. The card was dated 1973. Did a member need to re-up annually, or did membership in the Society confer the right to die for a lifetime? No bigger than a business card, it had a Living Will on the flip side. Dolores had signed. The text of the Living Will directed that she be allowed to die naturally, receiving only the administration of comfort care. Also in the Vita folder, a xerox of her application for the Marquis Who’s Who of American Women. Her answers to some of the questions: unmarried, political affiliation independent, religion Episcopal.

  All of the resumes in the Vita folder dated from the time before we met. None of them mentioned her failure to finish high school. They all began her Educational History with her B.A. degree at North Texas State University, then Southern Methodist University for an M.A., then four years at two different campuses of the University of Texas. One resume awarded her Ph.D. degree in clinical psychology in 1969. The program from her graduation ceremony at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School said 1973. At that ceremony, most of the diplomas went to M.D. recipients. Dolores was the only one of the four graduate students awarded a degree at UT Southwestern that year who actually showed up to receive her diploma from Lady Bird Johnson.

  Dolores’s employment history started in 1969, which was the year I was giving the valedictorian’s speech at Westchester High School on the west side of Los Angeles. As I offered my goofy wisdom on “existential anxiety” Dolores was starting four years at the Dallas County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center. She held different positions at MHMR: staff psychologist, chief psychologist, administrator and project director. Resumes from the Vita folder provide eight references, including a judge, and various professors, and Dolores “would be happy to provide additional references.” I wonder what other job she was looking for, or what existential anxiety, if any, she had about applying.

  *

  I came up with no criteria for what Dolores deemed deserving of a Ziploc bag. Among the things she sealed in the same Ziploc with a receipt for two office chairs purchased from Contemporary House in 1975: A Clos Pegase newsletter from Summer 1995. A birthday card, July 11, 1988, from Laverne Cook, our nanny and housekeeper. Michel Baudoin’s business card from Le Chardonnay in Fort Worth – handwritten on the card, “Jean Claude’s brother.” A message from Gwen Ferrell, her lonely next-door neighbor when both lived at the Tecali Apartments; Gwen had moved to Phoenix – “I can’t remember when we last talked, but Albert is out here now and committed to our relationship.” A lock of someone’s hair. And a crafty folded paper heart with colored threads pasted on it – “To very special friends, Happy Valentines 1994 – Pam and Jason”. Jason was a school friend of Ben’s; Pam, someone I was married to, though not for long, four years after Dolores’s death.

  *

  An unused Will in yet another manila folder. This Will, formally prepared in 1980, gave, devised and bequeathed to her adult son Mike any interest in any insurance policies. Her mother would receive “any automobile I may own.” I was given and bequeathed the house we owned at the time and everything in it (“furnishings, decorations”), but not including personal belongings – clothing, jewelry and “articles of personal adornment.” As for “all the rest in residue,” only one-third went to me; two thirds went to Mike. What residue was being referred to is a mystery.

  Dolores had never shown much concern about her own final disposition. She did save a letter and brochure we had received in 1987 from a cemetery that promoted “our sacred and beautiful Mausoleum.” It advised planning in advance for burial. I had opened the mail, reviewed the letter, and wrote in red pen at the top of it, I’m interested (for me, of course). I left it on our kitchen counter for Dolores to see. Her comment was in black sharpie underneath mine. “Me, too,” she wro

  *

  Wives in general expect to outlive their husbands. That’s not an unreasonable expectation. A life insurance industry anecdote is often retold by those who know the actuarial tables. The joke begins, “Do you know how long a woman lives?” And the answer, “Just as long as she needs to.”

  *

  Dolores wore a diamond ring from one of her prior lives. Her piles of costume jewelry also came from those times. The costume jewelry remained in five lidded plastic trays in the storage room, inside the blue plastic trunk. Earrings and bracelets were like data points in a random scatter, with no correlation that I could make between size and beauty, shine and value. There were old-fashioned pins, necklaces of thin silvery chain, and rings of bright ceramic fruit that Carmen Miranda might have coveted. I gave all of them to Corinne, who cleans my house once every two weeks. Corinne has a teenage daughter, and my middle-aged daughter hasn’t spoken to me in years.

  As for the diamond ring, I don’t know what happened to that or where it is. I may have buried her with it. Dolores and I were married for twenty years, but we never gave each other engagement bands or wedding rings. I did buy her a necklace that she always wore, nothing precious, slender cylinders of cat’s eye. She was buried wearing that.

  xxvii

  Some people are pained that ephemera is ephemeral. They have collections of candy wrappers or milk bottles or do not disturb signs from the Holiday Inn. For others, a digital database is their home base, where the past and its information are safe. The Smithsonian Institution reports that it holds an estimated 156 million objects. I would not describe that as an example of being picky, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 5.6 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans.

  I read somewhere that the only things we truly own are those we give away. That is as far from the literal truth as any wisdom could be. It’s too clever by half, which is another saying that I question. If it refers to the person who is “too smart for his own good,” why wouldn’t it always be better to be smarter, whether by half or any other fraction? All that said, I agree that it’s fair to consider what I own, and when does the metaphorical mountain of my possessions begin at least metaphorically to own me.

  Everything I own – car, house, furniture, photographs, tax records, the clothing in my closet, books on the shelf – all of it falls into two categories, based on how easy or hard it would be to part with it. Things shift from one category to the other over time, but ultimately in one direction, toward disposal.

  *

  Not done yet, but getting there. I was down to four boxes and a large white plastic tub.

  I threw out Dolores’s death certificate. Carcinoma of colon with metastasis was the stated cause of death. I want to question Dr. Gross. His answer to “Approximate Interval between Onset and Death” was “About 3 Years”. I wanted to ask him how he had allowed her cancer to go undiscovered until too late. When was her next to last colonoscopy? And when should it have been? Dr. Gross died in 2015. He’s taking no more questions.

  Information in an envelope mailed to Dolores from the Social Security Administration? Into the trash, which it could have gone into the day it was received twenty-five years ago.

  A xerox of a letter Dolores had handwritten to La Verne Cook, Ben and Eden’s nanny for eleven years. La Verne could not be persuaded to stay in Dallas any longer because her father was ailing. She was returning to Elkhart in East Texas.

  August 4, 1995

  Dear La Verne,

  Our love goes with you.
  etc.

  This fell into the category of it should be thrown away, but I would prefer not to.

  xxviii

  A diary. It was hardbound, the kind of blank journal you buy in an office supply store. Dolores was writing to Ben, a serial letter addressed to him.

  It began January 1, 1985. “Your first new year was spent at home with us.”

  Same entry: “Standing up! Not bad for six months plus.”

  It continued like this until the bottom of the first page. “I’ve started your diary,” she wrote. “I’ll try to catch up on your first six months.”

  Dolores wrote again the next day, but then skipped to Thursday, January 8. “I see the tip of your first tooth – bottom, front, your left side.” Then it jumped to Monday, January 21, a four- page entry that was a political report. There was the news from Washington, D.C. where it was so cold “the President’s swearing in ceremonies were moved inside for the first time since 1833.” Dolores editorialized. “In his inaugural address Reagan continued to talk about balancing the budget as if he hadn’t run up the largest national debt in history. You’ll still be paying off this national indebtedness when you’re grown.”

  On January 22, Dolores left inauguration day and returned to the everyday. “You fell off the bed this evening,” she wrote, “when your dad left you for a moment.” This was my brief appearance. “You’re very busy falling off everything, and we’re busy trying to catch you. Your daddy is standing here. He’s asking me if I mentioned that you fell off the bed so I can accuse him of neglect years from now. He said I need to point out that I am the one who lets you stay up late so I can sleep all morning, and I am ruining your habits.”

  Sunday, January 27: “You say ‘bye bye’ and lift your hand when ‘bye bye’ is said to you. These are your first words.”

  Those were her last two entries. The rest of this book of blank pages was left blank.

  *

  When a mother of young children dies, what has not been completed never will be. But isn’t the human situation always one of incompleteness? We leave things unfinished – a diary, the clean out of a storage room, a recounting of the past.

  Philosophers of logic have their notions of incompleteness as well, which they apply to mathematical systems. In a coherent mathematical system, when being true means being proven, there will always be a statement that is true but cannot be proven. It’s a baffling, profound notion. Also, in different contexts, obvious. What is true in our lives that we can never know is true? Probably lots of things. But our lives are not mathematical; the living are not subject to proof.

  Others have shared related insights. One way of putting it is to say that we are all leading the life of Moses, who got to the edge of the promised land but could not enter it. We obey, we serve, we may spend our lifetime working toward a goal, but life does not let us reach it. Kafka wrote this in his diary, that Moses was “…on the track of Canaan all his life,” but that his failure to get there, to only glimpse it from a distance, was symptomatic of incompleteness, and an incompleteness that would be the case even if the life of Moses “could last forever.” “Moses,” Kafka wrote in the privacy of his room, “fails to enter Canaan not because his life was too short, but because it was a human life.”

  *

  April, May, June of 2023.

  The parade of papers continued.

  A typed Financial Statement for Dolores Dyer, Ph.D. Total cash in the bank in 1976, $2500. Loans totaled $7,300. One from school, another an auto loan, the third a “personal signature” loan. She listed twelve different credit cards, five of them for clothing stores – Titche’s, Margo’s LaMode, Carriage Shop, Sanger-Harris, and Neiman Marcus.

  Dolores and I bought our first house together in 1977. So her financial statement was in support of that effort. I listed assets of $5,282.61 and a ’67 Chevrolet Biscayne automobile. Together, our confidential financial statements were sent to reassure banks that were themselves of suspect worth. Republic and InterFirst required evidence of our creditworthiness. Ten years later, they had merged their billions together and both of them were swept away in an excess of suspect lending.

  Our settlement statement from Dallas Title Company. Sales price for our first home, $49,650. We borrowed $39,402.90 at a 9.00% APR, promising to make three hundred monthly installments of $326.40.

  *

  Her high school yearbook from Our Lady of Victory. Also, more locks of hair in baggies, but no clues to whose they were. Glossy red shopping bags from Neiman’s, a wooden block with slots to hold kitchen knives, and a bunch of plastic grapes—none of that seemed to belong in a bankers box, but there it was. Dolores had also packed dozens of textbooks in abnormal psychology, statistics, and experimental method. They were the required reading for her courses on the way to her doctorate. I took them to a dock behind Half Price Books on Northwest Highway, where a young man with hair down his back, a brown beard, and a manner redolent of a graduate student circa 1969 himself said he could offer me “a few bucks” for them.

  *

  Another gold Mead folder. In this one, Dolores had made a directory of names and addresses. It was an invitation list. There were tabs for personal and for office. Within each, names were in alphabetical order, one name or the name of one couple per page. So the folder was much thicker than it needed to be, but the number of pages did give the impression of a life crowded with collegiality. I flipped through it. Hogue, Bob. Brice Howard. Joyce Tines. Lynn and Vic Ward. Maybe sixty, maybe seventy pages. It had the flavor of a Biblical census. Like that ancient enumeration, the names belonged to distant days.

  *

  A handwritten Medical History from 1979 on four sheets of her business letterhead. This had nothing to do with colon cancer. Dolores had prepared it when she was fifty. She began at age 15 ( Face paralysis – being treated for infected fever blisters on lips and face when left side of face paralyzed; had electric shock to face). At age 23, a tubal pregnancy ruptured, one tube removed. Age 26, “missed abortion,” or “reabsorbed pregnancy”. Other ages, other issues, breast cysts, abscesses, gastrointestinal spasms, an abdominal abscess. In 1979, the hormones she had been on, premarin and provera, had been stopped suddenly by doctor’s orders. What followed was a year of symptoms that were easy for experts to dismiss. She prepared this Medical History in response, reporting the consequences month by month and in detail. She had seen a psychiatrist as her health deteriorated. There was shortness of breath, vomiting, soreness, infections. She included the problems of continuing a relationship with a dry, rigid vagina or even a marriage when constantly irritated or feeling out of it. The endocrinologist she was seeing “indicated that my symptoms don’t make medical sense.” She described a distress that I remember, in the sense that I was there.

  *

  Dolores kept twenty years of DayMinder Monthly Planners and DOME bookkeeping records. These spiral notebooks were the pencilled records of her private practice as a therapist. DayMinders had the names of patients and their appointments in the squares for each month’s calendar, across facing pages. DOME notebooks had the billing and payments. From 1977 to 1997, it was all by hand. BillQuick was only released in 1995, too late for Dolores to learn the new tricks.

  Every DOME memorialized the name of its author, Nicholas Picchione, C.P.A., on a title page. Since the DOME was essentially a workbook, all Nicholas Picchione had written was the introduction. There were three Nicholas Picchiones –grandfather, father, and son–all deceased. It was the grandfather, born in 1904, whose name was on the title page. He was “the author of this system.” He was the one who had “spent 50 years specializing in the tax field.” Along with updated excerpts from the Internal Revenue Code, his introductory pages in the DOME spirals were full of his grandfatherly advice. For example, “To avoid is legal, but to evade is illegal.”

  Month by month, Dolores recorded the payments from the patients she saw. She left notes on returned checks, marked NSF. Most of the spirals also had handwritten worksheets to show total income, total IRA contributions, her office expenses, and details about doctors and donations, mortgage interest, local real estate taxes, and the expense of gasoline and long- distance calls.

  Her DayMinders were also a repetitive record. Pencilled names for patient appointments occupied the squares in 1976 and in 1986 and in 1996. Still, some changes were obvious over time. The seven appointments that filled each square in 1976 dwindled to four by 1986 and typically only two or three by 1996. By then many of the squares in a month were blank, or had a salon appointment in them, or a parent meeting at a child’s school. Boots and Cleo, the names of our two cats, appeared in the April 23, 1996 square; it was a reminder to celebrate their birthdays, which mattered to Ben and Eden.

  I’ve read about the thrill of archaeological digs that uncover the most everyday items. The farm tool from Saxon England, or the shard of pottery. Dolores’s DayMinders and DOME records have a different provenance, but in a thousand years they could also be thrilling, as evidence of the ancient practice of psychotherapy.

  *

  The Dome and the DayMinder were not the only tools she used to keep up with her days. She also had the Plan-A-Month calendars and a wire-bound Dates to be Remembered.

  On the 1976 monthly planner, Dolores wrote If lost, please return. It was in red on the very first page. The 1996 Plan-A-Month was her last one. Instead of If lost, please return, she had written Reward if lost. This was a more motivating phrase, though neither of the planners had ever been lost. On a square in August 1996, she wrote Robaxin 700 mg 3 times a day. The same appeared in October, along with Medrol dose package. Medrol is a corticosteroid hormone, used to treat all kinds of things, from arthritis to certain cancers. In a square for that same week in October, departure times were circled on the planner. We had a flight to New York. A family trip. All four of us went. Sightseeing, and then attending a production with Pavarotti as Andrea Chenier at the Met.
  I don’t recall her mention of any discomfort.

  The Dates to be Remembered – “A permanent and practical record of important dates” –was mostly blank. Its “perpetual calendar” came with the standard information about Wedding Anniversaries and what materials are associated with the milestones. It goes from the paper first to the diamond sixtieth. Wooden clocks for the fifth and electrical appliances for the eighth. The fiftieth anniversary is golden. The only anniversaries that Dolores wrote down in were ours on October 6 and my sister’s first marriage on May 20. For ours, Dolores noted that it was 1977 officially and 1978 “to his family.” I had failed to tell my parents about our marriage until a year after it happened. Aside from the two anniversaries, there were eight other dates to be remembered every year, all of them the birthdays of faraway relatives, other than La Verne’s. Dolores also drew a star on November 6.

  *

  The manila folder that Dolores labeled People was a thin one. Only three pieces of paper, two of them duplicates.

  A tear sheet from Ultra, June 1983, had a photograph of Sue Benner in her studio in Deep Ellum. The article showed some of the artist’s paintings on fabric, including Six Hearts, all magentas and violets on silk. Sue was a friend. After our son’s birth in 1984, she presented Dolores a painting on silk of three hearts to represent our family. When Eden arrived the following year, Sue gave us another, with four hearts.

  The duplicates? They were minutes of the Child Advocacy Advisory Committee meeting at City Hall on Wednesday, November 6, 1974, Conference Room 206B at 3:30 pm. Both were originals, the logo of the City of Dallas in color on both. Members present, Dyer and eight others, three members absent. Guests present, one.

  First item on the agenda: Proposed KERA-TV Special on Child Care

  Mark Perkins, Features Editor, KERA-TV acquainted the committee with plans for a 90-minute special on children to be shown in conjunction with the Week of the Young Child the first week of April, 1975. Chairwoman Harrison assigned Dolores Dyer to work with Mr. Perkins in getting the committee’s input for whatever assistance he may need from us in choosing ad presenting subject matter for this special.

  This was the official record of the minute that we met. In a way, that made it the quintessential keepsake. But did Dolores know the future, and that’s why she took two originals for safekeeping when she left the meeting? If we had divorced, Dolores might have brought these minutes to a girl’s night out, where Sue Benner might have asked, “Whatever made you get together with that guy?” And Dolores could have answered, “I was assigned to help him!”

  I took more than a minute looking it over. I never realized I had a title. I was six months out of college. Only a month before, I had driven an unairconditioned ’67 Chevy Biscayne from Southern California to Dallas to take a first job, at a public television station managed by Robert A Wilson, father of six-year-old Owen Wilson and three-year-old Luke. On November 6, 1974, I would be twenty-two for another week. Dolores, born July 11, was on her way to forty-four. I never thought of myself as someone’s “better half,” but mathematically we did have that relationship.

  The minutes had been saved only so I could throw them away. They proved however which day we met – and in what room at City Hall. If I had been asked, I would have said we met in 1975, at the earliest. I may also be mistaken about when I first arrived in Dallas. If it had been in October, as I thought, would I possibly have been in this meeting a month later? I remember spending my first months at KERA-TV staring at the walls and not yet accepting that I was employed. So I am probably wrong about when I left Los Angeles, stopping one night in Lordsburg, New Mexico, before reaching Dallas by evening the following day.

  Of course, I have no manila folder with any proof of my own. No saved receipt from the gas station in Lordsburg.

  *

  Dolores was asked to describe our marriage. She said nothing about love. “We got together,” she said, “and we never got apart.”

  She was lying in bed and answering in response to a friend who had come over with a video camera. He thought it would be valuable to have a recording. It was April or May, two or three months after her diagnosis and surgery. I was in the bedroom, too, so I heard and saw. I’ve never seen the videotape though. It may still be in a closet. Whatever VHS player we owned that would have allowed me to watch half inch tape I no longer have.

  What did she mean, we never got apart? Was she ascribing the stability of our marriage to inertia? It’s as powerful a force as any, I suppose. I never thought of us as bodies at rest during our twenty years together, but perhaps we were, certainly toward the end. People can be happy without sparks; happiness can be the absence of conflagration.

  Dolores and I were married by a justice of the peace in 1977. There were no witnesses, or none that we knew, only the next couple in line. It was unceremonious. We had no rings, I never wore one. The State of Texas required that we take a syphilis test prior to marriage, so we had done that. After we left the courthouse, there was no reception. Instead, we stopped at the Lucas B&B on Oak Lawn, where waitresses had beehive hairdos and breakfast was served all day. In a bankers box, I found the orange, laminated menu we brought home with us from the restaurant. On it, the steak sandwich I ordered will always cost $2.45, its price a reminder of how little happiness used to cost.

  xxix

  In a small book called Travel Therapy, the claim is made that the meaning of a family trip has nothing to do with itineraries, but with opportunities, as it says, “to cement the bonds of affection between family members.” That does not ring true. But then the material is produced by an outfit called The School of Life, where the wisdoms are sweet and forgiving and wise.

  Togetherness was not our foursome’s strong suit. In truth, a family trip could feel at times more like a forced march. It was only from a distance of years and in selective memory that our travel together felt comfortable. Still, I take comfort in the fact that we did so much of it in what turned out to be our last year together.

  The four of us took five trips in 1996. It’s as if we knew that this would be our last year intact, and we needed extra chances “to cement the bonds of affection.”

  In January we went out to Oceanside for my father’s eightieth birthday. Other than the dates Dolores wrote down on her 1996 Plan-A-Month calendar, his birthday is a blank. Nothing beside remains. The second week of March was also marked out on Dolores’s calendar. The diagonal lines meant we were on vacation. No departure times for March 6 and no arrival time on March 12. Destination unknown, unremembered.

  The lines hatched across May 30 to June 18 on her 1996 Plan-A-Month were easy enough to cross reference. They were for the big summer trip: Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and Morocco. Our itinerary must have been misplaced, but not the “travel reports” prepared by Rudi Steele Travel and their country-level introductions. Dolores saved them in one of her folders.. In these reports, countries are “sun-drenched,” their cities are “picturesque.” Everywhere, the health advisories include “take a pair of comfortable walking shoes,” and, in Morocco, “stick to bottled or boiled drinks.” Much of the What to Buy sections repeated an explanation of valued- added tax.

  We did take some of the advice. After we returned home, an Arraiolos rug arrived, shipped from Lisbon. Also, a second rug, from Marrakesh. They were What to Buy in Portugal and Morocco. And we agreed with the report that Gibraltar “merits at least a half-day’s visit.” Monkeys climbing on the walls there – Barbary apes, according to the travel report — entertained Ben and Eden far more than the Prado or the Alhambra had. One of the travel reports, using the impersonal first person, declared, “We think Spanish cooking is reason enough for a trip to Spain,” but also suggested not complaining about cigarette smoke. Health Advisories for Morocco advised not swimming in desert streams, since “they may contain bilharzia”, a potentially fatal parasite.

  Morocco had more than its share of warnings throughout. For example, under What to Buy, “Morocco appears to be filled with bargains, but look closely before purchasing. Good buys in wool carpets can be found, but most of what is sold is of poor quality.” This warning even suggested that the carpet-buying tourist “take a small tuft from the carpet and burn it with a match or lighter. If it smells like burning plastic, it’s acrylic fiber.” This was exceptionally rude advice. We did not follow it as we sat drinking glasses of green tea with the carpet salesman in Marrakesh.

  What to Eat in Marrakesh? According to the travel report, Moroccan cuisine is one of the finest in the world, but the same thing was said about every country on the itinerary. The report advised that we not be put off by bastille just because it contains pigeon. There was guidance that “meals are eaten with the right hand” and “don’t even pass food with the left hand.” The report said we should “splurge one night for a feast at a deluxe restaurant.” We did that. It informed us that “tradition holds that you should be seated on floor cushions,” and we were. Touajen, hout, mchoui, bastilla and djaja mahamari were praised. Mostly chicken and fish dishes, though mchoui is roast mutton. No mention of sheep’s brains, however, which is what Dolores ordered the night we splurged “for a feast.” The restaurant we picked was near the Djemaa el Fna, a Disneyland of snake charmers, musicians, and gas-lit stalls, some selling street food we avoided, and a powder to cure snoring, which I bought.

  After we returned home from Morocco, Dolores’s back pain began. She found no relief, and we speculated about the causes. Sometimes her stomach hurt. We thought it might have been something she had eaten. We thought it might have been the sheep’s brains.

  *

  In October that year, the four of us went to New York. I found no ticket stubs or hotel invoices from that trip. No business card from a restaurant on Mott Street. But the time was memorable because Dolores wanted to do something improbable. She brought Ben and Eden to hear Luciano Pavarotti in Andrea Chenier at the Met. We attended during his second week of performances. The opening night review October 2 in the Times described a production that was “pretentious, ugly, and confused.” As for the tenor, “six decades have drained a lot of color from his voice.” Pavarotti was outed as a sixty-one-year old.

  None of that resonates. I don’t remember the performance anyway, but that Dolores persuaded two reluctant children who had already sat through an opera to go into a reception room after the performance and meet the star. I don’t know how that even happened. There was no line. Pavarotti was by himself. He was a few feet in front of us, available for a photograph. She pushed Ben forward, but Eden, a month past her eleventh birthday, hung back.
  Pavarotti extended his arms toward our daughter.
  “Come here, adorable,” he said.
  Could that really have happened? I have the proof, a photo on my desk in a wooden frame, with the son who would never go to another opera, the daughter who doesn’t speak to me, and in between them Luciano Pavarotti in costume and full makeup. The reviewer had a point. He does look drained, six decades in. But then Pavarotti had just been executed by guillotine moments before on stage. He’s the only one smiling in the photo. At the same time, he also seems sad, aware, almost prophetic.

  These children are a few breaths from their forties now. The one I haven’t seen or spoken to, and the other a difficult adult – needing help, refusing help, unwilling to help himself. The phrase that floats above my head with the obviousness of a thought bubble or a speech balloon in the comics: How did I get it so wrong?

  *

  One more trip that year.

  We spent Christmas in Santa Fe. It was something we had done many times before. We would fly into Albuquerque and drive north on I-25 for an hour, passing pueblos and casinos on either side of the highway.

  When Dolores and I first started going to Santa Fe, we would stay at the Residence Inn, where there was free breakfast in the morning and free snacks in the late afternoon. By 1996, we were renting houses and taking Ben and Eden to Café Pascual’s for breakfast and La Fonda for Christmas dinner. We marched along the Audubon Trail until their resistance stiffened. The Georgia O’Keefe Museum wasn’t for them. It was the season of farolitos and the smell of pinon burning, and we walked Canyon Road on Christmas Eve, when the galleries stayed open and shop owners gave away cups of cider and cookies. It was charming, but not so much for two pre-teens. We were putting up with each other.

  That’s how I remember it anyway.

  We spent a last day in the Santa Fe ski basin. Dolores didn’t ski, but it was beautiful to be near the tree line of an alpine forest. On the way to the basin, we stopped at Cottam’s on Hyde Park Road and bought a cheap plastic sled, a throw-away, so Ben and Eden could slide around on roadside hills. We did that every time we went to Santa Fe at Christmas. One of those throw-away plastic sleds is on a hook in the storage room off the garage right now. It’s not from 1996, but from some earlier December, when I thought it was worth shipping home to a flat city where it almost never snows.

  Those were the varied travels in the twelve months of 1996. Oceanside, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Morocco, New York, Santa Fe. But we were on the very same road in all those places without knowing it, and without seeing the fork in the road ahead.

  *

  Dolores went to the Carrell Clinic in October 1996, looking for relief from pains that she thought might be merely muscular. I found a prescription pad authorization for physical therapy, for lumbar stabilization and abdominal strengthening exercises. Instruct and then set up a home program. That was the guidance from William A. Bruck, M.D. Dr. Bruck offered the same Rx again on February 5, 1997, suggesting physical therapy three times a week for four weeks. Dolores never did those exercises. Instead, she was operated on at Baylor two weeks later. On February 12, right before the scan that confirmed a presence of cancer and led to the operation, she sent a history to the surgeon —handwritten, in the script she had perfected at her Catholic girl’s school fifty some years earlier:

  To Dr Jacobson from Dolores Dyer

  June 96 Flew home from trip. Spent hours of flight in toilet vomiting.

  July 96 Treated with Cipro for diverticulitis by family doctor. Had painful abdomen. Could barely walk. Referred for follow-up scope. Back problems started.

  August 96 Can’t sleep on sides, back starting to hurt. Nightly and periodic spasms lower back. Doing water aerobics. Referred to Dr. Bruck, Carrell Clinic.

  October 96 Back problems worse. Went to Dr. Bruck. Told to see physical therapist. Didn’t go.
  December 96 Back spasms at night, up and down back – very severe.

  January 97 Seeing family doctor.

  February 5 Back to Dr. Bruck, more X-rays. Agree to go to physical therapy.

  February 7 Abdomen severely painful. Back too. One spot on left side throbs. Diagnosed with diverticulitis and put on Cipro to heal infection.

  Current Swollen, sick to stomach, most of the time. Back hurts. Pain on left side. Lower abdomen sore. Staying in bed a lot. Taking Vicodin to keep pain away. Cipro used for diverticulitis.

  2/12/97 CT scan. Hope this helps

  xxx

  Travel light is good advice for backpackers, but it retains value on the road of life generally. The things we hold onto have us in their grip. Imagine a life without closets. That would be a home improvement project with the power to remodel our souls. No storage room off the garage, maybe no garage at all – these were spaces that were more of a spiritual menace than any dark wood.

  In the dim light of the storage room, time had disappeared. Boxes of documents. Plastic tubs of clothing. Cords for landline phones and other tech past the donate-by-date. A trunk filled entirely with a teenager’s empty CD jewel cases. A grocery bag of speaker wire more tangled than jungle vines. So many photo albums, their pages sticking together like dryer lint. To keep or not to keep; until now, that was never the question.

  Surely I kept so much because I could not distinguish between what was valuable and what wasn’t. Either I had no judgment or didn’t trust my judgment. Safest, then, to keep everything for consideration later. Now that later had arrived, it was taking forever to get through.

  The rubric that begins, “There are two kinds of people” always provokes an objection. Life is complicated and no behavior falls into just two categories. With that disclaimer, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who like to throw things away, and those who are distressed by it. In the end, both need to come to terms with the facts of life. Both need to bend to the limitations of space or time, which dictate that discarding is essential and inevitable. One of them just becomes convinced of this more slowly.

  xxxi

  A note that Dolores wrote toward the end of 1996 to Dr. Perry Gross. Please give this to Perry to read, she wrote. It was a plea for help. Dr. Gross was our family’s physician. He knew Dolores longer than I did. Perry, I am not okay. There is something wrong. Dolores was on Cipro, but she was still hurting. It is not just soreness, she wrote. She was having spasms in her back when she lay down. The pain was overriding the Vicoden and Robaxin that Dr. Gross had already prescribed. She needed to get up at night and walk for relief. She had gone to see a back specialist, who found nothing on an x-ray and recommended physical therapy. She tried sleeping sitting up against pillows. She used heating pads. A third doctor informed her unhelpfully that the areas in her back that hurt were places of “major muscle pairs.” She asked Perry again, Do you think this is referred pain from an infection? Should we do a sonogram? Can I get stronger pain medication? Her questions were foretelling. It was indeed referred pain from the cancer that was spreading. In the new year, Dolores would need a different diagnostic. And stronger pain medicine. And within a few months, morphine through a port in her chest.

  *

  Some of what I found in the box marked Dolores Illness bankers were daily logs. Toward the end of June, these read like the journal of a lost explorer on a doomed expedition, a record of the freezing temperatures or how much food remains. June 26, strong pulse, active bowel sounds, no edema, blood draw. Some of these logs had been made by Mary, a nurse who came to the house, though not daily. I discarded records from Mary that were simply statistics: Weight –105, was 140, lost 35 lbs. Also, notes that were descriptive or prescriptive: Having difficulty staying awake. Nutrition key, eat a few bites every hour. Peanut butter, banana, yogurt. Most were very brief reports: Flushed dressing, changed battery. Other pages finally discarded might have been come from Monica. She came to the house five days a week, did the cleaning, shopped for groceries, and picked up Ben and Eden after school and fixed dinner for them. Monica wrote down names and times of visitors and phone calls. Joan called 9: 15. Bob Hogue by at 10. Leah Beth, 12. Debbie, 2:30. These were for my benefit, since I was at work and not home weekdays to answer the phone or a knock at the door. One of the visitors, a former patient of Dolores’s, left me a note. It said Dolores told her we needed WD-40 for the toilet so it will flush more smoothly; this might have been a misunderstanding.

  I found a note from Marti, another of the nurses, in the Dolores Illness box. It reported that Mary hadn’t been able to come that morning but Marti happened to be in the neighborhood and stopped by. New settings on pump; increased to 12 mg/hr; bolus 3 mg – still at every 15 minutes as before, she wrote, before adding Dolores wants to go to the spa with me Wednesday. My daughter and I are going for a total body overhaul – Dolores thinks she would enjoy that! Lungs are clear, heart rate a little fast, complaining of nausea. A total body overhaul? Yes, Dolores would have liked that. She needed that.

  *

  These handwritten notes became more clinical as the purpose for them, in retrospect, becomes less clear. These are from July 11, Dolores’s birthday, and July 12, her last full day:

  7/11/97
  8:30 pm 1 bolus 10 mg morphine sulfate
  3 mg of lorazepam at 9:30 – every 2 hours, 3 mg
  1 ½ cc + 1 ½ cc, wipe mouth, Vaseline
  11 pm 3 mg lorazepam, bolus 20 mg morphine sulfate
  11:35 pm 1 mg lorazepam
  12:10 am bolus 10 mg morphine sulfate
  12:33 am bolus 10 mg morphine sulfate
  1 am 4 mg lorazepam, bolus 20 mg morphine sulfate
  2 am 10 mg bolus morphine sulfate
  2:20 am 10 mg morphine sulfate
  2:45 am 10 mg morphine sulfate
  3 am 4 mg lorazepam, 20 mg morphine sulfate
  4:20 am 10 mg morphine sulfate
  5 am 5 mg lorazepam, 20 mg morphine sulfate
  7 am 5-mg lorazepam 10 mg morphine sulfate

  Nurse Marti reported. We have given 110 gm morphine throughout the night. She wrote “we,” but I don’t remember Nurse Marti being there at night. We have increased the lorazepam to 5 mg every 2 hours per Dr. Gross’s instructions, she wrote. And we have about 24 hours worth of lorazepam at this level. We need syringes. Suggest we increase base level of morphine to 110 mg/hour. At that point, baseline level at 110, we can try giving 10 mg morphine bolus with lorazepam, rather than 20, and continue other morphine boluses as needed.

  On her visits, Marti kept watch. Then I kept her notes for another twenty-five years. For all their quantitative detail, I find it hard to take their measure. By July 11, Dolores was asleep day and night. She was medicated and kept under. July 12 was more of the same.

  7/12/97
  8 am 10 mg morphine
  9 am 5 mg lorazepam, bolus morphine sulfate
  

  The last of the recordkeeping was in my handwriting:
  11 am 5 mg lorazepam + 20 bolus + bolus of 10 at 12:30
  1 pm 5 mg lorazepam + 20 bolus
  2 pm 20 bolus
  3 pm 5 mg + 20 bolus

  This list of hours and dosages went on until 11 pm that night. The task at that point? It was management.

  These days, if I looked up the best treatments for late-stage colon cancer, I see that some aspects of treatment haven’t changed. Leucovorin and 5-FU are still among the recommendations, sometimes combined with other drugs as well. So was anything valuable learned from the treatment Dolores received in 1997? Has progress been made? Maybe, I hope so. As for any lessons about the tribulations of dying, no progress has been made in that area.

  xxxii

  Let’s review: Dolores never showed an interest in the past during her last months. She never mentioned her certificates, the Ph.D. thesis, old receipts, newspaper clippings, the Mary Jo Risher trial, or anything about manila folders. She wrote notes to friends, to her therapy patients, to our children’s teachers, and to whoever she thought needed to know, or to be instructed, or to be thanked, or to be encouraged. She was concerned with her physical comfort. She arranged to have a pedicure at the house.

  In November and December, the months of the chiropractor visits, she looked for relief from back pains she could not explain. Our days were ordinary. We had the typical problems. Our two pre-teens were normally unhappy at school. In our family of four, Dolores was the happiest one, I would have said.

  She wrote her letter describing the pains that never went away to our family doctor. It must have been Perry who advised her to schedule a colonoscopy, just to be on the safe side. No urgency. So it was scheduled for February. Then surgery within days. After, when she was returned to her room at Baylor Hospital, her skin was yellowed with dye, and we waited together for the surgeon to give us the news. Eventually he came in. Dr. Jacobson informed us that the spread of the cancer was such that to remove it surgically would have led to immediate death. “What you have is incurable,” he said, “but treatable.” And so we returned home with that.

  For the next weeks, Dolores stayed in our bedroom upstairs, recovering from surgery. And then came short trips to the oncologist, chemotherapy, the protocols of a drug trial. My evenings passed in online colon cancer forums. I learned how to inject dosages of lorazepam for anxiety through a port in her chest. Dolores received a morphine pump so she could administer the bolus by herself.

  Our children went off to school. It was winter, they were occupied. Our house was being remodeled downstairs, and Dolores kept herself involved, picking out colors, writing detailed notes to the architect or the contractor or the interior designer, though her hand became increasingly unsteady.

  *

  At condolencemessages.com, there are some two hundred examples of “short and simple” condolence messages. The news of (blank) death came as a shock to me. So sorry to receive the news of (blank) passing. We greatly sympathize with you and your family. Our hearts go out to you in your time of sorrow. In many cases, maybe in most, the “short and simple” messages seem to be about the messenger. What does the sender feel? It’s possible that the answer to this question is closer to indifference than to any genuine distress. These recommended stock responses have the substance of a vapor. Some of them arrive trailing clouds of nothing. We will continue praying for you from our hearts. Whose burden is lightened by what someone else says they are feeling or pretend to be doing? Guidance is provided on the Hallmark website for what to write on a sympathy card. As a result, too many are keeping you in our warmest thoughts as you navigate this difficult time. If 1-800-Flowers has the 25 Thoughtful Messages to Write in Your Sympathy Card, Keepsakes-etc.com comes up with ten times that many. It offers 250 examples. The Pen Company promises “The Definitive Guide, what to write in a sympathy card.”

  There isn’t too much to say about most of the dozens of sympathy cards I discarded. Their messages were standard. Some of the senders surprised me though. Among those in sympathy were eleven employees who signed the card from a roofing company. The parents of the ex-husband of a one of Dolores’s former friends were also in sympathy; they must have been regular readers of obituaries in the local paper, as people of a certain age are. There were notes of sympathy from children prompted by their mothers, who were teaching manners. One child from across the street signed with a heart drawn for the dot over the i in her name. “I’m so sorry your mom died,” she wrote to Eden. It came the very same day Dolores died. Her mother may have seen the van from the funeral home arrive at three in the morning to pick up the body.

  One of my cousins, her husband, and their children were “so very sorry to hear about Dolores’s passing.” She asked, “Why do these awful things always happen to the best people?” I didn’t know. I don’t think the premise is correct.

  Our family was in the thoughts and prayers of the woman who used to give Ben and Eden piano lessons before they finally refused to continue.

  A card came that had a profile of the poet Roman poet Virgil on the front, with a verse circling it: Give me a handful of lilies to scatter. Another was made by KOCO, which declared on the back that it was a contributor to The Hunger Project, “committed to the end of hunger on the planet by the year 2000.”

  Esther Ho sent a thinking of you Hallmark card from Kuala Lumpur. I wondered whether that was available in the drugstore there. She included a picture of her daughter, who was named after Eden and was already in third grade and doing well in ballet and music.

  Our family was in the thoughts and prayers of people I barely knew. Two months after the funeral, a neighbor sent a note on Mr. & Mrs. Jeffrey Juster stationery. They had only just “sadly learned.” They said Dolores would miss enjoying the remodeling of our house, and “our deepest sympathies are with you.”

  I recognized the name of one of Dolores’s former patients, whose story I remembered. He was a burly bar fighter who was going through a sex change. Dolores used to advise John on women’s clothing, wigs, and how to apply makeup. On the front the card, tulips were embossed With Sympathy For You And Your Family. On the inside, one sentence, but broken into four phrases, and with a rhyme to make it poetry.

  May you find in each other
  A comforting way
  Of easing your sorrow With each passing day.

  It is one of the many conventions and duties of sympathy cards to say something in writing as we might never speak it.

  *

  Not every message was scripted.
  A picture postcard of Cape Point near Cape Town came through the Royal Mail in mid-July, postmarked London. It was to Dolores from her friend Louis, who spent part of the year as a guest conductor in South Africa.
  Hope the summer is treating you well.
  A week later Louis sent a letter. “Thanks for asking your friend to call me about Dolores,” he wrote. “I grieve for her, and for what you too have endured.” He added, “May your healing start soon,” which would work well on condolencemessages.com.

  A former co-worker who had moved to San Francisco customized her message. I didn’t think Jennifer had ever met Dolores, but she wrote,” All of us who knew Dolores have been so touched by her.“ Jennifer also let me know she was not married and that it would be wonderful to see me if I were ever in San Francisco. Maybe she and Dolores did know each other.

  Jennifer’s name was on the list of those who donated to Hillcrest Academy Building and Development Fund, which was the donations-may-be-made-to charity in the obituary. Hillcrest was where Ben went to middle school. Jennifer’s was one of seventy-three donations to this pre-K to 8th grade school for kids with “learning differences.” I found the letter from Hillcrest’s director reporting the “overwhelming response” and his “heartfelt thanks and deepest sympathy.” “As Dolores knew,” he concluded, “we will always be here for you.” As it turned out, no building was ever constructed. Hillcrest Academy struggled and in 2003 went out of business.

  I put every card and all the letters in the trash. But I was thinking about you, Victor and Melanie Cobb, Ernest Mantz, Elwanda Edwards, Roddy Wolper, Betty Regard, Bob & Beverly Blumenthal, Lawrence & Marilyn Engels, Ronald Wuntch, Inwood National Bank, Tom Sime, Melanie Beck Sundeen, Jack and Janet Baum, Forrest and Alice Barnett, Marjorie Schuchat Westberry, Jess Hay, Robert Hogue, Richard and Roberta Snyder, J.B. and Judith Keith, and the rest. I was thinking about aftermaths, too. Of the seventy-three donors that were listed by the Hillcrest director in his letter, I have seen only seven in the last twenty-five years. Nine, if I include my parents, whose deaths came in 2010 and 2018.

  *

  Witness My Hand, etc. It is typical of the seriously official to have an odor of oddity, a pinch of strange grammar, a language never meant to be spoken. This Witness My Hand phrase seemed to combine both sight and touch. It appeared on the Letters Testamentary that had found its way into an envelope with a return address stamped Forest Lawn Funeral Home. Letters Testamentary, from Probate Court 3, Dallas County, Texas.

  The Letters appointed me as executor for Dolores’s Will and Estate. The business that follows dying can only be in the hands of the living. A yellow post-it note I had left attached to the Letters had my to-do list, numbers 1 through 5 in circles. The tasks were financial. Look for TransAmerica in safe deposit box. Call Franklin Templeton, 1 800 – 813-401K. I discarded all of it. Including a receipt from the City of Dallas Bureau of Vital Statistics for death certificates; two at nine dollars each and ten at three dollars each. A death certificate signed by the funeral director seems like something that shouldn’t be thrown away, but I threw it out, too. And I tossed the contact information for Michael’s Fluttering Wings Butterfly Ranch. There was a sketch stapled to it of a gravesite monument, with scribbled instructions and a few questions. Texas pink granite. A rectangle around Dyer polished, or just a line under? Base polished, versus dull? Go see polished samples. Ask Bob? Bob was Bob Hogue, the interior designer Dolores had worked with on our endless remodeling. Also in the envelope, two dozen printed invitations to a ceremony at the cemetery. This was for Sunday, June 14, 1998, eleven months after the funeral. The plan was to unveil the headstone and to release butterflies with their fluttering wings.

  Forest Lawn’s business card was also in the envelope. No need to keep it, though. Forest Lawn Funeral Home on Fairmount Street is no longer in business. The phone number on the card belongs to North Dallas Funeral Home on Valley View Lane now. Was there a buy out? When a funeral home owner retires, or wants to sell the business, who wants to buy it? is a customer list one of the assets with market value? No one wants to be buried again or cremated a second time, but the dead are not the customer. And there’s a market for second-hand mortuary equipment. For the body bags, mortuary stretchers, lifting trolleys, mortuary washing units, autopsy tables, coffins and caskets, coolers and storage racks. What Forest Lawn had for sale, North Dallas must have wanted to buy. Purchasing the business in its entirety made sense. As part of the equity, the phone number never changed.

  *

  After I discarded the sign-in book that Forest Lawn Funeral Home had provided for the funeral service, I thought, this chore that feels like it has no end is finite. And whatever I put in the trash will be forgotten. Should I care? The facts will disappear with the artifacts. On the pages that preceded the sign-ins, Forest Lawn had filled in Dolores’s date and place of birth. Under the Entered Into Rest heading, her date and place of death. For place of death, someone from Forest Lawn had entered “At Home.” It wasn’t obvious to me who such facts were for. But a fact is like life – it seems to matter, even if it’s hard to say why. For example, the number of sign-ins at Dolores’s funeral, how many were there? I counted. There were 247 names in the book, including two that were unreadable. Does that fact matter? Keeping count easily devolves into keeping score. It can turn anything into a contest. I don’t know how many people will show up for my funeral, but I am certain it won’t be that many. More than once at a an intersection – this was in the 1980s — I saw He who dies with the most toys wins on the bumper of a car in front of me. That was an expression of the vulgarity of the times. Attributed to Malcolm Forbes, the phrase was countered soon enough by a slogan on a t-shirt, though I never saw one: He who dies with the most toys is dead.

  *

  Rubber-banded together, more sympathy cards at the bottom of the last of the unemptied bankers boxes. I set them loose on the floor of the storage room. Some were addressed to me “and the children,” who have never seen them. Someone quoted Matthew 5:4 (Blessed are those who mourn). “Thoughts and wishes” varied on dozens of them, but not that much. May memories comfort you. Our thoughts are with you. In deepest sympathy. With deepest sympathy. With sincere sympathy. In sympathy. With heartfelt sympathy. Let us know if we can help. Our thoughts are with you. Thinking of you. What does it mean for someone else’s thoughts to be with you? It had certainly been too much to respond to at the time, and I had never responded. What if I sent a message now, after all these years? A belated thank you, should you yourself happen to still be alive, for your thoughts and wishes.

  *

  Much has been written about the association of flowers with death and mourning. Lillies are displayed at a funeral. Carnations or chrysanthemums are brought to a grave. Reasons why are available, or at least proposed, on the blog of 1-800-Flowers, under the category of Fun Flower Facts, subcategory Sympathy.

  Flowers and the dead have been together forever. According to the blog, flower fragments were discovered at burial sites by during the excavation of the Shanidar Cave in Northern Iraq. Soil samples from the excavation were used as evidence that flowers were placed on the graves in 62,000 B.C. Indeed, flowers at funerals are in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest form of human ritual. The 1-800-Flowers post also points out that decoration and expressions of sympathy may have not been the strongest motives for flowers at funerals in the past. Before the practice of embalming, which has never been universal, flowers were used to cover the stink of decaying bodies.

  Is this true? I don’t know. At the bottom of the 1-800-Flowers post you can read the author’s bio: Amy graduated from Hofstra University with a degree in Journalism/Public Relations and put her studies to good use, frequently contributing articles to various websites and publications. She is a native New Yorker but has once called Paris and Brussels home. When not writing, you can find her painting, traveling, and going on hikes with her dog. Below that, the author’s photo. She’s a young woman. Blonde hair, but with darker roots, so not entirely opposed to deception.

  xxxiii

  Memory is an internal state, the bringing to mind some moment from the past. And there is more to remembering than simply not forgetting. There is paying attention. In that sense it is an act of love.

  Sometimes, my memories are like those flowers that were brought to a burial in that time before embalming was either practiced or perfected. They provide a fragrance that hides as best it can the odor of decay. Other times, memories are a cover that I can throw over my experiences. It keeps them warm, and also hides them.

  I kept journeying through the bankers boxes, and the plastic tubs, and the trunks. I looked at what Dolores had saved from her own life, as well as what I had collected during the months of her illness and after. I threw out her manila folders. I donated her clothing. And I brought into my house that handful of things someone else will need to discard after I’m gone. But I never arrived where I intended to get.

  I expected to reach a conclusion, and I don’t have one.

  Maybe this, that those who forget the past are not condemned to repeat it; they are free to imagine it however they choose.

  I don’t trust my own memories. Why should I? Even if they are based on my direct observation. Especially if they are based on my observation. The initial experience is filtered by my blinkered understanding. Then add to that the layers of static as the years go by, and what I remember is no clearer a transmission of the original than in the game of telephone, when truth is degraded as it passes further from the source.

  When Dolores died on July 13, 1997, my watch ended. But all things come and go, and time is coming for me. She and I are only separated, as we have been from the beginning, by the fiction of years.

  What did Dolores leave behind? She had one biological child, who had only one child, who never married; so, end of the line. Her descendants will not be numerous as the sands or the stars. Nor was she Eve, the mother of two, although one of those was a murderer. How proud could Eve have been, with Cain as her only living son? Without other mothers around asking her how are the kids doing, it probably wasn’t so bad. Eve could keep the grief to herself, hiding it even from Adam.

  Of course, none of the things that were in the storage room mattered. Not the high heel shoes in the clear plastic box. Or the Ann Taylor jacket, as yellow as the sun, still wintering in my closet for now.

  Dolores, you bagged and sealed letters, photos, Playbill programs, costume jewelry, sweaters, curled belts and scarves. They are gone. They are keeping company with that pockety noise of the dieseling maroon car you drove, which outlasted you three years, until our son – sixteen then, and unhurt by the accident – drove it into a telephone pole.

  Manila folders, dissertation, travel itineraries, pill bottles, flyers, postcards, certificates.

  It was all a message from the past. I could record it, but I could no more translate it than if it had been birdsong.

  *

  Time to stop. For the day, for the month, for however long it takes to get away from the bankers boxes. For now, I have had enough.

  xxxiv

  Some of the boundaries of Dolores’s later life were set by her willingness at age fifty-five to adopt a newborn, and then another fifteen months later. Disqualified by her age from using the normal agencies, we made private arrangements. These are ambitious undertakings at any age. Dolores was a networker. She took charge of the effort and succeeded, twice. Boxes in the storeroom were full of folders there were full of reminders of the adoption process and the first year after.

  There were lists of potential babysitters, possible nannies, a business card for The General Diaper Service, receipts from first visits to the doctor, and the handwritten guidance alcohol on Q-Tip 2 to 3x/day for navel, Desitin Ointment for diaper rash, Poly-vi-sol 1 dropper/day.

  Among the throw-aways:

  A note with a social worker’s name and phone number – Linda Carmichael, who was sent by Family Court Services to interview us for suitability as adoptive parents.

  A bill from Dr. Schnitzer, the perfectly named urologist who performed Ben’s circumcision.

  A Storkland bill stamped Picked Up and Paid. It was for a portable crib, sheet, pad, changing table, and a nipple.

  A receipt for four bottles of Similac at $5.99 each from the Skaggs Alpha Beta on Mockingbird Lane. That may have been the per-carton price. Similac was one of many receipts that Dolores had sealed in a Ziploc bag for reasons of her own. Like the Visa credit card carbon covering four weeks service by General Diaper Service, $34.08, and a “Bath tub,” only $8 from Storkland. She kept the carbon receipt for an Aprica stroller, model La Belle, in Navy, also from Storkland. The top of the receipt was for warnings. The customer understands that the merchandise must be returned at the end of the lay-away period if it hasn’t been fully paid for, “and all moneys forfeited.”

  She kept receipts from Storkland for the Medallion crib and the Typhoon rocker. A tear sheet for our Medallion crib, also saved, has the picture of the finished product assembled. Dolores chose the Malibu model, with its wicker headboard and footboard. “Today more and more young families are selecting wicker,” the copy reads. “They know wicker is a sound investment of lasting value.” This crib, disassembled, and the rocker were still in the storeroom. So was a pink bassinet, described on another receipt as a bedside sleeper. Dolores filed the assembly instructions for the crib.

  Typhoon is a wonderful name for a rocker.

  Another plastic bag had the assembly instructions for a Nu-line 4-Way Portable Pen-Crib, which is “a combination crib, dressing table and playpen that will fold flat for travel and storage.” It’s still in the storeroom, too.

  These larger items were too much trouble to discard. Someone else will have to.

  *

  There you go again, Dolores, saving not one, not two, but thirty reprints of Page 9 and 10, Section 1, from the Monday, August 20, 1984 edition of the Morning News . I unfolded one in the fluorescent light of the storeroom. I didn’t need reminding, but I reread the story taking up three of the five columns across, about the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. Its headline: Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson arrested for trespassing at convention site . The forty-two- year-old Beach Boy had been arrested on criminal trespass charges inside the building where the 1984 Republican National Convention was not quite underway. Brian Wilson spent three and half hours in custody before his release after posting a $200 bond. From the third paragraph, “Arrested with Wilson inside the Convention Center were two men, listed as employees of the Beach Boys, both of whom were found to have large quantities of pills in their possession.” The article also provided the ironic context: “In 1983, then-Interior Secretary James Watt stirred up controversy when he prohibited the Beach Boys from performing at Washington’s Fourth of July celebration. Watt contended rock groups attracted ‘the wrong element.’ But the White House rushed to the Beach Boys’ defense, with first lady Nancy Reagan declaring herself a fan.”

  This is history, but it wasn’t what Dolores was after. On the same page, below a story headlined Protesters brave 108-degree heat to rip Reagan, I could see the United Press International photograph of our newly adopted son leaning back in his navy Aprica stroller. Ben wore a “Babies Against Reagan in 84” t-shirt and was gripping the finger of the young woman kneeling next to him. The caption: Benjamin Perkins, 9 weeks old, and friend Charlotte Taft protest President Reagan. Our friend Charlotte, the most photogenic pro-choice spokesperson in Dallas, the one always interviewed on camera about abortion, its most articulate and presentable local defender, wanted her picture taken with a baby.

  Into the trash, the stack of yellowing reprints. Also, in its sealed Ziploc bag, a pink Babies Against Reagan t-shirt, which had dribble around its neckline.

  *

  All About Baby, a Hallmark product, was sleeping on its side on refrigerator shelving in the room off the garage. Its first page declared This is the keepsake book of followed by the blank space where Dolores had written in our son’s name. She provided the facts on The Arrival Day page – arrival time, color of hair, hospital, names of doctors. Other pages had prompts for what was coming soon. Growth Chart. Memorable Firsts (smile, laugh, step, haircut). Then Birthdays, School Days, Early Travels. None of that had been filled in. Instead, the bulk of All About Baby was all about congratulations; the pages and pages of cellophane sleeves were packed with congratulatory cards.

  Also, Dolores’s notes about gifts and matching them to their senders. People had shopped, purchased, mailed or dropped off at the house a Wedgewood bowl and cup, a rabbit and a second stuffed toy, a cup holder, socks, a quilt, a red suit and a blue blanket. She noted the vinyl panties, booties, children’s cheerful hangers, an elephant rattle, the electric bottle warmer, a rocker music box, and chocolate cigars. There were gifts of receiving blankets, two of them, one with a mouse head and one Dolores simply called “blue”. The infant kimono had a snap front. There were blue and red overalls, a striped t-shirt, a blue knit jacket, white sweater, infant coverall, and a stretch terry. A baby care survival kit had come in a Teddy Bear bag. Ben was a bonanza for the makers of cradle gems, towels and washcloths, yellow blankets and matching coveralls, and a white short suit with light blue trim and pleats. Dolores kept every sender’s name and the gift given in the All About Baby book. She needed to distinguish a pastel blanket from a blue blanket from yet another receiving blanket.

  There were the wishes and predictions, too.

  “Only people who adopt can really appreciate the special joy….” The card was signed Mr. and Mrs. Mathis. Tommy and Thelma had lived in the house next door in Los Angeles when I was a teenager. I played some with their adopted son Tracey and dreamed some about their adopted daughter Debbie.

  May this is the common format for wishes. Card after card, with their manufactured messages, used it. It appeared on personal messages, too. “May this happy event continue to bring you even more happiness in the years to come,” my father wrote, following the formula. One summer when I was home from college, my father had told me if given the chance to make the decision again he would never have had children. Perhaps his opinion had changed.

  “Happy birthday, my little one,” someone named Doris wrote. She had pasted a typed prayer in her card: May you grow to love only that which is good. May you seek and attain that good. May you learn to be gentle and respect yourself. May you never fail your fellow humans in need. May you lessen a bit the tides of sorrow. May you come to know that which is eternal. May it abide with you always. Amen. It was a lot, for a newborn.

  Liz, another name I didn’t recognize or couldn’t remember, had sent a card to express her happiness. She addressed Dolores. Her brief note ended with, “May it all work out the way you wish.”

  Dolores took three pages to record names and associated gifts. At the time, these pages were a to-do list for thank you notes. Nothing to do but toss them now.

  *

  Unpacked, years of large calendars. These calendars were strictly business, if only family business. They had no panels of color photographs, no wildflowers, landscapes, oceans, sunsets. Dolores used to scotch tape them to our refrigerator. She wrote her schedules for Ben and Eden on them — piano lessons, dentist appointments, Gymboree, Skate Day. One month at a time, she recounted the days. But a calendar is not a diary. It’s more like a warning, a reminder to not forget. So there’s no reason to keep it once the month and year have passed to which those forgotten days belong. Yet, here they all were, in a pile at my feet. As I lifted the pages of 1996, flipping its months over the wire spiral of the binding, the future lay underneath the past, each new month uncovered by lifting the one before. If at times in the storage room I felt like an archeologist, this was just the opposite of a dig, where recency is on the surface, and the deeper you go, the further back you get.

  Saturday, May 4, 1996. Baseball game, Scouts, 3 pm recital, 6:30 Greenhill School Auction & Dinner. For May 31, Memorial Day, the square said “Go.” Then, blue slashes all the way to June 18, and, on the June 18 square, “Return.” On June 10, the square also had “12th birthday,” despite the slash. From the look of it, our son had written that one in. Three other months had a date filled in for the birthdays of the rest of us. Our birthdays were considered to be certainties.

  The first days of school arrived the third week of August in 1996. School pictures were scheduled and a Mother’s Breakfast. Aspects of our remodeling projects made it onto the calendar. The Nicodemus sons were repairing our seamed metal roof in September. They were the & Sons of their grandfather’s sheet metal business. In his day, they would have been called tinners. School magazine drives, volunteer board meetings, city trash pickups, the due date for a science project a month away – all of it made sense in the lives of our ordinary household, though I could imagine a distant future when Dolores’s 1996 calendar would be as enigmatic as a carving in Akkadian on a stone stele from Babylonia.

  On Friday, November 1, our twelve-year-old son was grounded. Ben was grounded half a day on the adjacent Saturday, too. Sunday had a green SS marking; Sunday school, probably. The following Monday was the start of Trash Week. If I compare those days to plates spinning on sticks, it is an enviable trick. People complain about too much to do and their overcrowded calendars, but only the living need reminders.

  *

  Making plans for children consumed much of Dolores’s time. There was plenty of evidence of it in her manila folders. It’s on monthly planners, typed schedules, and written lists with items crossed off. I had the inevitable reaction as I threw things away. It was a sadness that arrives long after the fact, replacing the anticipation that preceded and the excitement or disappointment that actually occurred.

  The list of names for a daughter’s birthday party is a roll call of Indian princesses who are middle-aged women today, or empty-nesters on diets. Dana and Margaret and Lauren and Leah and Kate and so on.

  Dolores made a list of the invitees to a Halloween party at our house in 1981. Counting each couple as two, there were sixty names. Did this list of names from 1981 still have any purpose? Hadn’t it already done its job? I am close enough to the end of my life to need no more reminding. But as I threw this list of names away, crumpling the three paperclipped pages, I suspected I would never have another thought about Larry and Sharon Watson, or even try to recall Peter Honsberger or beautiful Pam who answered the phone on the front desk at a graphic design studio where I worked in 1981. She was the Pam who was hit by a car while crossing the street after a softball game, a year after she came to our Halloween party. I saw her comatose in the hospital, which she never came out of.

  It occurs to me that end of recalling is all the more reason for this list of names to go into the trash. I had been looking for some principle or rule for keeping or discarding. Maybe this should be the rule: If what I was looking at will mean nothing to anyone other than to me, then throw it out.

  But no, the rule cannot be based on meaning alone. That would only lead in the direction of chaos. I trashed the plastic wire-o notebook from Rudi Steele Travel, “especially prepared for Dr. Dolores Dyer,” with the Weissmann Travel reports for Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and Morocco, along with a folded street map of central Cordoba that Dolores had inserted into it. It had meaning. it was a record of our final summer trip. And it was my second go-round with this wire-o bound notebook. It had survived weeks earlier, when I first took it out of a manila folder and could not throw it away.

  *

  Dolores filled in a notebook with instructions for sitters. It served for those few times when we went out of town by ourselves. She provided names and numbers for doctors, neighbors, grandparents, co-workers, our children’s best friends, and their schools and teachers. Kirk Air Conditioning, Public Service Plumbers, and even Parker Service for the refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher were on the page for Services. Medications – Actifed for sniffles, Tussin DM for cough, Tylenol for fever. She wrote down the first name of the pharmacist at the nearest drug store, not just the store number. Ben had asthma attacks from time to time, and those times were typically two or three in the morning. So, instructions guided what to do. A formula for medications got posted on a cabinet door. It was Slobid and Alupent at bedtime, and, if needed, Ventalin for the nebulizer in the hall closet. If even more was needed, then Dr. Ruff, or the emergency room. Dr. Michael Ruff was the asthma specialist, but, she wrote in the notebook, “Dr. Dan Levin of Children’s Medical Center Intensive Care Unit would respond for me in an emergency.”

  Thermostat instructions received their own page and included drawings of the arrow buttons and the “heat off cool” switch, along with explicit cautions (“open the lid carefully, it drops down”).

  Overnight caretakers were advised to watch the doors on the refrigerator, “they don’t always catch.” Also, to remove the top caked ice on the right end of the icemaker each day, so it would make new ice. On the separate page for Kids, Clothes, etc., Dolores’s note about taking our son to the bathroom before the sitter went to bed was starred for emphasis: “Walk him into his bathroom and help him get his pants down good. Be sure he leans over when he sits on the toilet or he’ll pee on his legs and clothes if he’s erect or not careful. He seems to sleep through this!”

  I found the handwritten response from one of the sitters, who reported on yet another aspect of the bathroom experience. Ben had been caught “dumping and flushing his trash can into his toilet before I could stop him. Might want to watch his toilet, I don’t know what all he dumped…”

  Care for a special pet also merited a star: “Give leaf lettuce, apples, veggies, give clean water, turtle needs indoor sun or some light for two hours.”

  After Dolores’s death, I had my own variation on all this, for when I need help to cover a business trip or a weekend away. It picked up names and numbers from Dolores’s handwritten version, but the listed contacts were far fewer. Fewer friends, fewer neighbors. Dr. Michael Ruff still made the cut, in case of an asthma emergency.

  *

  In the thirteen years from Ben’s birth until Dolores’s death, two nannies helped raise our children. Dolores chose them. Each was nanny, cook, and housekeeper combined, five days a week. First La Verne Cook for eleven years, then Monica Clemente. Their days were captured in schedules, menus, and recipes that Dolores kept on three-hole punch paper, the pages fastened with brads, in a blue Mead folder. A few of the recipes were Dolores’s, but most had been handwritten by La Verne. Lima beans and pot roast, red beans and ground meat, and ground meat patties and gravy. Baked ham. Chicken fried steak, definitely La Verne’s. The ones in Spanish were Monica’s. I sat reading the Monica’s chicken recipe, with her instructions penciled in, se pone en un pan el pollo con limon. Monica favored scalloped potatoes. Pasta con camarones en salsa de naranja was entirely in Spanish. The recipes for plain chicken and for salmon on the grill came from Dolores’s. One of her suggested meals was Cornish hen, dressing, green beans, new potatoes, cranberries, banana pudding. That was a meal no one made.

  Dolores also wrote an overview. She, suggested that each meal should have a vegetable, and that other recipes could be found in our cookbooks. “Look in the Helen Corbitt Cookbook,” she advised. Helen Corbitt, overseer of food at the Zodiac Room on the seventh floor of the downtown Neiman Marcus, was an arbiter of taste in Dallas. Dolores had brought the Helen Corbitt Cookbook into our marriage, though I never saw her use it.

  There were two sets of work schedules in the blue Mead folder. The one that was typed had SCHEDULE in all caps for a heading. It was detailed. Tasks were broken down by time interval, starting at 10:30 and not ending until 6:30, though 5:30 to 6:30 was “flexible time.” Not on the schedule: Morning drop-off at pre-school. That was my job.

  This was Monday:
  10:30 – 11:30 Laundry
  11:30 – 1:00 Pick up at pre-school, lunch, nap
  1:30 – 2:30 Clean kitchen, especially floor
  2:30 – 3:00 Sweep patio
  3:00 – 5:00 lesson: reading, stories
  5:30 – 6:30 Flexible time

  The Wednesday and Friday schedules were similar, except for sweeping the pool perimeter on Wednesday and Friday’s lesson being numbers. Tuesday and Thursday had kids outside, games, alphabet, and housekeeping (organize pantry, organize drawers), with an afternoon block for numbers, learning games, trips to the park or another outside activity once a week. How shopping for groceries and cooking dinner fit in, somehow it did.

  Did anyone really adhere to these schedules? Probably not. A second schedule in a second folder seemed more realistic. Handwritten by La Verne, it had no time intervals separating one hour from the next. It was just, get these things done: grocery list, coupons, clean porches, clean refrigerator before groceries are bought, clean downstairs toilet. That was all page one. The other pages listed different rooms in the house to be cleaned and a few specific requests with more detail. Water flowers inside every other week. Wash all clothes on Monday and the children’s clothes Thursday as well. Change cat litter boxes on Monday and Thursdays. Bath for kids Wednesday and Friday and wash their hair. Empty trash in the laundry room, and all trash outside on Monday. La Verne must have made the list for Monica, who worked for us after La Verne left. Since Monica did not speak or read English, this list was also not likely used. Still, the schedules had the charm of artifacts.

  Neither La Verne nor Monica were live-ins. Both came weekdays, full time, and their duties extended far beyond child care. While Dolores went to her office, they were the stay-at-home mom. We paid their health insurance policy and stuck to the IRS rules for household employees. They earned what others earned, though the market rate certainly wasn’t enough.

  Monica had a husband but no children of her own. La Verne had a boyfriend, Ron Bryant, and eventually they married. I can remember when their vows were said, because Dolores had made a xerox of the announcement. It appeared in the community newspaper for Redland, Texas. Bryant-Cook Say Vows in March 31 Ceremony. Redland, an unincorporated community of a thousand people, is in northwest Angelina County. So, in the piney woods of East Texas, an area settled first by the Caddo and later by slaveholders. Texas may be the West in the movies, but East Texas is the South.

  “La Verne Cook and Ronald Glenn Bryant, both of Dallas, were united in marriage March 31 at the home of the bridegroom’s parents in the Red Land Community. The bride, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Doyle Cook of Elkhart, is a graduate of Elkhart High School and employed by Dr. Dolores Dyer and Mark Perkins…” Two columns in the local paper had space enough to include a photo of La Verne and the names of everyone involved in the wedding. “Flower girls were Eden Perkins of Dallas and Sabrina Peterson of Palestine, niece of the bride. Ring bearers were Quintrell Kuria of Tyler and Ben Perkins of Dallas.” Laverne was in her wedding dress. She wore a white hat with a trailing veil, white pearls and matching earrings. She was not smiling in the photo.

  I don’t think La Verne ever thought of the apartment south of downtown Dallas where she and Ron lived together as her home. Home was her daddy’s shotgun place with its gabled front porch in the piney woods. After Doyle became ill, La Verne left us and Ron and moved back to Elkhart to take care of him. That was in 1995. She stayed there. The year after Dolores’s death, La Verne was diagnosed with breast cancer. I knew about it because she called to tell me that she was driving herself to M.D. Anderson in Houston for treatments. That must have been very difficult for her. The next time I saw her, fifteen months had gone by. Ben and Eden and I were in Elkhart at her open casket funeral.

  La Verne had sent Dolores one of the thinking of you cards. It was in the Get Well stack. It’s a card I’m keeping at least for now. On the coated cover, an illustration of a wicker chair and glass-topped table. Draped over the chair, a quilt; and, on the table, two glasses of lemonade, a plate of cookies, and a vase with blooming pink roses. The back of the card quotes from II Thessalonians. On the inside, La Verne tells Dolores that she loved her and is praying for her, and then she added a you are the strongest woman I know.

  After La Verne, Monica Clemente worked for us for three years. Like La Verne, she arrived at the house after I left every morning, and she was gone by the time I came home from work in the evening. A year after Dolores’s death, she was entirely gone. I used an agency to find someone else, who stayed less than a year. I don’t remember her name. She was older and from the Philippines, very disciplined, and said “Okey-Dokes” repeatedly. By then Ben and Eden were teenagers, and the days of nannies or household help other than housecleaning had come to an end.

  *

  Dolores devoted a manila folder to a “Saving Our Son’s School” campaign. When Hillcrest Academy lost its lease in 1996, it made its temporary home in St. Luke’s Church on Royal Lane. Some of the neighbors objected. They opposed the nine-month permit that would allow Hillcrest to survive until the school could find a permanent location. A manila folder had copies of letters that Dolores had written to the mayor and other members of the city council, who would approve or deny the permit. She saved her correspondence with a reporter at the Morning News. She was among the signers of the To The Neighbors of Hillcrest Academy letter, which was sensibly worded. She also handwrote her own Dear Neighbors letter. This one was never sent, though she kept it in the folder. After telling the dear neighbors how distressing their opposition was, she concluded, “I want to thank you bastards for all the trouble you’ve caused.”

  *

  Many parents have written about the challenge of downsizing after their children have left home. They talk about the difficulty of letting go. Not of abstractions, such as hurt feelings – which are difficult to let go — but of actual objects. A mother blogs about “the impossible task” of getting rid of a child’s toys, the onesie, or the small furniture that the baby or toddler outgrew so many years ago. She denies she’s hoarding, then slyly applauds herself for being “a pack rat,” and then gives herself an ovation as she relates how she did the right thing at last, donating the old toys or putting the unused furniture out by the curb, so someone else can benefit.

  What is the point of those feelings? They seem as inauthentic as my need to complete the task of emptying out a storage room of Dolores’s folders and my records of her illness. It was daunting at the start and became more ridiculous the closer it came to the end. I had thought I could reduce, distill, extract an essence, or transmute it into some meaning, as I went into her boxes in storage. Or I would form a picture of the past, handsome and coherent, from ten thousand pieces of paper in manila folders. Instead, the pieces I went through had no straight edges. They belonged to a puzzle that cannot be put back together.

  Maybe what I have been doing is discovering or demonstrating a physical law. A kind of Conservation of Matter, applied to memories, which says that whatever I began with, I will have the same amount at the end, even if the form may have changed. Nothing disappears. Not the water boiling in the pan, not the papers or ticket stubs I throw away. They may simply change form.

  I did not throw away the homemade Mother’s Day cards that Dolores kept in yet another Ziploc bag. They were made when Eden and Ben were five and six, to judge from the wholly enthusiastic declarations of love. I brought them into the house for safekeeping. They have graduated from the storage room and are now inside, behind a cabinet door. As for their unthrottled messages? Those have turned into the message in a bottle tossed into an ocean with no expectation of ever reaching the right recipient.

  *

  That subcategory of people known as your children are going to be themselves no matter what you do. Thirty years ago, I failed to understand this. That lack of understanding is the only explanation I can make for a document I found with General Principles typed on the first of its twenty pages. I had been reading a book on “parenting” and its advice on how to discipline. Most of the twenty pages were copied from it. According to General Principles, we needed to have rules, we needed to explain the rules, and we needed to not repeat the rules endlessly or discuss behavior over and over. It also said we needed a reward menu with at least eight items on it. On a blank page in the document I had handwritten my proposal for the first four: Rent a Nintendo tape at Blockbuster. Rent a movie at Blockbuster. But a Turtle or another small figure. Special dessert with the family dinner. Dolores filled in numbers five through eight: Have a friend over. Go to a movie on weekend. Go out for lunch or dinner on weekends. Number eight sounded more like her. Ask kids, she wrote.

  General Principles was very insistent – it used will and must and should. There were lots of don’ts as well. And there were plenty of consequences.

  Provide the consequences with consistency, it said. That never happened but was not quite as mythological as the sentence that followed it: When you consistently apply the consequence, they will understand the rules.

  I must have believed that rewards and punishments could impose order, at least on someone who was still small enough to command.

  Browsing through General Principles was like unearthing an ancient legal code. By the prohibitions, you gain insight into the common transgressions.

  Money, food, and toys were declared acceptable as rewards. But with rewarding, there was also a don’t. Don’t use the same reward over and over, a child can tire of money, food and toys, so construct a varied reward menu so it will remain motivational.

  Timeout for bad behavior must be coupled with rewards for good behavior.

  Don’t praise the child, praise the action. Don’t threaten loss of the reward.

  You need to establish a baseline record for behavior. For this purpose, make a chart and keep it for two weeks. It said see xerox of page 50-51 , but I no longer that.

  Dolores actually made a chart. There it was, on lined yellow paper, more like a list than anything charted. There were specific crimes. Saying bad words and calling names made the list for Ben. Also, kicking, hitting, scratching, slapping or grabbing. His violations continued with other categories of defiance. Not stopping when told. Screaming and shouting. Our daughter Eden specialized in transgressions that were less aggressive, but hostile nonetheless – going into your brother’s room, taking other people’s things. Last were the general misbehaviors, things that must have annoyed Dolores — complaining about clothes and breakfast, getting up late, not getting dressed.

  The list replaced any longer narrative. I can’t reproduce the dialogue or picture the overflowing toilet or the birthday cake on the kitchen floor. Dolores’s list recaptured the atmosphere, though, the fragrance of the household with the six-year-old brother and his five-year-old sister.

  *

  I read through the sequence of “I will not” commandments that Dolores created. Not ten, but six for our daughter and seven for our son. They took up a page of General Principles. If this program existed in our household, nobody ever got with it. Eden’s six : I will not scream when my brother calls me names. I will not go into his room without permission. I will not hit anyone. I will not call anyone names. I will not fool around when Mommy tries to get me dressed. I will not tease my brother. Ben was not to say bad words or call anyone names or tease his sister. He was never to hit anyone, but to keep his hands to himself, which is a broader law, covering poking, tapping, and other activities he seemed unable to stop doing. His list also included commands that broke the “I will not” pattern. For example, The first time I’m told to do something I will do it. I will listen to my teacher and do what she says. And I will do my piano lessons when I am told to do them.

  Titles on many of the pages copied from the parenting book were hot topics: Family Meetings, Problems We Have, Behaviors We Want, Temper, Putting Clothes and Toys Away, Bedtime, Fights Between Children, Following Instructions, Good Behavior Away From Home, School Attendance, Chores and Allowance, Homework, Swearing and Lying . These were all pages that I had xeroxed from the source.

  Hopes for our children were expressed as assertions, and there were whoppers on page after page.

  They will be people who listen to others, and who say positive, sympathetic things.

  The fewer instructions you give, the more instructions your children will follow.

  Also, some understatements:

  The program for solving problems at home is a 12-week program, at a minimum.

  It turned out to be a lifetime project. And the solutions that I eventually found after Dolores – they were not the ones I had looked for. Tears, surrender, estrangement are solutions. Another solution to problems at home is to leave home. Sometimes partial solutions are the best you can do.

  *

  Under Problems We Have, there was a Being Lonely and Unhappy subhead, with its Loneliness and Unhappiness sidebar. The paragraph in this sidebar advised the parents of misbehaving children to decide what a good day involves. The very last line instructed us to work for two continuous months of good days. We would have needed to set a very low bar for good days in order to have two continuous weeks of them. The list under Behaviors We Want included smiling, saying something nice, giving a compliment, and not swearing when angry. For chores, the guidance was to assign as few as one but no more than four. Dolores wrote our list on one of the blank sheets: Set the table. Clear the table. Make your bed daily. Neither of our children ever made their beds. Not when they were seven or eight or nine, and not now at thirty eight and thirty nine. The guidance on allowances was to pay only when chores are done, on time, and correctly, not as guaranteed income, regardless of work performed.

  We were advised to discourage complaining and encourage problem solving. When we heard complaints, we were to listen quietly and only speak when the child changes the subject. We were to see page 169 for more detail. Our goal was to give little or no attention to the complaint. If we needed five ways to discourage negative statements, we could see page 169 again.

  General Principles spoke to a family where children responded rationally to reward and punishment. But our two were never rational actors. Haven’t Nobel Prizes in economics been won demonstrating that most of us are not? Dolores had problems with Ben and Eden getting themselves dressed for school on time in the morning. But in what world would it work to dress the child in an outfit he does not like if the child does not get dressed independently and quickly?

  I never wanted to instruct, reward, or punish anyone. My dog has always been disobedient. As for disciplining my children, I had no gift for it. So, probably not the right qualities to be the dad. The pages of General Principles were evidence of things not going well, if not a partial proof that I should not have been the dad. They belonged in the trash.

  I had emptied another bankers box. Next came the noisy part, stomping on the stiff corners of the empty box and flattening it, so the cardboard could also be discarded.

  *

  Decide what a good day involves.

  That is a challenge. To have a good life, you need good days. And to have them, you need to know what a good day is. Thirty years ago, I thought I knew. I no longer do. In truth I probably never did; at least, not with enough clarity to persuade Ben or Eden to take my version of a good day for theirs. Instead, I offered both of them the elementals. Diapers, then onesies, then t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. I provided square meals in all their shapes and variety. There was a roof over their heads; tar and gravel at the first, smaller house, then standing seamed metal over the two-story brick home where each had a bedroom and even their own bathroom. I made wisdom available. Or at least pointed in its direction, at home and at schools both on weekdays and Sundays. I can’t say they found it. Same goes for love, a lack of which will stunt a child’s growth and misshape it. I offered what I had. These years later I have concluded that it may have been unrecognizable. Maybe it was their wiring. There are circuits in both of them, they have antennae that are uniquely theirs. I thought I was broadcasting love, but the reception may have been poor. My love might not have come through. For so many reasons, good days were rare after Dolores, and then there were even fewer of them. Adolescence is a steep climb for a boy just thirteen and a girl turning twelve.

  After Dolores, they were making that climb with weights on their legs.

  *

  I’ve not really spelled it out, have I, but those were in fact the good days, those thirteen years when Dolores and I were parents together. Even the last five months of them in 1997. Those were good days despite the foolishness of General Principles, or my attempts to instill good habits or whatever else I thought I was doing. Eden was a delightful kid, full of devices. Ben was a beautiful boy, a slender demiurge. The subsequent years and their commotions have nothing to do with boxes in a storage room and clearing out papers and clothing and pill bottles. That later story doesn’t really belong here, with my tug of war between discarding and preserving.

  As for the subsequent state of things, that is more a story of mental illnesses and estrangements. Placement in a group home to see if “structure” would help Ben (it didn’t). Calls from a stranger who was Eden’s birth mother, which acted as a nuclear bomb on our nuclear family. Did all this follow only because Dolores died? Or simply because delightful kids become troubled teenagers and then even more difficult adults. Or because I couid never figure either of them out? Or because of who Ben and Eden are, for reasons of blood, as it were? Do I regret adopting? And, pressing this further, should I never have married Dolores in the first place, as my current “significant other” believes, though she has only said it once, adding that Dolores, as a woman twice my age, should have known better and never married me.

  These are nastier questions that lie under a rock in my consciousness. And nothing that I was throwing away from Dolores’s manila folders or from my records of her illness offered any answers.

  Like so much else, these questions will be stored. They exist as misunderstandings, like other things I cannot throw away. And these sentences, too, are a feint and a dodge.

  *

  One of the curiosities of looking at your distant past is how it comments on your recent past, which used to be your future. The congratulatory card from Milt and Evelyn, friends of my parents, for example, wished Dolores and me ‘Best of luck with your new baby. We know he’ll bring you much happiness.” There is some sorrow in this message, which it never had originally. How could it be otherwise, given what the future held? It is the same feeling that adheres to a pink Babies Against Reagan t-shirt, or to a black and white photograph. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s not sadness exactly. It might be bitterness, but it isn’t that, either. It’s colder than that.

  The coldest things for me to look back at were those at the farthest distance from where I have landed. Things that remain where the hopes and dreams were, on the shore where a future that never came to pass was left behind.

  What would it mean to be God, to know the future, as God is said to know it? What sorrow that would be, though God would never feel it, to know in advance the hollowness of intentions, to know the misfortunes that are waiting. What better definition of hopelessness could there be than to have perfect knowledge of the future.

  *

  The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote a short essay on the portion in Genesis that begins with the death of Sarah, Chayei Sarah. He titled it A Call From the Future. It begins with a recounting of Abraham’s past. At 137 years old, Abraham was “old and advanced in years,” as the text describes him. He had banished his first son, Ishmael; he had stood with a raised knife over the breast of his second son, Isaac; and now his wife Sarah has died. What does a man do after knowing such trauma? He is entitled to grieve. But Abraham’s most pressing task was to find a wife for Isaac, who is unmarried and nearing forty. This is the lesson, according to the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: First build the future, and only then mourn the past.

  Isn’t that what I did? After Dolores’s death, I worked with my children to see them on a path into college. But Ben dropped out and moved back into his bedroom, behind a closed door. And Eden spiraled off to be with the birth mother who reclaimed her, and then with husbands as intemperate as she was, the last one a violent suicide. And whatever cloud was inside my son darkened into depression and a passivity complete enough to obliterate the distinction between failure and the refusal to try. Both of them, like Isaac, are nearly forty now.

  So I built a future, just not the one I thought I was building. And if I am now spending time in the past re-reading emails, looking at old clothing, or going through greeting cards, I am making no apologies for it.

  Rabbi Sacks concludes his essay with a warning. “So much of the resentments of this world are brought about by people obsessed by the past and who, like Lot’s wife, are unable to move on.” Maybe so. But two cheers for Lot’s wife for looking back. In the text, she has no name of her own. I would call her human.

  xxxv

  Those not busy being born are busy dying . And I had bundles of bills from those busy earning a living from the dying. A “hospital visit/simple” from Dr. Pippen, $66. A “hospital consult/comprehensive” for $330. Prudential could provide an “explanation of benefits.” Other insurances did the same, on pages of explanation no one had any interest in understanding. Pages were mercifully marked This Is Not a Bill . An invoice from Tops Pharmacy Services asked that its top portion be detached and returned with payment. The patient balance was $1.50. Tops sent a subsequent bill that listed this $1.50 again, but also requested $919.23, which was Over 30. I must have neglected the earlier, larger invoice, for the period ending 7/12/97.

  Dolores died 7/13/97. Some subsequent bills were addressed to the Estate of Dolores D. Perkins. Charges for morphine sulfate injections, drug infusion pump supplies, and external ambulatory infusion devices. For the thirty days ending on July 13, 1997, these charges totaled $9,436. I had reviewed none of the charges at the time. Now I was throwing bills away and took the time to wonder about them, trash bag in hand. If two 200 Morphine sulfate injections (J2270) had a $534 charge each, and each of two 400 Morphine sulfate injections (J2270) had the logical charge of twice that amount, then why did the 160 Morphine sulfate injections at the end of the invoice total $4,272? Maybe it had something to do with the number of injections needed that very last week. Medical billing is a mystery. The hospital is harder to question than even the car mechanic.

  Nobody really wants any of the things they must buy from the business of medicine. North Texas Colon & Rectal Associates PA billed Dolores for “mobilization of splenic flexure.” Medibrokers rented her a lightweight wheelchair with two “swingaway” footrests. There was the morphine and the pump to dispense four to seven milligrams per hour. Other medications, supplies, and equipment, and instructions for same. Prednisone, take with food, take EXACTLY as Directed. Morphine Sulfite, Causes Drowsiness, especially w/alcohol. Clindex, Compazine, Imodium, and Lomotil, for stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea. Promethazine, for pain, nausea, and vomiting after surgery. We descended through an underworld of Greek-sounding words that are found nowhere in the daylight of home or neighborhood. Heparin flushes, bacteriostatic agents, syringe, needle, tubing, and pads with alcohol for prep–those were in my wheelhouse. I did the flushing of the port in her chest, administering the anticoagulant, then the Ativan. Packages with supplies of morphine, sodium chloride, bacteriostatic, heparin, needleless connectors, latex gloves, syringes and needles appeared on the woven mat at our front doorstep. Emptying a bankers box, I was finding the packing slips and taking my time reading their once urgent delivery instructions: Deliver via Sharon P. by noon.

  We received no deliveries from Amazon in 1997. Amazon had only just filed its S-1 as part of going public. That happened on May 15, when Dolores had less than two months left. I should have bought Amazon stock that May instead of A Cure for All Cancers. An investment then would be worth a fortune now. But no one knows the future. We only know what happens to us eventually, in the long term, though by that May Dolores almost certainly knew the near- term as well.

  *

  Into the trash, bills for services provided at the Sammons Cancer Center, whose lead donor, billionaire philanthropist Charles Sammons, had made his money in insurance, cable television, industrial supply and bottled water.

  Sig Sigurdsson sent a separate bill for the $77.92 left over for management of anesthesia, after insurance payments.

  A letter to Dolores from the government. “Medicare cannot pay for the services that you received,” she was told in reference to a charge for Omnipaque, which is used before CT-scans because it contains iodine and is helpful as a contrast medium.

  Statements for services performed in March, April and May for chemotherapy, venous access and flush, fluorouracil and leucovorin calcium, were mailed again in December from Texas Oncology PA. Dear Patient, attached is a new patient statement. Based on comments from our patients, we’ve made changes that should make the statement easier to read and understand. Overdue reminders came from Patient Services.

  By and large, the business offices were patient. Invoices for services were still being sent from Sammons Cancer Center in February the following year. Your Insurance Has Been Billed, they would say. Please Remit payment For Any Balance Reflected In The “Patient Amount Due”. And Thank You. Instructions were repeated in Spanish, with “Patient Amount Due” in English, and then Gracias. There were bills for small amounts left over for Chemotherapy, push technique and injections of heparin, fluorouracil and leucovorin calcium. Dolores had done chemotherapy starting the month after surgery until near the end. These were experimental protocols. I can wonder whether participation in an experimental drug trial should be considered paid work, rather than a billable event.

  xxxvi

  Only one bankers box left.

  More than enough has been written about travel, how it broadens us and allows us a perspective unavailable any other way. Less so about the hoards of itineraries, hotel brochures, city maps, country maps, visitor guides, handwritten lists of attractions, receipts and ticket stubs that it produces. In Dolores’s collection, placed in multiple manila folders, each of them labeled Travel, she was all over the map.

  She saved an article about the hill towns of Tuscany, a handout with day hikes in Bryce Canyon, a mint wrapper from the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver, and a Quick Guide to London (a Beefeater on its cover) from the British Tourist Authority. Also, three pages of home listings from Anchor Bay Realty in Gualala, California, a trip we took that must have provoked daydreams about moving, or of a second home.

  The American Automobile Association sent her the folded map of Spain, Portugal and North Africa, including Gibraltar, Andorra, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Madeira, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In the same folder, an Official Visitors Guide to Santa Cataline Island, and a note with a smiley face from Susan “looking forward to your stay in the E.P. Ferry Room” at The Old Miners’ Lodge in Park City, Utah.

  Some of the trips we took left nothing behind in my memory, either of the year they occurred, or of the experience. Despite maps and receipts, they made the trip to the trash. Most, however, had left a combination of mental snapshots and uncertainty – had we actually been to such and such a town or museum, or did Dolores simply get the brochure.

  I sat in the storage room reviewing and disposing. An itinerary from Rudy Steele Travel recaptured our first trip overseas with Ben and Eden. That was 1993, when they were eight and six. We flew into Milan, took the train to Rome, stayed Sunday to Thursday, left by train for Florence, then a rental car to Siena, Orvieto, Gubbio, Ravena, before dropping the car in Venice and taking a water taxi to the Hotel Marconi for three nights, then the train from Venice back to Milan, then home. I only know this because the itinerary said so. The memory of these places is a blur. It comes into focus only for moments, on stracciatella gelato in Piazza Navona, on pigeons landing on outstretched arms for photographs in Piazza San Marco, on squabbling children, and on that sharp moment that occurred on every family trip, when I swore to myself I would never do this again.

  Dolores saved a library of brochures and maps for Lone Pine, California, including an alphabetical list of the movies that had been made there, from Adventures of Haji Baba with John Derek to Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, Richard Widmark, and Harry Morgan. There were one hundred thirty-four films listed, and a dozen television shows – Death Valley Days, Wagon Train, and so on. She also kept the self-guided tours of Inyo County, a map of Mt. Whitney, and a “planning your visit” guide to Furnace Creek Ranch, for our own Death Valley days.

  I discarded any number of one-offs. A typed reminder from the Jefe de Reception that the fecha de salida seria hoy at Hotel Playa Blanca in Cancun, Quintana Roo. A brochure from the Chateau de Pommard in Burgundy. A stub from the Millenium Broadway, for a 4-night stay, four guests in one room. A detailed graphic with explanations of every image on The Sun Rock, which is the Aztec calendar. The business card of Hotel France Louvre, 40 rue de Rivoli, Paris 75004. A ticket stub from Mission San Juan Capistrano, visited on St Joseph’s Day, March 19, 1982. Another stub, this one from Museo del Prado in 1994. The 1992 Carte Touristique in celebration of the 350 th anniversary of Montreal. Did we ever go there? Stationery from St. Ermi’s Hotel on Caxton Street in London, also completely forgotten. A brochure from The Andrews Hotel, two blocks west of Union Square in San Francisco. This was close enough to walk to Sears Fine Food for Swedish pancakes and lingonberries. I remember that. A postcard from the front desk of The Inn of the Governors in Santa Fe. A receipt from Le Richelieu Motor Hotel in the French Quarter, $25 for the night in 1975. A brochure for Yamashiro in Hollywood, where we took my parents to dinner for their fortieth anniversary in 1988. A brochure for Hotel Colon in Merida, Yucatan, which had tiled steam baths. It was a city where a steamy rain fell every afternoon when Dolores and I were there. That was back in 1975, when we barely knew each other.

  *

  An oversized postcard from the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles displayed the skeleton and tusks of an Imperial Mammoth retrieved from the La Brea Tar Pits. An undersized paper bag from Smithsonian Museum Shops contained a receipt for $.75. Dolores saved all shapes and sizes of tickets for admissions, including a green ticket smaller than a postage stamp for Empire State Observatories. It carried the self-advertising message Souvenir of visit to the most famous building in the world. That could be true. The Taj Mahal might be more famous. So might one of the Great Pyramids, if a pyramid is a building. Souvenir tickets for tours of the United States Capitol had rules on the back that warned Standing or sitting in the doorways and aisles, smoking, applause, reading, taking notes, taking of photographs, and the wearing of hats by men are prohibited.

  I threw away brochures for Hershey, Pennsylvania (The Sweetest Place on Earth) and for Fallingwater, in Mill Run three hours away. Also, the flyer that bid us Welcome to Capilano Suspension Bridge & Park. A business card for the Mandarin Inn, at 34 Pell Street, specializing in Peking and Szechuan cuisine. And a promotional brochure for The Money Factory, from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This brochure could have been used as prep for the Jeopardy category Denominations and Their Presidents. It not only named whose face appears on the one dollar, two dollar, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bills, but what’s found on their backs as well. Those “what is” Jeopardy questions, in order: the Great Seal of the United States, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Lincoln Memorial, the U.S. Treasury Building, the White House, the U.S. Capital, and, on the hundred, Independence Hall.

  Prepping for Jeopardy would not have been Dolores’s reason for saving any of this. I didn’t have the question to which her Travel folders was the answer.

  *

  The Caribbean cruise we took in 1977 on the Monarch Sun was scheduled for a week, departing and returning to Miami, with stops in San Juan and St.Thomas. It turned out to be longer. A different ship, the Monarch Star, broke down. It floated into waters near Cuba, and the Sun was required to rescue its passengers, who were miserable and cursing as they were brought aboard our ship. It was our good luck. Those of us on the Sun were offered the option at no extra charge to take the Star’s more expensive itinerary, with stops in Port-au-Prince, Cartagena, Aruba, Curacao, Caracas, Grenada, Martinique, and St. Maarten.

  Dolores kept our passage ticket in its yellow jacket for cabin 606, an outside stateroom with shower. On the list of thirteen cabin options, from deluxe apartments to inside double staterooms, our outside stateroom with shower, double bed, vanity, and double wardrobe was fifth from the bottom. I found the Schedule of Shore Excursions, and the daily Program of Activities. The Sun Never Sets on the Fun, starting with coffee and pastry, then breakfast, then mid-morning bouillon, light lunch, then luncheon, then afternoon tea, then cocktails, dinner, midnight buffet, and then Eggs Benedict at three a.m. “for the late swingers.” Passengers could dance or flee from the music of The Regency People, Koko and the Calypso Stars, the Betty De Que Duo, and the Al Kapp Duo. There were on-board stage shows, talent shows, exercise classes, ping pong and shuffleboard, movies, bridge lessons. Giant Jackpot Bingo for prizes at 9:30 p.m. An on-board casino, open until three in the morning. Suggested dress for the evening: Jacket and tie for the Gentlemen. Mr. James Kirk was the excursion manager for the shore excursions. Kirk was not the captain. The Sun’s captain, J.E. Markakis, was called Commander.

  I have a shipboard photo somewhere. In the photo, I am the twenty-five-year-old wearing a Cutty Sark t-shirt. Dolores was forty-eight then. Most of our fellow passengers were cruise regulars, gay travel agents, and retired dentists from Miami and their wives. The servers waited on us in the dining rooms, poolside, everywhere. They had seen everything before. Many of them were from Anatolia or the Maghreb and other places far more exotic than our stops in the Caribbean. All of them wore the loose white coats that you might associate either with medicine or barbering.

  Dolores didn’t save anything from our stop in Haiti, where a local tour operator handled the shore excursion. I remember it though. Two scenes, disconnected, as though they were separate film clips. In the first, Dolores and I are led into the cathedral in Port-au-Prince while a funeral is in progress. We are ushered right to the altar. A priest is talking. Sitting in the new pews, schoolgirls in plaid skirts and white blouses.
  “This is a funeral,” our guide says, his voice louder than the priest’s. “These are school children. This funeral is for their teacher.”
  Then he leads us out, the scene ends.
  In the second clip, Dolores and I are driven “through the colorful winding streets” of a residential area and up a mountain, for the panoramic view and tour of the rum factory. It is the view described by an itinerary in Dolores’s Travel folder as “one of the most beautiful in the World”. To the west, the blue of Port-au-Prince bay and the whale-shaped Gonave island; to the north, the Matheux Range; to the south, the mountains of Morne La Selle; and to the east, the faraway Dominican border. No memory at all of the rum factory itself, but only of the ride in a private that takes us back down the mountain. The car descends slowly. At the first switchback, a young child, eight or nine years old and wearing nothing but his white underpants, runs in the dirt, just outside the passenger side of our car. He holds out his hand to our closed window as he runs.
  “Give me something, give me something,” he repeats, his pleas in a rhythm, keeping up with us for a few seconds, until we gained speed.

  *

  Before any travel, there’s the planning. And before that, the dreaming. Dolores’s Travel folders were full of torn-out pages from travel magazines. I also found a typed list of ideas for destinations. The list was three pages. It covered all the continents. It seemed to aspire to include every possibility from Kansas to Kamchatka. With some of the entries, Dolores noted the number of airlines miles required for tickets. There was the improbable Kamchatka Peninsula, Boojum Expeditions, with its 800 number. Andy Drumm’s Tropical Ecological Adventures, out of Quito. The Platte River Valley in Nebraska, to see the sandhill crane migration. And Fly to Shanghai; Suzhou, the Venice of the East, a day trip by train from Shanghai; Hangzhou, resort by a lake; fly to Beijing, hire a car to the Great Wall. That was a trip I actually ended up making in 2001, but with a girlfriend, her polite teenage son, and my resentful teenage children. We replaced Dolores’s Hangzhou with Xian, in order to see the terra cotta warriors, and we began in Beijing instead of ending there. I might just as easily have let my finger fall elsewhere on Dolores’s list. On ten days in Turkey, or through the Copper Canyon via rail out of Chihuahua, followed by kayaking on the Sea of Cortez or a drive through Baja California.

  *

  After so many years, the roads have merged. I am no longer clear where Dolores and I had gone, when, or even if. The paper records I was throwing away had the quality of third-party news, rather than something I had experienced. Even her handwriting was no guarantee that what was written down ever took place. Did we stay in the Albergo Hotel in Firenze, or is this just information she gathered, although the note said Please reserve room or rooms with bathrooms for family of four, two adults, two children, at most reasonable price. My memory is as thin as the paper Dolores left behind in her Travel folders. Were we ever in Albergo Bosone in Gubbio as a family of four, with bath at most reasonable price? Her comments were often about costs and suggestions for trimming them.

  A hotel voucher for the Jeronimos Apartments, Calle De Moreto, Madrid, proves that we were in Spain, party of four, in 1994. But keeping the receipt from a hotel, what for? Today, I would refuse the receipt. And any printed itinerary. When a business asks me to go paperless, they might have financial motivations, but their offer of electronic information is an act of compassion. It can all be deleted by the button on a keyboard.

  We went back to Madrid in 1996. That was before Dolores knew that she was ill. On that trip, we took a train leaving Atocha station and went south past fields of sunflowers on our way to Cordoba. From there, memory fails. Car rental? We saw Seville, Grenada, Lisbon, and Gibraltar, and then flew Air Maroc to Marrakesh. My adult son recalls a different itinerary that included Barcelona, a place I’m certain I’ve never been. It came up long after I finished in the storage room.
  “We drove through Barcelona,” he told me.
  “No, we didn’t.”
  “We did.”
  “It never happened.”

  *

  No matter where, all of our family trips shared a common experience. At some point, Ben or Eden managed to get lost. Or we thought one or the other was lost; neither of them ever thought so. At Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece in Pennsylvania, Eden disappeared. We feared she had fallen into the water, but she was just in one of the rooms, being watched by security. The moment you realize your six-year-old isn’t with you is a peculiar one. The emotion varies, depending on the location. At Fallingwater, it had an overtone of fear, but also notes of irritation. The solution came quickly, and everyone spoke English. On the other hand, the time we lost Ben in Belize, we came closer to panic.

  Dolores devoted one of her manila folders entirely to Belize. Her collection included a brochure for Blue Hole National Park, a “popular hiking spot” where the Sibun River emerges from its subterranean journey into the base of a collapsed karst sinkhole. The park is also home to three of the five species of wild cats in Belize — ocelot, jaguar, and jaguarundi – not to mention coral snakes and boa constrictors. As I thumbed through it, I thought what a bad idea that had been, to go there for a hike. Even though the trail we took looked narrow enough to confine both children, they delighted in racing ahead of Dolores and me. We caught up with Eden, but when the loop trail ended back at the parking lot, there was no sign of Ben. Could we have passed him somehow? On such a narrow path that seemed impossible. A park ranger at the exit only spoke Spanish, but he understood anguish well enough. He walked back down the trail into the park to look. We waited for an eternity, though the ranger returned with Ben in ten, maybe fifteen minutes. No explanation of how he had managed to get off the path. However it had happened, from the ranger’s lack of excitement we gathered it had happened many times before.

  Into the trash, dozens of loose papers, including a brochure from Rum Point Inn in Placencia and a picture postcard from Placencia. At Rum Point Inn, three daily meals were included, according to the voucher Dolores had placed in her folder. She kept the receipt showing the purchase of a snorkeling tour to Laughing Bird Caye. I was surprised by a tear-out from Architectural Digest. Its photo spread was for Blancaneaux Lodge, Francis Ford Coppola’s property in the Cayo District. Underneath it, a receipt Dolores also saved. That’s how I know fifty years later that the four of us stayed two nights at Blancaneaux Lodge in a double room with two beds. From there, a day trip to the border, though I found no record of that. Even so, I can picture the souvenir stand and the soldiers in fatigues carrying automatic rifles on the Guatemala side.

  Only three things left to get rid of from the Belize folder. There was a rental car receipt and another rack brochure, this one for Pelican Beach Resort in Dangriga. And last, a tri-fold about Guanacaste National Park. I lingered over the cover drawing of a blue-crowned motmot. What, I wondered, is a guanacaste? It’s a tree. It’s a giant, over one hundred feet tall. It has a trunk that can be six feet or more in diameter. Or so the tri-fold said. I don’t believe we got ever there or saw one.

  *

  A trip to Costa Rica left its residue in a manila folder. Nissan Sentra, $486, 11 days Dolores had written, on road map I unfolded to see our route traced in green marker. We drove north from San Jose, passing Arenal, a volcano that emitted small puffs far from the highway. The Monteverde Cloud Forest was fewer than a hundred miles northwest, but the road was slow. In places, it had collapsed. One of the holes we drove around was bigger than the Nissan Sentra.

  I’ve read that Quakers were the ones who preserved Monteverde. They arrived in Costa Rica in the 1950s, looking for a country with a negligible military and no draft. Our arrival forty years later came after looking for a place to go on Spring Break. Ulises Rodrigues, Manager, and Wilberth Parajeles, Assistant, welcomed us cordially to Hotel Montana. “We do not consider you and your family as a number,” they had written on the hotel handout. “For us, you are a very special person.” Dolores had saved their message. She preserved the flyer from the Jardin de las Mariposas in Monteverde, too. Looking at it so many years later in the storage room, it did remind me of blue morpho butterflies that were the size of Chinese fans.

  She also kept the pocket folder from Si Como No, a hotel in Manual Antonio on the Pacific Coast where we stayed three nights. It was still stuffed with its brochure, stationery, postcards, and menus. And its picture postcards were still perfumed with that “wish you were here” scent that is essential to destination marketing.

  I found a business card from Restaurante Super Mariscos Sarchi Norte, Rigoberto Rodriguez Soto, Proprietario. You can google it, it’s still there, still simplemente deliciosio, though this unremarkable roadside restaurant in Costa Rica is now abierto todos los dias. On the back of the business card, it said Cerrado los Martes. So here was a warning not to show up for mariscos on Tuesdays at Restaurante Super Mariscos. It been sleeping in a manila folder in a bankers box for nearly thirty years. Dolores had left it for me, through marriage, widowhood, my brief remarriage, and my long divorce.
  Si como no?

  *

  In my “if I could live my life over” fantasy, I long for the do-over of the many things I’ve bungled. And I want a repeat of experiences I will never have again, at least not at the age I was when the experience was a thrill. There is one trip I have the impossible wish to experience again just as it was. In 1993, Spring Break again, we visited the Big Bend area on the border between Texas and Mexico. No hint back then from our nine-year old son or seven- year-old daughter of the disruptions of the years ahead. So I lingered a bit longer than usual over the brochures and clippings that Dolores had collected — the panoramic postcard from Prude Ranch in Fort Davis, where we stayed a night; a rack brochure for McDonald Observatory, with dates and hours for Star Parties; the newspaper article about the sandhills in Monahans, where we stopped in a rental car after a Southwest flight into Midland Odessa. I reviewed daily trip plans on the index cards she kept, a clipping about the Gage Hotel in Marathon, and information about the cottages in Big Bend National Park. Dolores had noted “no rooms available,” which is why we ended up in Lajitas, a faux frontier development that belonged to the empire of Houston businessman Walter Mischer.

  An envelope stamped Official Business had come from the United States Department of the Interior. Dolores must have requested it. She had the official brochures on Big Bend National Park, Panther Path, and The Lost Mine Trail. A catalog from the Natural History Association listed maps for sale and guidebooks about rivers and deserts and flora and fauna. I tossed it. along with the Texas Monthly feature on Big Bend and the two articles on the park from The Dallas Morning News.

  Why Dolores had kept hotel brochures and travel agent itineraries, ticket stubs, receipts, the shore excursion guides, the tri-fold flyers, street maps and road maps – was it to help her remember, or so she would be remembered? I have no theory.

  All the papers went into the trash. They needed to be gone. It was sad to be reminded and, at best, bittersweet.

  Nothing in a manila folder about La Kiva, a restaurant in Terlingua, though La Kiva was a best memory. La Kiva had a hole in its roof so the bright stars were visible. In its dining room, Ben and Eden raced around the tables and no one was bothered. La Kiva did no marketing, so there was no postcard, and the menu was on a chalkboard. Phones weren’t cameras then, and no pictures were developed. As for my memory, it is fragmentary, and less spatial or visual than in the echo of the name of the place.

  xxxvii

  Done. The last of the boxes emptied. No more manila folders. Nothing left, or next to nothing, that Dolores had kept from the years before her illness. Same with the colon cancer discussion list emails, the get well cards, the amber pill bottles and funeral service sign-ins saved under my watch. If it had all been saved in support of memory, had it all been discarded in the service of forgetting? Or in order to remember the months of February to July 1997 in whatever way I want, unburdened by reminders.

  In 1998, Michael’s Fluttering Wings Butterfly Ranch was a business in Mathis, Texas, not far from Corpus Christi and the Gulf of Mexico. It supplied live butterflies, which were sold to be released at special occasions. Butterflies were purchased for weddings and for birthdays, but mostly for the occasion of burial, or for the ceremony graveside at a later time, when a monument might be unveiled. That was what we did. We ordered butterflies to release at a monument ceremony in June 1998, eleven months after the funeral.

  The butterflies came packaged in a triangular, nearly flat paper pouch, one for each butterfly. Each of the pouches had Caution: Live Butterfly as part of the warning printed on them. Open slowly and carefully. Marketing collateral that accompanied the butterflies referenced American Indians and a legend in which butterflies were the messengers of the Great Spirit. To make a wish come true, the copywriter said, whisper the wish to a butterfly, and upon these wings it will be taken to heaven and granted.

  The Butterfly Ranch was the business of Reese and Bethany Homeyer. Both names were on the return address of the flyer I saved, though only Bethany signed the letter that came with delivery. You have received your shipment of Butterflies, she wrote. Keep your Butterflies in a cool dark place until the time of release. She hoped we would enjoy the beauty of setting these delicate creatures free. I can say that it engaged both children, who were fourteen and twelve. At the unveiling, it provided a moment.

  I found an article about Bethany online. It was from the Caller Times, “Butterfly wings lift spirits of grieving mother.” It reported that the business was booming. And it was Bethany’s story, about the business she had started after her son Michael died in a car accident at eighteen. Michael’s behavior had been very foolish — drunk, riding on top of a vehicle a friend was driving at high speed down a rural road. The article online was “last updated” in June 1997. I wondered if the Butterfly Ranch was still in business. The article claimed that Bethany and Reese had out-of-state customers, “thanks to the couple’s home page on the world wide web,” but there is no such page to be found any longer.

  xxxviii

  Why would people want to be mourned? Surely we know that after we die we are unlikely to care. And who attends our funeral is not our concern either. Even our name on the donor wall of the symphony hall or homeless shelter will make no difference to us. Praise makes sense for the living. But being remembered? It’s less substantial than a shadow. Grief makes sense, but that is only for the living. Our attitudes toward death are full of contradictions. We dress up death, clothing it like a living doll. We take things we assert aren’t so and then act as if they are. We say God is incorporeal, but then we talk to Him. He has no arms, but we long for His embrace nonetheless.

  xxxix

  I have reached the point that you, if you are here, reached some time ago.

  I have asked myself with every item discarded what good was this revisiting, this embrace of the past that was also a rebellion against it.

  There was no single takeaway from what was hiding in the folders Dolores saved and I threw away. These folders, manufactured in imitation of manila hemp, a banana-like plant that isn’t hemp at all but a fiber that comes from the Philippines and is no longer used to make sturdy, yellow brown envelopes, are gone. Surely every piece of paper they had held had been placed in them deliberately. It had been retained by design, but over the years that design had disappeared.

  Same with whatever I kept – or am keeping.

  Isn’t that the way of things, a reverse teleological reality, where things move not in the direction of purpose, but the opposite.

  Four last “thoughts”:

  Memory is like the glass bowls I use for my cold cereal. The bowls are small, but if you accidentally drop one, the brittle, tempered glass shatters into a thousand pieces. The glass is made to do that. The tiny bits of the breakage are less likely to cause serious injury, as long as you don’t try to clean them up barefoot.

  Memory is made up of fragments, bits and pieces, some rhymes, fewer reasons. When I am told that the unexamined life is not worth living, I have my doubts. Not everything is worth examining.

  Memory is quicksand. Sink too deeply into it, let it into your throat and your nostrils, and you will be unable to breathe.

  Last, more personally: Four years after Dolores’s death, I remarried. It didn’t last long. So I’ve been widowed and I’ve been divorced. I don’t know if I ever want to marry again, but I never want to be divorced again. That said, being divorced does have an advantage over being widowed. When someone divorces you, at least they take their things with them, even if they take some of yours as well.

  xl

  An afterthought:

  Articles arrive in my email daily, as reliably as a ten-year-old on a bicycle once threw a morning paper onto a front porch. While I was still working at emptying boxes in the room off my garage, an article appeared in my inbox. It linked to a translation of an essay written in 1943 by a woman in hiding on “the Aryan side” of Warsaw. She had escaped the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. This woman, Rachel Auerbach, was one of those who helped compile what became known as the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of papers and objects buried in three metal milk cans and some metal boxes on the eve of the uprising to preserve the memory of that doomed community of Jews in Warsaw. It held “diaries, eyewitness accounts, sociological surveys, poetry, public notes and wall posters,” along with theater tickets and chocolate wrappers, and other ephemera. No Ziploc bags back then. Compiled under the direction of Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive survived the total destruction of the Ghetto. Ten metal boxes and two of the milk cans were found after the war. One of the milk cans had a note from a nineteen-year-old boy. “What we were unable to scream out to the world,” he wrote, “we have concealed under the ground.” Rachel Auerbach had helped buried the archive; when she returned to Warsaw after the war, she helped to recover it.

  Her poetic essay might even be considered part of the archive, though it was never buried in a milk can or a metal box. In her essay, she called those murdered “the lowly plants of the garden, the sorts of people who would have lived out their lives without ever picking a quarrel with the righteous – or even the unrighteous—of this world.” Of the deportations she witnessed, she wrote that no cries were heard, “except when women were caught and loaded onto the wagons, and one could hear an occasional in-drawn hiss, such as fowl make as they are carried to the slaughter.” She asked, “How could such people have been prepared to die in a gas chamber? The sorts of people who were terrified of a dentist’s chair; who turned pale at the pulling of a tooth.” She grieved for her brother’s orphan daughter, her cousins, all her mother’s relatives. She named them, and the towns and places of their murders. And then she wrote, “I will utter no more names.” She knew that memory had become a cemetery, “the only cemetery in which there are still indications that they once lived.”

  True enough. True for Dolores Dyer, and for Rachel Auerbach’s niece, though for Princess Diana, maybe less so.

  ***

• Self-Portrait With Books

  SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOOKS

  Chapter One.
  TURN OF THE YEAR

  It is the last week of the year.

  I have decided to sell the loose diamond that my second wife left behind ten years ago. So I go looking for it where I think I have left it, in the small safe in a room that is now a den but was our bedroom during our marriage.  The combination is 80-37-72.  I can remember that somehow, no matter how long since I have opened this safe, which has my passport, birth certificate, some coins, duplicate car keys, and other things that I used to keep in a safe deposit box at the bank.  There is no loose diamond though.  There is only a ring, with a diamond in it.  Perhaps that’s the one.  I also find a diamond of a different kind – my “vital information” document that an attorney had me fill in as part of redoing my Will and Trust, after the divorce.

  The list of assets on this document is no longer accurate.  My old email address is no longer mine.  But there is a sequence of statements that are meant to pass along my instructions to those who will deal with whatever I leave behind, starting with my dead body.

  I have a deceased spouse, who was my first wife, and I wish to buried “next to such person.”   I do not wish to be cremated.   Any special requests for the funeral?   “Say a prayer of gratitude for life,” it says, though I do not remember why I wanted that.  What song, music, or poetry do I want at my funeral?  The form asks.  I request Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Catullus’s poem on the occasion of his brother’s death and specify that it can be found in my copy of Spring Shade, a paperback on one of my bookshelves.   I do not have a brother and have trouble finding the Fitzgerald book, but here it is, on a shelf in one of the seven bookcases that are built into the hallway. The translation goes like this:

  By strangers’ coasts and waters, many days at sea,
     I came here for the rites of your unworlding,
  Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living,
     And my words – vain sounds for the man of dust.
         Alas, my brother,
  You have been taken from me. You have been taken
          from me,
      By cold chance turned and shadow, and my pain.
  Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
       Long ago for the starvelings under earth:
  Take them: your brother’s tears have made them wet;
         and take
    Into eternity my hail and my farewell

  No telling what the odds are of this being read at my funeral, but probably somewhere between very low and no way.

  The form then asks about the engraving on my tombstone. I reply “just birth and death dates” and “faithful husband, caring father.”   In answer to where donations can be sent in lieu of flowers, I write, “I like flowers.”

  What else?  I say that I admire the example of my first wife, who died thirty years ago of colon cancer. I add that I am content to follow wherever she has gone.  Asked for any message to the ones who come after me, I imagine my mourners, if any, and I write, “Be comforted.  If you loved me, I loved you.”

  This document that my attorney gave me years ago to fill out also has empty pages with measured spaces to insert the facts.  All that David Copperfield kind of crap, as Salinger put it. Which hospital I was born in and on what day.  Names of my mother and father and their mothers and fathers. How one grandfather fled conscription in the czar’s army, though that is only a story and may not be true.  How he arrived in the States by himself as a teenager, which may also have been just a story. How the immigration officer at Ellis Island changed his name to the one I have now; that is certainly a myth — more likely, Grandpa changed it himself. These details hardly matter.  Aren’t we all descended from the same Adam and Eve?

  The biographical questions and my answers go on and on. Parents met after the War. Neither one went to college. Father worked on a laundry truck, then sold Baldwin pianos, then furniture wholesale.  The fact that I grew up walking distance from the Pacific Ocean.  That I skipped 3^rd grade and have put up with illegible handwriting ever since. How I never had a grade lower than an A and was valedictorian of my public high school. Graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. Ran a business for forty years.  The lifetime achievement awards, the boards I was on. That I was married, adopted a son and a daughter at birth, a year apart.  That I was widowed, remarried, divorced.

  This unearthed form also has a space to fill in for When I am gone, I hope my family learns this from my experiences. I write that I agree with Thoreau — your elders have nothing to teach you, though I add that it doesn’t keep us from believing otherwise, or continuing to try, whether we believe or not.

  Last, The most important thing to do in life is. In that blank space I write, “Keep moving.  If only I could do that now, I would not be where I am.”

  ii

  Dante Alighieri found himself in a dark wood midway through his life’s journey.  I am way past that this December morning.  Not out of the woods, but long past the midway point.  I am in my seventies.  They say that Moses was eighty years old when he saw the Eternal in a shrub that was on fire but not consumed by the flames.  I am nearly there, but the Eternal has not appeared.  Not yet.  The last time I read Dante, I was turning the pages of an elegant, softbound Il Paradiso in Italian, La Nuova Italia Editrice Firenze. I also had three paperbacks of John Ciardi’s translations with me. In my earliest twenties then, I am sitting in Café de Flore, or in one of the other Paris cafes I had read about in A Moveable Feast, pretending that I am a poet or at least a writer or would be one shortly. All those books are still on my shelves – Dante, Hemingway, and the Hebrew Bible as well.  That last one is the only one I am still reading, despite its disputed authorship.  And they have all been moveable, from dorm room to apartment and from house to house for fifty years.

  There are 2,369 books in the house I live in now. Most of them are on shelves, though some are on desks and tables, downstairs and upstairs. I can be more granular. There are 1,471 books on the 56 shelves of seven bookcases in the hallway that leads from the front door to a bedroom.  There are 219 books in the room off the kitchen, which might be called a den, some of these on glass shelves, but most in a freestanding bookcase from a Wayfair catalog. There are 238 other books on ten shelves in two built-in bookcases behind the writing desk downstairs, and another 209 on the ten shelves in the two bookcases built into the wall in front of this desk. On top of the downstairs desk, 75 more books. Then, the 56 books on a desk in the room upstairs, which is a studio. In that same room, 56 more books on the small metal shelves that seem to float off the white metal stand from Design Within Reach. On three other tables in the house, one upstairs, one in the den, and one a Plattner table in my so-called living room, another 15 in total. And, last, in the kitchen, 29 cookbooks on the floating shelves of another metal stand, this one black.

  Other than cookbooks and kitchen, there is no clear correspondence to which books are where. No obvious principles have been applied.  There will be six Graham Greene paperbacks together in a hallway bookcase. But a seventh Graham Greene will turn up in the den, and an eighth upstairs. Streaks occur, just like they do in an NBA game, or in baseball. But a book about Sandy Koufax will be nowhere near one with the wisdom of John Wooden. And multiple copies of the same book – Virgil’s Aeneid or Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, for example — keep to themselves on separate shelves and even separate rooms.

  This lack of a system, the absence of coherence, is this a symptom?

  iii

  A new house is being constructed across the street. At all hours of the workday, which starts for them before I am out of bed, the Mexicans who do the lifting and the carrying, the hammering and the sawing, have the volume raised on the tinny music that comes from their radios. Although distracting, it is not unpleasant. I barely remember the house that used to be there, on that same site. This was the home that Mrs. Linehan lived in with her slow adult son Bobby, who died first, though I never knew how or of what. Mrs. Linehan was already in her nineties herself. She died a few years after, ten or eleven years ago now. Her other two sons and their wives were eager to sell the house, which then stayed vacant for years, until it was torn down by the buyer.  Then the lot stayed vacant for five years more, while the stock market fell sharply and rose slowly.  Now something new and grand is under construction, someone’s dream, and I can hear the Mexicans shouting to each other over the music.

  iv

  The books in this house are also my neighbors.  Not just the unread ones, the unexplored, which are the majority, but those I have read and forgotten, those I took in page by page and that have disappeared inside me.  When I look at the shelves, I am uneasy.  Melancholy is as good a word as any for this feeling.  So many books.  And too many of the author’s faces in the photos on book jackets, are frowning in disapproval.  Some may only be winking.  On one of the lowest shelves down the hallway, the six coated spines of A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, edited by Horace Howard Furness, stand at rigid attention.  I look for Much Ado About Nothing, and the scene where Dogberry calls comparisons odorous instead of odious.  These Variorums, all Dover Publications, are stale leftovers from college.  As it turns out, Much Ado About Nothing is not among the six.  Comparisons are odorous, but there was a time I would have remembered that, without looking.

  v

  On another shelf, the six volumes of Proust, the Moncrief translations.  I have read only one volume – Swann’s Way – and It was hard going, each sentence a journey on which at some point I would lose my way.   I would have to go back, retrace my steps, and even then I would rarely retain half of where I had been or what I had seen.  I began the second volume, Within A Budding Grove, but only got ninety-four pages in.  My bookmark is an unmailed souvenir postcard of a mural in Mexico City.   In front of the mural, some tables and empty chairs.  Did I pick up this colorful card at Sanborn’s in my twenties, when I was a tourist with my first wife – her name is Dolores — in Mexico City?  Just as likely, the card was hers, from her life before we met.  My remembrance of things past is not detailed enough to be certain.

  vi

  The things my daughter left behind when she left home have been boxed up for twenty years.  I realize now that she is never coming back for them.  It has been seven or maybe eight years since I last saw or spoke to her.  Three boxes hold everything she left – clothes, CDs, drawings, high school notebooks, her diaries that begin but then stop after a few pages, the sci-fi stories she started writing but then abandoned, rolls of undeveloped film, the cards and notes, a few stuffed animals, the baggies full of beads and shells and colored threads, her collection of X-Files episodes on VHS tapes.   I threw much of it away years ago.  Whatever was too sour or anguished in her writing or in the cassette tapes that she recorded late at night, I did not save.  What I still have on the floor of the room upstairs are only the boxfuls that I thought might suggest to her, if she came back for them, that her childhood had not been the misery she is convinced it was.  And so whatever she is holding against me, perhaps she could let it go.  She might even see that she has mostly made it up.

  vii

  When she was a little girl, my daughter — Eden is her name — had an astounding memory.  Maybe even a photographic memory, if there is such a thing.  This could be why being completely forgotten by her is one of the sharper knives.

  viii

  Difficulty remembering books, despite how much of life is spent reading them, turns out to be common.   Many people ask online if it is normal to forget what they read.  Some even compare the experience of reading to soaking in a bathtub and, after the water goes down the rain, discovering that nothing is left from the experience, just the filmy residue in a ring around the tub.  My lack of reading retention goes far beyond forgetting the sentences I spend hours soaking in.  With many of the books on my shelves, I am not even clear about whether I ever opened them.

  In the case of a Vintage paperback of Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems, which I am taking down from a shelf in the hallway this morning, it is the poet’s name that enchants me.  I flip to a random page and read this stanza dedicated to Alexander Blok:

  I come to him as a guest.
  Precisely at noon.  Sunday.
  In the large room there was quiet,
  And beyond the window, frost.

  I do not read Russian, but I do not imagine that this is any better or any more engaging in its native language.   Who knows, maybe it is.  I do like her name though.  And there is a charming patina of age on the January 1914 printed below the fourth and final stanza, and I have held onto the memory of finding this turquoise blue paperback in the largest and most famous bookstore in St. Petersburg on an afternoon escape from a group tour in 2018.  The bookstore, in the former Singer Company building, is an Art Nouveau treasure on Nevsky Prospekt.

  Hundreds of the books on my shelves are this way.  My attachment to them is a romance that has little to do with reading.  That said, I am not a collector.  So many of these books, probably most, are cheap paperbacks.

  ix

  For thirty years, I exercised five days a week at midday on a treadmill at the Verandah Club behind the Anatole Hotel.  I would go for the exercise and for the pleasure of a shower after and to break up the workday.  William Gilliland, who sometimes shared my row of lockers in the dressing room, was a retired bookseller and tried to persuade me that a book should be prized as an object.  I told him it was only the sentences inside that were valuable, not the paper or the binding or the copyright or any author’s signature on a flyleaf.   He disagreed.  And over the years, Bill gave me several first editions from his collection as gifts.  One or two of these gifts were written by nineteenth century Englishmen nobody reads anymore; another is a first edition of Leonard Cohen’s first novel, The Favourite Game, published in 1963 by Secker and Warburg.  Nobody reads that either.  I certainly never have.

  x

  Carelessly, chaotically, other than how each fits into the pocket of space between its neighbors, these books have been shelved willy-nilly.   My unkept New Year’s resolution this year should be to organize them.  For example, by author’s last name or by genre or type.  Novels, poetry, history, science, religion, self-help, classics, cookbooks.  Books I have read, books I want to read, books I have started but will never finish, books that I bought but will never open.  The paperbacks, the hardbacks, the coffee table art books that are lying on their sides.  Books with jackets, books with broken spines.

  In my teens, I wanted to see my own name on a book spine, jacketed or not.  Look how many there are, how hard could it be, to write a book?  But that wish has gone nowhere, and I wonder where could it ever have gone.

  xi

  Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the books on my shelves I have never finished despite several tries.  The writing is chilly enough that I doubt I will ever do more than dip a toe into it.  Its six hundred pages are as overweight as its more complete title, The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is, With All The Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics and Several Cures of It.   It was published it in 1621, when Burton was in his forties.   I am thirty years past that and baffled by its meandering.  In the dead center of it, part a passage encumbered with Latin phrases, Burton writes that “whosoever then labours of this malady of melancholy, by all means let him get some trusty friend to whom freely and securely he may open himself.”   In my own experience, talking to friends is not much help.

  The author of one of the introductions to The Anatomy of Melancholy claims that Burton’s book is “packed with common sense and uncommon nonsense.”   This is not a phrase that would encourage most readers to keep trudging to the very distant finish.

  xii

  My first wife died when our children were eleven and thirteen.  The two of us used to read aloud to them, picking the same prized books night after night.  At five, my daughter’s favorite was The Polka Dot Puppy.  it remains on a shelf in the hallway.

  The Polka-Dot Puppy is easier reading than The Anatomy of Melancholy.  It is also more subversive, especially for an adopted child for whom where do I belong can become a painful question.  The plot is simple.  After a long, unsuccessful search, the polka-dot puppy finally finds a home.  Same with Are You My Mother? — another book we would read with my daughter.  Similar plot, only this time a baby bird instead of a puppy.   What underlies this need to search for the true parent or the right home?  I don’t think I was ever confused about my parents or the house we lived in.  Disappointed in them, often, but not confused.  It is possible I don’t remember.

  xiii

  Maurice Sendak’s Pierre was another favorite read-it-together book; it is somewhere on the shelves as well.  This one I associate with our other adopted child – his name is Ben — the older by one year.   It is about a boy who says “I don’t care” to everything.   Sendak must have been inspired by Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, where the infuriatingly passive hero says “I would prefer not to” in response to every task his employer gives him.  Melville also wrote Pierre: or The Ambiguities, a novel no one reads unless they have to.  If they do, they can choose the edition with illustrations by Maurice Sendak.  I don’t own Pierre: or The Ambiguities in any edition, though Moby Dick is under the waves of the lowest hallway shelves.  Even in paperback, it is heavy enough to sink.  I read it in college and remember little more than its famous first sentence.   As for Sendak’s Pierre, it turned out as prophetic of my son’s future attitudes as The Polka-Dot Puppy has been for my daughter and her sense of unbelonging.

  xiv

  This poem Eden wrote in third or fourth grade is in a metal frame slightly larger than an index card.  It goes:

  In Big Bend

  Trees and grass
  Birds calling
  Mountain air
  Rough rocks.

  Not exactly Mary Oliver, but similar.  Oliver’s Blue Horses is on one of the shelves in the hallway.  Oliver’s title might have been a line in my daughter’s poem, though blue javelinas would be a better fit for Big Bend.  Oliver’s Why I Wake Early is on a shelf, too.  I have read enough of these poems to tire of their self-regard, their recording of attentiveness to the natural world.  Wislawa Symborska has more bite and is more to my taste.   And for praises of nature, I prefer Thoreau’s droll, aphoristic sentences.  There is more than one Walden on my shelves. When I start reorganizing, I can also find where I put his Wild Fruits. 

  xv

  Do parents always harm their children?  We may not mean to, but we do.  That is what Philip Larkin says, in a poem between the covers of a book I am looking for down the hallway.  I come across Wislawa Symborska instead and open her Collected and Last Poems to read the translation of Night, a poem from the 1950s.  Symborska writes in the voice of a child about the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac.   She imagines herself experiencing it.   She is the child brought to a mountain in the wilderness to be sacrificed at God’s command.  The knife that is raised above her breast is held by her own father.   It is an imagining that is worse than any bad dream, worse than loneliness.   And she writes that from that night forward, God begins to move –minute by minute, day by day–from the literal to the metaphorical.

  Symborska is Polish.  By chance, Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer is leaning into the space left after I remove her Collected and Last Poems.   Halfon is Guatemalan.   I want to reread The Polish Boxer, which is a novel or a sequence of stories or maybe just a recounting, not a memoir exactly, but closing in on one.  It is hard to tell.  And it is so simple, the translated sentences, that I think anyone could write it.  I tell myself I could write it.

  xvi

  Three is a magical number.   The three remaining boxes upstairs that remind me of my once-upon-a-time daughter have a place in the plotting of a fairy tale.   Suitors from distant kingdoms would be asked to open one of the three.  Inside, they would find a challenge to overcome or a riddle that must be answered in order to win her hand.  In real life, I am the only suitor, and the riddle is when exactly to throw everything away.  They are her belongings.  Or, former belongings, because neither boxes nor daughter belong here any longer.

  xvii

  Sometimes an object has explanatory power.  The things I kept after my daughter left home tell a story, but I am at a loss to come up with a moral.  The past is not once upon a time, it is a series of specific times.  There is a brown paper sack with a sticker on it that says The Cat’s Out of the Bag About…with her name printed below that.  Inside, a strip of paper with My Favorites Are and spaces to fill in.  Favorite food, favorite color, favorite hobby.  There is space for Person I Admire Most.  This must have been done during her X-Files phase, since Agent Scully was her most admired person.   She was nine or ten or eleven then.  Career I Want in The Future?  She wanted to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.  Place I Want to Visit?  Inside a U.F.O.  Something I Do Well?  Levitate.

  If she returns soon, Eden can also retrieve her school reports.  At nine years old, she has “quite a charming personality,” in the words of a lower school homeroom teacher.   “She has the gift of conversation and is a caring, cooperative young lady.”  Hard to know how formulaic this second-grade reporting might have been.  Two other reports, one from the year before and one from the year after, from different teachers, begin with the exact same phrase.  She is “a joy to have in class.”  This phrase may be the wine dark sea of praise from primary school teachers.  “She always listens,” a first-grade teacher writes, “and seems to hang on my every word.”  That is not how I remember her, but I concur.  She was a delightful child.  Smart, curious, funny, imaginative.  On a slip of paper that has a teacher’s semi-serious recipe for “Swimming Spaghetti,” my joy-to-have-in-class daughter adds in the blocky printing of a third grader, I wonder if it can do the backstroke?

  And then, within a few short years, the diary entries and poems turned into misery, and there is the cutting herself and putting cigarettes out on her arm to “stop the pain.”

  What happened?   Her mother died, she became a teenager, her father remarried, her birth mother found her.  But which of these might serve as an explanation, nothing that she left behind explains.

  xviii

  Despite or because I forget most of what I have read, I enjoy stepping into the same book twice.  That is what I intended to do with The Polish Boxer.  Unfortunately, what was entrancing the first time, on second reading seems like posturing.  The idea of the book has become better than the book itself.   So I am stalling out on The Polish Boxer, despite how slender and inviting it is.   I reinsert it on its bookshelf in the hallway.  I have no more patience for Eduardo Halfon and his pretentious conversations with Milan, the Serbian pianist who improvises a playlist no matter what the program says.  I am tired of his Guatemalan authenticity, the meals with spoonfuls of caquic and other foods I have never heard of, the white rice covered by ladles of spicy pepian.

  xix

  As for the diamond ring that belonged to my second wife – her name is Pam –  she left it in our safe deposit box by mistake in 2006.   It is mine now.   The terms of our divorce decree declare that from its date forward whatever was in the physical possession of either of “the parties,” as we are called, belongs to that party.   My appointment with a business that can value this ring and will either make an offer or not is today at noon.  The place where I am selling it is a suite on the top floor of a twenty-story building.   It takes a very deliberate journey to get there.  First, finding the right driveway into the building and its underground parking.  Then from the parking garage elevators to a lobby.   The lobby elevators go only as far as the seventeenth floor, where a private club is open for lunch.  A separate elevator then carries me up two more floors, to a Regus space with a shared reception area, for businesses that do not want responsibility for a receptionist.  Not for the employee, or for the coffeemaker, the refrigerator with cold drinks, or the shared waiting area and its generic furniture.

  The business I am going to is a local office for what its website claims is “the most trusted buyers of diamonds, fine jewelry and luxury watches on the planet.”   I have a noon appointment with one of the “experts in 18 locations around the globe,” who has “access to the latest market data” and will provide me “a seamless process, incomparable value, and immediate payment.”

  I am a few minutes early.   The expert comes out at the exact appointed time, and she extends her hand.   She reminds me of someone, but not of anyone I know.  She reminds me of someone I wish I knew.  Perfect skin.  Short, straight auburn hair that falls in a semicircle to the level of her chin.  Her name is Heather.   Skirt and blouse and heels, though she comes to work at a business where she is both manager and sole employee.  I follow Heather back through right turns and left turns, down corridors and beyond the closed doors of the other Regus tenants, to the small space where she has her desk, and where she ushers me into one of two armchairs on the other side of the desk.

  I am wondering whether I am her grandfather’s age, or only her father’s.
  Probably somewhere in between.
  The diamond ring in my pocket is wrapped in a tissue.  I fish it out, as Heather is waiting for me to present it.  A beat, a moment passes.
  “Let’s see what you have,” she says.
  As I pass her the ring, a witticism occurs to me, and before I think better of it, I say it.
  “You’re very beautiful,” I say.  “I think I should be proposing.”
  No response, really.  She smiles though, as a saleswoman might.
  Heather has a jewelry loop, a computer screen, and a booklet that she consults.  There are gemologist certifications in frames on the walls.   As she works, she mentions the boyfriend who wants to marry her.  It does not take her long to assess my diamond and offer half of what I had hoped she might.  She writes the offer on a form and says she can write the check today or transfer funds directly into my bank account.  I tell her I have to see one or two other places for comparisons before making a judgment.  Giving me back the ring, Heather tells me the offer is good for seven days.
  Who she reminds me of occurs to me afterwards, in the elevator down.
  She is a ringer for Agent Scully from The X-Files.

  Chapter Two.
  WHAT IS FAILURE REALLY

  Sooner or later, every man is a failure in his own eyes is an admirable aphorism.  I don’t know who said it or where I read it, but I get it.  From time to time, both sooner and later, I too have the conviction that I have failed.  And not just failed at this or that.   Failure can become an attached label, like a name tag on a sticky white rectangle peeled from a roll and then pressed onto a breast pocket.  I have written my first name and last initial on that rectangle, using the black Sharpie pen that the host at life’s check-in table has provided.  I also own the nicer, metal tag, the one that has my first and last name debossed on a strip of metal.  That is the manufactured one that comes with the separate button of a magnet and the warning do not use with pace maker.

  ii

  Yearend is a time to walk through the events of the year past.   At life’s end, however, going back can be a complicated journey.  And a stumbling, melancholic one.  Be not solitary, be not idle, Robert Burton recommended in The Anatomy of Melancholy, as one of his cures, steps he thought as effective as a trip to the physician or the apothecary.  I have substituted for both at different times in my life, making use of psychiatrists and pharmacists.   And here I am trying to write down my thoughts about failure.  So being solitary goes with the territory.   Siting in a chair, tapping on the keyboard of a laptop, looks very much like idleness, at least to the outside observer.  Then again, there is no outside observer.  And that is a relief.  Since no one is providing a target, I have no mark to hit.  There is no test, so no right answers.  No prizes, and no punishments either.  This exercise can only be a failure through lack of effort, a failure to follow the wisdom of Kohelet, available in a pew:  whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

  iii

  Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy has the allure of the all-you-can-eat restaurant.  The concept is tempting, but the experience is mixed and the result is the regret that comes with overeating.  The fat paperback on my bookshelf has an introduction by William Gass.   I have freed it from the shelf and am weighing it in my hands. There is also a “Note On The Text.”   According to this Note, several pages long, no original manuscript of The Anatomy of Melancholy exists.  For the five versions printed during his lifetime, Burton made changes and added material.   The text in my paperback follows edition number six, which was the first printed posthumously.   If he could, Burton would be digressing now, explaining the complexities of the word “posthumous.”  How, in Latin, posterus can mean “coming after” and postumus, the superlative form, might or might not mean “last.”   Burton might also add that when Latin was a spoken language, postumus referred to the last born of a man’s children– particularly to those born after a man died.   From there, piling on, he could note how “umus” in postumus became entwined with “humus,” meaning “dirt” or “earth,” and so came to be confused with the very earth where a child’s father is buried.

  iv

  Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong is on a desk upstairs, in a room a real estate agent will call “the study.”  This book is “a masterclass in navigating failure,” according to Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit, who is quoted on the front of the book’s jacket.  Right Kind of Wrong has the subtitle The Science of Failing Well.  Angela Duckworth repeats her endorsement on the back cover.  She praises Right Kind of Wrong as “a master class in navigating, and even seeking out, the inevitable failures that pave the way to success.”  As if failure ever needed to be sought.

  Consultants and academics speak of the opportunity to “fail well.”  But what is being praised at the Harvard Business School is not failure; it is learning from failure.  Thomas Edison will be quoted.  I have not failed, the great inventor declares in prefaces and first chapters, I’ve found ten thousand ways that won’t work.  That is all fine.  Learning and moving on is a wonderful strategy if you can bring it off.   But what if your sense of failure is not a stepping stone, but bedrock.  What if it is as vast as the vista ahead, in the aftermath of giving up.   A final grade, the conclusive assessment, a summing up, or a black mood you are not moving beyond.  Then there is no curtain you can part, dispersing the convincing darkness.

  There is also the romantic notion that failure can turn into honor eventually, if you live long enough.  Transformation may occur posthumously.  Artists unrecognized during their lives will be lionized after their deaths.   Van Gogh is the standard bearer.   It is also a trope of literary achievement.   I have Kafka on my bookshelves and on the tops of tables.  In the hallway, Complete Stories.  In another room, The Castle.  The slim reprint of Kafka’s Letter to My Father on a desk upstairs is from the gift shop of the Kafka Museum in Prague.  Other editions I have seen of this little book translate it as Letter to The Father, which is a crueler title.   I never wrote letters to my father, who died at ninety-four, less than a year after he tripped and hit his head on a concrete stair on his way into a movie theater.  I do have letters from him, however.  They are more like notes.  He wrote his messages in block print and sprinkled them with capitalizations in the middle of sentences.  The day before his fall, my father had robust health.  His subsequent decline was steeper than the stairway.

  Kafka’s Letter to My Father has nothing do with my own father.  For that, it would be better to find a baseball book, the biography of Sandy Koufax.  Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy, by Jane Leavy, is on a high shelf in the hallway.  It is from my father only by proxy.   My son wrote a message in 2002 on its first blank page.  Dad, it says, I remember you telling me about seeing Koufax play at Dodger Stadium so I got you this book.   He is misremembering.  The night game that my father and I went to was at the Coliseum, not at Chavez Ravine.   More formally, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, August 31, 1959.  Dodgers versus San Francisco Giants, Koufax pitching, Johnny Roseboro catching, my father and I sitting in bleacher seats, high above right field.  Koufax struck out eighteen.

  So, what is failure, then?  Is it the gap between who you thought you would be and how things have turned out?   Maybe that is only a failure of wisdom and a lack of acceptance.  Maybe failing is inevitable simply because the failure to stay alive is inevitable.   For parents, having children can be a response to that inevitability.  A father might think he will still live on earth in the genes of those who come after him, however challenging it may be to be satisfied with that kind of immortality.  As the father of adopted children, I need some other death denying illusion, to use the language of Ernest Becker, whose The Denial of Death is buried on a desk downstairs, under Bittersweet by Susan Cain, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and Love Poems of Pablo Neruda.

  It is also possible to embrace failure.   It is even possible to joke about it.  To belittle it, by belittling yourself.   Ornella Sinigalia writes about the use in China of the term “diaosi,” which means something like “loser.”  She says it became trendy among the generation born after the 1980s to poke fun at their own low status.   Then there is the ambitious winner who started a business called The Failure Institute.  The premise of the business is that we all need to free ourselves from the stigma of failure.  That need is desperate, according to the text under the About Us navigation on The Failure Institute’s website.  The Failure Institute is a global movement.  It has chapters in some three hundred cities around the world.  Its “signature events” are called Fuckup Nights.   Lessons learned from more than one million participants on past Fuckup Nights are distilled by The Failure Institute into “content and community for top companies and organizations around the world.”   The slogan of The Failure Institute:  Failure sucks but instructs.   Private events, workshops, newsletters, reports, blog posts about authenticity and vulnerability, and the off-rhyming slogan are all part of the sale.  This is not parody, though you might fail to see how it could not be.

  v

  For an authoritative definition of failure, there is the two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary asleep on a second shelf of one of the seven bookcases that are built into the hallway.  I received it as a graduation gift after high school.  This dictionary is one of many books my parents gave me, usually for birthdays.   The two dark blue volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary are in their slipcase.  The slipcase has a small tray at the bottom, with a tiny knob that I can pull, sliding the tray outward to reveal a magnifying glass.  Even at noon, the magnifying glass is helpful in the dim hallway.

  National Geographic Atlas of the World was also a gift from my parents.  It is slipcased, too.  It is on a shelf behind the downstairs desk.   My parents also gave me P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous.  The pages of this dusty, unread book are a terra more incognita than any place in an atlas.  I can see its spine on one of the upper shelves in the hall.  “By the author of Tertium Organum,” it declares on its jacketed cover.  “The famous Russian philosopher’s story of his quest for a teaching which would solve for him the problems of Man and the Universe.”  I never got further in this book than the message my mother wrote on an empty inside page.   “For your 16^th birthday,” she writes, “with hope that this book will answer some of your questions that we do not know the answers to.”   She was solving a problem I did not have; I would never have asked her questions about Man or the Universe.   My father might not have heard me even had I asked.  Home from his work as a manufacturer’s rep, he would not be bothered.  He preferred listening to the ballgame on a transistor radio, his ear plugged with an earpiece.  Maybe it is finally time to read this neglected gift.  More than sixty years have passed, and I still need to find the miraculous, whether by searching or by accident.

  vi

  The Tao Te Ching asks: “Success or failure:  which is more destructive?”  Also, “Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.”   The Tao Te Ching is resting somewhere on these bookshelves.   When I go to find it, the book I remembered as the Tao Te Ching turns out to be The Parting of the Way, an explanation of Taoism by Holmes Welch.   Joseph P. Walcott is written in blue pen on the inside front cover.  I remember Joee.   Long stringy hair, looking like Jesus as Jesus might have looked on a college campus in 1973.  I must have borrowed this paperback from him and then never returned it.  Passages in The Parting of the Way are colored over with Joe’s yellow marker.   There are terse margin notes in blue pen.  I see a blue “Yes” above two blue underlines in a margin alongside a sentence Joe highlighted in yellow.  On page fifty, the passage that he colors asks, “Where are those mysterious peaks for which Lao Tzu is famous?  They have been right above us all the time, shrouded in obscurity.  Let us go up and explore them.”   In that margin, Joe has written “Yes” again, with another double underline.  He also comments or copies halfway through the book:  Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak.  That is all fine, but where is the Tao Te Ching that I own?  I keep looking on hallway bookshelves.  Another book about Taoism, The Shambhala Guide, has a promotional card inside from The Pristine Mind Foundation.  This book is as crisp as a cracker and has never been opened.

  Eventually, I find two separate translations of the Tao Te Ching on different shelves in other rooms.   Both are handsome, jacketed hardbacks, with unworldly illustrations.  They are like art books.  I must have bought Tao Te Ching A New Translation, calligraphy of Kwok-Lap Chan, and then forgot about it entirely.   Years passed.  And then I bought Tao Te Ching, An Illustrated Journey, translated by Stephen Mitchell, with the delicate scene on its cover from the ink-on-silk handscroll Twelve Views of Landscape, Southern Sung dynasty, early 13^th century.

  Ursula Le Guin, whose father wanted pages of it read at his funeral, translated her own version of the Tao Te Ching, in order to “catch the poetry.”   She says it is “the most lovable of all the great religious texts.”  She also reports that absolutely nothing about it is certain other than that it is Chinese and very old, written maybe 2500 years ago, and only maybe by someone named Lao Tzu.

  vii

  Tao Te Ching can be translated as The Book of the Way, but for some reason its title is usually not translated.  There may be a marketing advantage to leaving it untranslated, an added authenticity to the brand.  There are books whose difficulty is part of their appeal.  I have Finnegans Wake on a shelf somewhere, never read, not even attempted.  Today, late in December, I am leafing through the Stephen Mitchell translation.  Mitchell in his introduction to Tao Te Ching says “there is practically nothing to be said” about its author.  He then says, “Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces,”  as if the habits of an anonymous Iroquois are well known to every reader.   Stephen Mitchell ends his introduction with a comment on translation.  “If I haven’t always translated Lao Tzu’s words, my intention has always been to translate his mind.”  That is also a bold assumption.

  viii

  Both of the Tao Te Ching books present the text in a series of short sections typeset as if they were poetry.  In Stephen Mitchell’s version, the notion that failure is an opportunity appears as the first sentence in the poem he numbers seventy-nine:

  Failure is an opportunity.
  If you blame someone else,
  there is no end to the blame.
  Therefore the Master
  fulfils her own obligations
  and corrects her own mistakes.

  This assessment does not appear in my other Tao Te Ching.   It is a very different book, its sections are not numbered, and its poems are called chapters.  Still, it has things to say about failure.  The chapter forty-five poem begins:

  A great thing done is never perfect.
  But that doesn’t mean it fails:
  it does what it is.

  As a kind of repudiation of “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” chapter sixty-three begins:

  The sage does nothing,
  and so he never fails.

  Joe Walcott thought Tao Te Ching was deep wisdom.  He said so to me.  The flap of the jacket cover of Tao Te Ching A New Translation asserts something similar.  It says that the Tao Te Ching expresses “divine truth.”   But then, those who know do not say, and those who say do not know.

  Chapter Three
  THE WORLD’S GREATEST BOOKS

  The seven bookcases that cover the length of the hallway are in dim light.  The twelve volumes of The Complete Works of Mark Twain, their spines as yellow as bananas, are bright spots on the top shelf of the first bookcase.  They stayed in my bedroom in Los Angeles throughout my childhood.   Decades later, my parents stored them at the Oceanside home moved to in retirement.   And then, after my father died, I took them.  They are small, thick books, clothbound, and they fascinated me when I was a teenager, though not enough to ever read them.  I liked the banana yellow of their spines and covers and how the name of each volume is set in gold on a crimson band.  Gold laurel leaves encircle an embossed profile of Samuel Clemens in a crimson oval on their covers.  Outside that oval, a second circle of embossed five-pointed stars.  Under that, the writer’s signature, also in gold.

  The American Artists Edition of The Complete Works of Mark Twain was published by Harper & Brothers, copyright 1922 by Mark Twain Company.   I have not looked at a single page in them in over fifty years.   In the hallway, I am holding Volume 8, The Mysterious Stranger, enjoying the endpapers, with their crosshatched illustrations that depict characters from different Twain stories.  Each of the Twains has its own uncredited illustration facing a title page.  In my bedroom as a child, I would open these books only to look at the dreamy color scenes.  The one that I loved most is in The Mysterious Stranger.   Three young men are in the snow, they may be out hunting.   One holds a crossbow.  He squints, seeming to look right at me.  The other two, on either side of him, also peer forward.  The three are wearing feathered caps.  They have leggings and jackets, outfits that belong to another time and a far-away country.  Behind them, on top of a rocky ledge, distantly and under a dreamy sky, the castle with six turrets.  All is pastel and sunny on the page.  Even the silly caption is transporting.   Eseldorf Was a Paradise For Us Boys.  These seven words worked a kind of spell, and I never read any further.  Whoever the mysterious stranger was, that remains a mystery.

  These are the twelve Twains in order:   Pudd’nhead Wilson, The American Claimant, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court, The Mysterious Stranger, The Innocents Abroad, The Gilded Age, A Tramp Abroad, and What Is Man.

  Every American knows Tom and Huck, or used to.  But who is Pudd’nhead Wilson?

  ii

  My first-generation American father, who never went to college or ever read an assigned book, is a mysterious stranger himself.   Both my parents are.  I cannot picture either of them collecting this twelve-volume set, but here it is in the hallway.

  In my childhood bedroom, the twelve Twains rested on one of two shelves made of particle board that was supported by metal brackets hooked into slotted metal tracks.  The tracks were fastened to the drab green, textured and synthetic wood of the bedroom wall.  The longer of the two boards sagged under the blue burden of an Encyclopedia Americana.  Those encyclopedias are long gone.  I still have A Treasury of the Familiar, though – it was one of the “extras” that the publishers of Encyclopedia Americana threw in as an incentive to buy the complete set.  It is in a bookcase behind my downstairs desk.  Edited by Ralph L. Woods, A Treasury of the Familiar is a sort of greatest hits album in one dark blue volume.   Much of it is poetry, though not all.  I am looking through it this late December morning.   If I wanted to, I could read Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia or George Washington’s Farewell Address, and plenty of Robert Browning, in these 750 pages of the formerly familiar.  Strange to remember only the epigraph from Alfred Noyes’s The Barrel-Organ, which remains just as it was, in front of all that follows:

  And the music’s not immortal;
  but the world has made it sweet. 

  In the “Index by Authors” at the end, the longest list belongs to “Anonymous.”   There is no named author for Polly Wolly Doodle or The Boy Scout Oath.

  iii 

  These books are ghosts.  They are the hosts of spirits.  They speak about the past, if only in a whisper.  My father is resting under the covers of the Mark Twains.  My mother uses a Russian mystic to write to me about my childhood.  They are voices in a crowd.  Bertha, my mother’s oldest sister, speaks three shelves below The Complete Works of Mark Twain.   She is someone I never met, but her twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books have exhumed and reburied her in the casket of a mahogany bookshelf in the hallway.

  Aunt Bertha had rheumatic fever as a child.   She dropped dead age twenty-six on the living room floor of an overcrowded apartment in East Los Angeles, astounding and terrifying three younger sisters and her mother.   That was in 1940.  The twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books she left behind are in precarious shape.  What little is left of the faux leather paper that used to wrap around their spines will crumble when I touch it, exposing fabric and the yellowing glue.  I have seen these books in one house or another for seventy years and never looked inside them or read even their titles until now.

  iv

  Bertha was the star of the family.  There was a brother, Harold, though by 1940 he was already out of the apartment where the four sisters lived with their immigrant parents.  Bertha had ambitions.  She bought books as foreign to her father and mother as Moldova and Bucovina are to Echo Park in East L.A.   A nice-looking salesman might have knocked on the door to their apartment.  An offer was made, buy a book a month, for practically nothing.   If that is the story, then at least twenty months would have passed before the catastrophe on the floor of the living room.  Bertha collapsed, blood at her mouth.   When my mother described it to me, she did not name a cause or explain exactly how it happened, other than saying that death was sudden.  Heart failure?  My mother was a teenager then; so, old enough to know.  Maybe the family was too intimidated to get the medical explanation.   Like so much else in family history, the explanation is not sought until there is no one left to explain.   Whatever was so promising in Bertha, those promises were not kept.  My mother held onto Bertha’s books however. Not just The World’s Greatest Books, but others still on my shelves.

  The shelf that holds The World’s Greatest Books is deep enough to also hold a small, hinged gold frame in front, a double frame for two images.  In the style of the times, Bertha’s photo is tinted.  She is on the right of the center hinge, and the tinted photo of her father, Isaac, is on the left.  I never knew Isaac Reegler either.   I was one year old when he died.  In his photo, he wears a very wide necktie with tinted blue stripes, and he looks a bit like Lee J. Cobb at his angriest.   The photo of Bertha is textured with riverine cracks, as though her face had been printed on a geologic study.   I can slide out the cardboard from the back of the frame, in order to free her photo and turn it over, to look for any information, a date, her age.  No, nothing.  My departed family is like that.

  Volumes I through VIII of The World’s Greatest Books are entirely Fiction, with the authors excerpted in alphabetical order.  In Volume I, Edmond About and Harrison Ainswater are among the greatest.  Looking into the steady eyes of William Thackery, whose portrait is the frontispiece in Volume VIII, I wonder what Nanny, my grandmother, must have thought about any of this.   The family struggled to make rent and pay bus fare.   What did Nanny say when these books showed up?  Did she welcome Harrison Ainswater into the apartment?

  “These are for me,” Bertha told her.
  And, after her favorite daughter’s sudden death?
  “Keep them,” Nanny said, and Bertha’s kid sister, my mother, did.

  v

  Has anyone ever read all twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books, copyright 1910 by S. S. McClure?   Has anyone anywhere ever done that, since their publication by McKinley, Stone and Mackenzie?  These books are high culture, with faux marble endpapers and frontispiece portraits.  They stand for something.  Simply owning them is a signifier.   When I pry out Volume XIII, Religion and Philosophy, bits of the binding flake off like old skin.  If I open it to the table of contents, the front cover separates and falls to the floor.  Under “Religion,” its list of excerpts goes from Apocrypha to Zoroastrianism.  There is Koran and Talmud, and snippets from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, and from William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude.  All of the excerpts are preceded by scholarly summaries.  “Philosophy” in Volume XIII begins with Aristotle but only gets as far as Epictetus.  Looking for Volume XIV, I need to pull out five other tightly-shelved books, doing even more damage to them.  The wrapping around most of the spines has disappeared entirely, so titles and volume numbers are gone.  The set is not in numerical order.   “Philosophy,” Hegel to Spinoza, is in a crumbling Volume XIV that also includes “Economics,” from a bit of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to a taste of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

  There are no complete books in The World’s Greatest Books.  The set is a tasting menu, with nothing too filling.  After the eight volumes of Fiction, the next two are Life and Letters.  Then comes Ancient History/Medieval History, one volume; Modern History, one volume; Religion and Philosophy, two volumes; Science, one volume; Poetry and Drama, three volumes; Travel and Adventure, one volume; and, last, Miscellaneous Literature and Index in the same twentieth volume.  Each book has a frontispiece, a colorless portrait or a ghostly photo of an author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Volume VI, for example, John Lothrop Motley in Volume XII.  Excerpts are always in alphabetical order by author’s last name.  So, Volume I, Fiction, begins with Edmund About.  Volume XIX, Travel and Adventure, starts with Sir Samuel Baker and ends with Arthur Young.   Ancient History/Medieval History, Volume XI, is different.  After the frontispiece portrait of Edward Gibbon, its table of contents has “Ancient History” and, under that, four categories — Egypt, Jews, Greece, and Rome.   Herodotus writes about Greece, Josephus and Henry Millman about the Jews.  Then, under “Medieval History,” another four categories — the Holy Roman Empire, Europe, back to Egypt again, and then England.  Volume XII, Modern History, follows its own pattern.  After a portrait of John Lothrop Motley, “Modern History” is granted to America, England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, India, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and The Papacy.   The authors are not always contemporary.  Voltaire covers Russia.  India goes to Mountstuart Elphinstone, “the outstanding scholar-administrator in the employ of the English East India Company.”

  You have to wonder how S.S. McClure decided who belongs in The World’s Greatest Books.   Maybe it was a matter of availability, or the laws of copyright in 1910.  Why does an excerpt of Henry Milman’s History of the Jews appear in the “Ancient History” section of Volume XI?   According to the editors, “The appearance of History of the Jews in 1830 caused no small consternation, but among the Jews themselves it was exceptionally well received.”   I doubt that.  Henry Hart Milman, Doctor of Divinity in London, born in 1791, buried in 1868 in St. Paul’s Cathedral, served as Dean at St. Paul’s for nearly twenty years, and this is how his excerpt from History of the Jews begins in The World’s Greatest Books: “By the destruction of Jerusalem, the political existence of the Jewish nation was annihilated; it was never again recognized as one of the states or kingdoms of the world.  We have now to trace a despised and obscure race in almost every region of the world.”

  The joint editors of The World’s Greatest Books are Arthur Mee, Founder of the Book of Knowledge, J.A. Hammerton of Hammerton’s Universal Encyclopaedia, and S. S. McClure.  In American publishing, S. S. McClure, whose name sounds like an oceangoing vessel, was a really big fish.  He was a journalist, editor, and publisher.  In 1884, McClure established the very first U.S. newspaper syndicate.  In 1893, he co-founded McClure’s Magazine, which championed long-form investigative journalism.  It was ground-breaking; the work came to be called muckraking.   McClure’s Magazine ran pieces by Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson.   McClure was also in business with Frank Doubleday.   Their partnership, Doubleday & McClure, became just Doubleday after McClure left.  By 1911, McClure had left McClure’s Magazine as well.  That year, the magazine published his “autobiography” as a kind of farewell. It was ghostwritten by Willa Cather.

  Willa Cather is a ghost herself on a shelf in the hallway.   She haunts an unread blue green hardback Death Comes for the Archbishop, a decommissioned library book I must have found at a used book sale.  Turning its pages this morning, I came to the author’s biography.  Born in Virginia, moves west as a child to the hardscrabble farm, graduates from the University of Nebraska at nineteen, begins teaching and working for newspapers in Pittsburgh.  Then: “It was in these years that she wrote the brilliantly original short stories published in 1905 under the title The Troll Garden. The manuscript of this book came under the eye of S. S. McClure, who telegraphed Miss Cather to come to New York, where he offered her a position on his magazine.”

  vi

  In honor of Aunt Bertha, I am reading one selection that S. S. McClure chose for The World’s Greatest Books, an excerpt from the “travel and adventure” of Arthur Young.   Arthur Young, because I know nothing about him, just as I know almost nothing about Aunt Bertha.  Her heart failed before she had time to choose what I am choosing.  It is also possible that her goal was something far less time-consuming.  If what she wanted was simply to be the kind of person who owned The World’s Greatest Books, she did not fail.  There was time enough in her brief life for that.

  The selection from Arthur Young’s Travels in France in Volume XIX of The World’s Greatest Books is nine pages.  In 1784, Arthur Young started writing about agricultural conditions in England.   In 1787 he was invited by the Comte de la Rochefoucauld to do the same for France.   According to the editor’s note, Travels in France is “the most reliable record ever written about French rural conditions.”  The selected excerpt, which reads as a diary, has nothing to do with rural life.  “At Versailles,” the entry for May 27, 1787 begins.  “After breakfasting with Count de la Rochefoucauld at his apartments in the palace, where he is grand master of the wardrobe, was introduced by him to the Duke de la Rochefoucauld.”   Arthur Young mentions the ceremony he attends that same day with the Duke.  The king, Louis XVI, is present “and seemed by his inattention to wish himself ahunting.”  Marie Antoinette is in the room as well.   The French Revolution is two years and two months away.   “The queen,” his entry concludes, “is the most beautiful woman I have seen today….”  Bertha, forgive me, but I do not have the stamina to make the journey through all nine pages, despite the editor’s note that says Travels in France “is as popular as ever today.”

  vii

  A green three-ringed binder that I am certain is somewhere on a bookshelf behind the desk downstairs holds a xerox of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, with the stamp of the public library from 1981 on its title page.   Francois de la Rochefoucauld, 2^nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld and the writer of Les Maximes, was not the Rochefoucauld who brought Arthur Young to a ceremony with the French king and queen.  The writer of Les Maximes died in 1680.   Arthur met a descendant, Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, the cousin of Francois’s great grandchild Alexandre, the 5^th Duke.  This 5^th Duke only had daughters surviving him, so, following the rules of salic law, Louis Alexandre inherited the dukedom.   It was an unlucky inheritance.  Louis Alexandre, defender of the American Revolution and friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, was murdered in 1792 by a mob ahunting aristocrats.

  The three-ring binder turns up where I thought it might be.  There is also a forgotten loose sheet in the binder, folded into a square, with nothing on it besides this single sentence in blue ink:   Le pays du marriage a cela de particulier que les estrangers ont envie de l’habiter, et les habitans naturels voudroient en etre exiles.  I was four years into my first, happiest marriage, when I copied this sentence down from a French edition of Les Maximes, also xeroxed and protected in the binder.

  Wedged on the shelf next to the green binder, a faded red spine.  The Droll Stories of Balzac, Blue Ribbon Classics, with black ink illustrations by Steele Savage, is another of Aunt Bertha’s books that I took from my parents’ house.  When I open its cover, I find a message penciled on the page across from the title page.   Happy Birthday, Bertie, from Ginny.  It was for Bertha’s last birthday, the one a month before she died.   My mother, seven years younger than her oldest sister, gave Bertha this gift when she was still a teenager.  I am flipping through the Steele Savage illustrations of bosomy maidens and cowled, leering friars.

  viii

  Twelve Twains and the twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books are not the only sets on my shelves.  There are twenty-one books of the World Book in a freestanding bookcase in a back room that is now a den.  They speak volumes about the misadventure of providing our two children, resistant at first and eventually hostile, with “enrichment.”   Then there is Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, behind the downstairs desk.  It is one of the five volumes in a never-read set of World’s Great Thinkers from Carlton House publishers.   In the preface to Philosophical Dictionary, the uncredited editor writes that this Voltaire book “does not demand continuous reading; but at whatever places one opens it, one will find matter for reflection.”  True enough.   I am reflecting right now on how these five volumes got onto my bookshelves, and am drawing a blank.  They were probably Aunt Bertha’s as well, a doubling down on her imagined future.

  Next to Voltaire, four other great thinkers from Carlton House.  The full house includes Bacon’s Essays, The Philosophy of Spinoza, The Philosophy of Plato, and Sigmund Freud New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.   Copyright on the Freud is from 1933.  In the Plato book, I discover a receipt stamped Los Angeles, April 24, 1947.   So, seven years after Bertha’s death.  This receipt has nothing to do with World’s Great Thinkers.  It is a cheap paper ticket – the kind on pale pink paper that comes off a spool and might be good for admittance to a movie theater in 1947 or a ride at a fairgrounds.  Also, a bookmark in Bacon’s Essays, separating the 56-page introduction from the very first essay, Of Truth, where Frances Bacon begins:  What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

  Another set, six volumes of Psychology, The Study of a Science, covers half of an upper shelf in one of four built-in bookshelves in the small room where I sit at a veneered table – the downstairs desk — piled with other books waiting to be read.  The six Psychology, The Study of a Science were never mine.   My first wife was a psychotherapist and brought them with her into the marriage.  On the same high shelf, the dimpled white spine of The Family Interaction Q-Sort, her self-published doctoral dissertation.  It, too, will never have another reader.

  The Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks on a shelf in the den might also qualify as a set.  Two dozen of them, Ballentine paperbacks, the Tarzans and John Carter of Mars series.   They were a thrill sixty years ago.

  There are other sets on other shelves.   The two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd, two volumes of The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, two volumes of the Journals of Andre Gide, the jacketed three-volume Letters of John Addington Symonds.  Years ago, I dipped into the four volumes of George Orwell’s writings, which are on a shelf in the hallway.  The four volumes of Thousand and One Nights have never been opened.   Same with the four slipcased books of The World of Mathematics, with commentary and notes by James R. Newman, which I must have wanted to sample when I bought them in the late 1970s.  I can probably learn the definition of a set inside them, but it would not help.

  ix

  I cannot know what unreachable shore of culture my aunt was pursuing in The World’s Greatest Books.  For my grandfathers and grandmothers, not being pursued in Piatra Neamt or Dubrowna was culture enough.  They left no books behind as clues that suggest otherwise.  In this way they are more aligned than Aunt Bertha was with the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching.  In the Stephen Mitchell translation:

  In pursuit of knowledge,
  every day something is added.
  in the practice of the Tao,
  every day something is dropped.

  The way of the Tao is to know and do less and less, until arriving at the condition of “non-action.”
  That would have appealed to my grandfather – my father’s father, who did not know exactly where he was born.
  “It was near the Dnieper River,” he said.
  He claimed not to know what his family name was, either, before it was changed.
  “Something like Purkin,” he said.
  As far as I know, he came to America by himself as a child in 1905.   He also drove a cab in Chicago during the Al Capone days and had nothing to say about that.  By the time I knew him, he was no longer working.  He was smoking unfiltered Camels and driving a 1954 Buick that I hoped would be mine as soon as I turned sixteen, though my parents squashed that dream because, they said, “An old car will dollar you to death.”

  Stephen Mitchell continues:

  When nothing is done,
  nothing is left undone.
  True mastery can be gained
  by letting things go their own way. 

  Aunt Bertha did not share the approach that Lao Tzu praises.  When she bought The World’s Greatest Books, she was refusing to let things go their own way.   She had a project, and she was getting things done, and she was not nearly done when time ran out.

  x

  Of all the sets of books read and unread on my shelves, The Five-Foot Shelf of Books is the heavyweight.  It comes in at fifty volumes.  They fill two shelves in one of the hallway bookcases completely.   Their five feet have swelled over the years.  When I put a tape measure to it, The Five-Foot Shelf of Books measures sixty-seven inches.  The set belonged to my first wife, before our marriage.   I never saw her open one.  Until this morning in late December, neither has anyone else.

  All fifty are branded Harvard Classics, with Veritas seals in gold on their crimson spines.  Unlike the twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books, which are crumbling, these books do a better job of faking belonging in a world of leather armchairs, lamplight, wood paneling, and English gentlemen.  Their crimson covers, gold-colored type, the curlicue embellishments and marbled endpapers almost look real.

  America is a society that promises its members freedom from the limitations of class.  There is permission to be self-made.  Who buys The Five-Foot Shelf of Books?   Someone who sees a relationship between self-made and self-taught and wants fifty volumes of it.   In the bound Reading Guide that comes with the set, its purpose is declared.  These fifty books “will carry you forward upon that road to the high goal toward which all of us are making our way.”  It is assumed that all of us know what that high goal is.  And, since we do, the Guide also assumes we all share it.

  xi

  When P.F. Collier & Son persuaded Charles W. Eliot, a retiring Harvard president, to select and introduce “this great company of the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages,” there was a market.  P.F. Collier published the first twenty-five volumes in 1909.   The rest appeared the following year; fifty volumes, twenty-three thousand pages.  Something must have been in the water at New York publishing houses in 1909.   That was the same year S.S. McClure secured his copyright for The World’s Greatest Books.   By then, waves of immigration had brought my grandparents on my mother’s side to the Lower East Side of New York City.   By 1910, seven out of ten people in New York City were immigrants and their children.  Maybe what was in the water was the hope that The World’s Greatest Books might clean up the children of the unwashed.   The wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages was what Dr. Eliot prescribed for these strangers from Southern Europe or, even stranger, from Galicia and the Russian Pale.

  Page six of the Reading Guide that comes with The Five-Foot Shelf asks What Shall I Read Tonight?  It follows up with How often does that question come to all of us, as if this were not a question but a statement of fact.  This query comes from a far-away world, one with no television sets, no internet, no smartphones.  There was no radio, either, in 1910.   In many homes, Americans were still reading, if at all, by gas lighting or candlelight.  The Reading Guide goes on: “We want something to carry us out of ourselves, to take us a million miles from our humdrum existence.”  It says these fifty books of The Five–Foot Shelf of Books will meet the need.  They will “bestow pleasure, self-satisfaction and the joy of mental growth to each man, woman and child with impartiality and in infinite variety.”   My fifty have sat quietly on two shelves for decades, like children seen but not heard, and mostly not even seen in the darkness of the hallway.  The Reading Guide warns about this on page 6.  “We urge you,” it says, “to keep at all times several volumes easily at hand on your desk or table to read and browse through.  Don’t put your set away in a distant bookcase where you must go to get them.”   This good advice was not taken.

  xii

  Two years after publication, P. F. Collier and Son told Dr. Eliot that a half-million sets had already been placed “in the homes of enthusiastic purchasers.” Also, “a stream of unsolicited letters of approval has come from these owners.”   The Reading Guide includes a testimonial from one of those enthusiastic purchasers that P.F. Collier refers to.   “My first reading,” a woman writes, “gave me a pleasure likened unto finding small particles of gold.”

  The Guide continues like this for ten more pages.  It plugs Magnificent Special Features that include introductory lectures, footnotes, and general Index.  The Guide begins to read like an extended script by Ron Popeil for the longest infomercial ever, although the vocabulary is statelier.   But wait, there’s more.  After prefaces and promotions, the final seventy pages of the Guide are the Daily Reading Guide.  This is Dr. Eliot’s 15-minute-a-day program, which he declares “a substitute for a liberal education, to anyone who would read with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day.”

  In Volume 1 of The Five-Foot Shelf of Books, there are over a hundred pages of Journal of John Woolman.   I have never heard of John Woolman, but an excerpt from his Journal is included in The World’s Greatest Books as well.  Woolman, who was born in New Jersey in 1720, devoted his life to agitation against the practice of slavery.  He was the son of Quaker parents and influenced the abolition of slavery among the Society of Friends.  According to the introductory note in Volume 1, “no small part of the enthusiasm of the general emancipation movement is traceable to his labors.”  Was John Woolman someone “every schoolboy” knew in 1910?  By the time I attended the local public school in Los Angeles fifty years later, John Woolman had dropped out.

  I am considering the January through December calendar in the Reading Guide, with its daily assignment “that will take you out of the rut of life in the town you live in and make you a citizen of the world.”

  xiii
  .
  December 31.  The end of the year at last.  With no intention of following the program, I am curious what my assignment would be for New Year’s Day.  It is Read from Franklin’s Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp 79-85.   In fifteen minutes of “leisurely enjoyment” I will get Franklin’s Advice for the New Year, which includes “Resolution:  Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”  I do not know if I am up to it.  Maybe I should try it, if only for the month ahead.  If I start with Benjamin Franklin on the first of the month, what will my assignment be at the end of the month?   For January 31, Read from Don Quixote, Vol. 14, pp 60-67.  A small illustration appears in the Guide, a drawing of a knight on horseback poking a lance into the blades of a windmill   It comes with a caption, too.  Don Quixote, the ambitious amateur knight, was well ridiculed for his pains.

  Just for fun, I skip ahead to April Fool’s.   Dr. Eliot takes the day seriously.   He assigns me Browning’s Poems from Vol. 42, near the end of a three-volume sequence, English poetry, from Chaucer to Whitman.  For February 14, his advice is Read Pascal’s Discourse on the Passion of Love, Vol. 48, pp 411-421.   November 13 will be my next birthday.  What should I be reading then, if I am getting with the program?   The Confessions of St. Augustine, Vol. 7, pp 31-38.  Austere, but not wrong.  I will be turning seventy-something.

  xiv

  New Year’s Day.  As I knew I would, I forgot about Benjamin Franklin.   I will never read St. Augustine either.   Not next November or in any of the five or maybe ten Novembers I might have left.  Aphorisms could be the better choice.  La Rouchefoucauld and his Maximes are still dozing in the green binder.  So much wisdom, impossible to take it all in.  Mark Twain is excellent at maxims, too.   If I looked hard enough, I might find some inside one or two of the twelve yellow Twains in the hallway.   I am not looking for them there.  I have one of them by heart, which is probably the best place to keep it.  According to Mark Twain, or so he reportedly said, the two most important days in life are the day you were born and the day you discover the reason why.

  And if that second day never arrives? It hardly matters. I am lucky to have had the first day. Just being born will have to be enough.

  Chapter Four
  WHAT WOULD DEWEY DO?

  More and more, I ask myself about what I know but have forgotten.  The names of trees, for example, the flowering dogwood, which I look at and ask myself what is it, and the crepe myrtles, which I see and the word redbud forms in my mind, though this slender, smooth barked tree is no redbud.  Much of my life is dark to me because I cannot remember it.  Does that mean I no longer know myself?  Or have I just forgotten?  Maybe I am less and less one person, and more a sequence of selves, each one replacing the one before.

  This forgetting is because of age, but not only.  I have always been like this with certain categories of knowledge.  Certainly with the names of plants; not just trees, but the flowers and ground covers, too.   Yes, I know that grass is grass, and that ivy is ivy.  But the jasmines, the creeping juniper, the liriopes and the monkey grass — which may be the same – those are the names that escape me, even as I place my foot right on them.

  This forgetting what I know applies especially to what I have read.

  ii

  Every reader, as he reads, is actually looking into himself.  Proust wrote that.   He suggested that books are a kind of optical instrument that a reader uses to discern what he might never have seen in himself.   If so, I may be looking at In Search of the Miraculous through the wrong lens.  In this new year I am continuing to read it night after night.   I can only manage a page or two at a time.  It is impossible to understand; and even when it is clear, it is tedious.  It offers no answers, but it provokes a question.  Why would anyone think this is a good gift for a boy’s sixteenth birthday.  This gift is a burden.   I am only be plodding through it now because what else is there to do with it.

  iii

  My daughter and I are estranged.  In that way, she is lost.  My son is lost in a different way.  Out of work, living by himself, and acting as though he wants nothing more than to play video games and watch television.  He is “going nowhere”.  The check I write him every three months or so keeps him going.  This new year he has taken a turn for the better.  Meaning, he is working out with a trainer twice a week, he is seeing a psychiatrist twice a month.  This coming June, he will be forty years old.

  My shelves store dozens and dozens of their books – from childhood, from school, gifts received, books abandoned.

  iv

  There is a blog written by a woman named Victoria who shares reading tips and related lifestyle how-to’s.  “Do you have a hard time finding the book you need at a particular moment?” Victoria asks.   As if there were a moment that is not particular.   Victoria makes the argument that it is important to organize bookshelves.  It can make rooms look neater, which is not my problem.  It will make it easier to access “all of the knowledge stored away on their pages,” which might be true.  Victoria says the right organization “increases the odds of selecting a book to read,” and will “enrich the overall reading experience.”   None of that is true.  If there are good reasons to organize books on a shelf, there has never been a reason good enough for me to do it.  Still, how should it be done?  Victoria has ten ways:

  Organize by separating fiction and non-fiction.
  Organize by author.  Victoria says “take it up a notch” by arranging the books by a single author in order of publication.
  Organize by separating the classic and the contemporary books.  This might mean dividing the living from the dead and would require reshuffling, and paying attention to obituaries.
  Organize according to mood or emotion.  Books that are funny, sad stories.
  Organize by separating the read from the unread.  This might work for me, although the number of unread books would be so high that another principle will be needed to organize those as well.
  Organize alphabetically.   She means by author’s last name, not by title.
  Organize by separating hardback and paperback.  Victoria thinks this will create a “leaner and streamlined look.”  So, an aesthetic criterion.
  Organize by subject matter.   This is one of the core principles of the Dewey classification system.
  Organize by color.  According to Victoria, color-coordinated bookshelves “make a statement.”
  Organize by separating out your favorite books.  She thinks this makes sense because these books are the best candidates to be re-read “every so often.”
  Organize by height.  This is number eleven, her “extra tip,”, and it has practicality to recommend it, since books and bookshelves vary in height.   Organizing by color or mood does not work and alphabetically will have its limits when the height of a spine exceeds the vertical of the shelf.  That is not Victoria’s point, however.  She is recommending making a bookshelf look like a stairstep; tallest books on the left, then descending in size.
  Victoria throws in two more extra tips:
  Don’t be afraid, she says, to stack books horizontally.  It creates “pockets of interest,” and the stacks can work as makeshift bookends.
  Last, put heavier books on the bottom shelf.  She says they will act “as an anchor.”   This advice makes little sense.  The bookshelves are not adrift.

  My shelves represent the impurity of principles.   A run of favorite books, a run of by author, some shelves all paperbacks, most a combination of the read and unread.  Nothing is alphabetical.  No fiction versus non-fiction, nothing put in place because of color.  Even where there are hints of forethought, the principle is unreliable.  Duplicate titles are shelved in different places.  If I find a sequence of six books about the Spanish Southwest together in the hallway, there are six others, same subject, elsewhere and scattered, separated in ones or twos in other rooms.   This may be the way of the world.  Systems are appealing, but what is truly coherent is usually incomplete.

  If there were a grid, a spread sheet to help organize all the books in this house, it would need   columns for name of book and name of author, and an adjacent rectangle of space for comments.  In the comment column, a note about the book, why it is here, how it fits not just on my shelf but in my life.  Not every book would get a comment.

  There could be a column not just for “read/unread,” but for “started,” implying “mostly unread.”  For example, The Assyrian And Other Stories, William Saroyan:  Started.  And in the comment column:  “Found this used hardback on Amazon, but have only read the introduction.  So, got no further than the pages that use roman numbering.  Book kept on the desk downstairs, as if being in arm’s reach makes it more likely that it will be picked up.”

  This comment will never fit in a rectangle on a grid.  It is too long.  Space and its limitations, that is the theme of all book organizing projects.  Also, time.   What would Victoria consider the greater obstacle to organizing, space or time?   Which is more limiting?  Both can seem limitless, looked at from an inhuman perspective.  But I am old and running out of both, day by day and shelf by shelf.

  v

  There is a bookcase is in a corner of the studio upstairs.  An identical one, downstairs in the kitchen, supports nothing but cookbooks.  These two vertical bookcases are five-feet tall metal shafts on a flat base.  Their shelves, square metal plates, are suspended at intervals and will hold a short stack of books, though Design Within Reach says these vertical bookcases are also great “for holding towels and displaying collectibles.”   Design Within Reach calls it the Story Bookcase.  The Container Store calls it the Floating Bookcase, which is the better name.  Also, the price is better.   The matte white Floating Bookcase cornered in the studio upstairs holds fifty-odd books.  Both bookcase and books are dusty.  The books are divided by size, smaller on top of larger, between the nine metal plates and a metal base at the very bottom.  If I start at the top and work down, this is the roll call:

  How To Love, Thich Nhat Hanh.  Gratitude, Oliver Sacks. Felicity, Mary Oliver. The Tulip Flame, Chloe Honum.  Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke. Fervor de Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges.  The Elements of Style, Strunk, White and Kalman. Death of the Black-Haired Girl, Robert Stone.  The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig.  For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larson.  The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, John Baxter. Lost City of the Incas, Hiram Bingham. Machu Picchu, Ryan Dube.  The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Mario Vargas Llosa.  Peru, Eyewitness Travel. Birds of Machu Picchu, Barry Walker.  Los Dibujos del Cronista Indio, Guaman Poma.  The Ministry of Special Cases, Nathan Englander.  Dear Life, Alice Munro. The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz. Take Joy, Jane Yolen.  Canada, Richard Ford.  Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace. The Tools, Phil Stutz & Barry Michels.  Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski.  Why Meditate, Matthieu Ricard.  Silverchest, Carl Philips.  The Zen of Social Media Marketing, Shama Kabani.  The Mansion of Happiness, Jill Lepore.  Selected Poems, Yehuda Amichai.  More Love Poems, Yehuda Amichai.  Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa.  Barcelona, Robert Hughes.  Getting More, Stuart Diamond.  Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman.  John Adams, David McCullough.  Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl.  Judaism as a Civilization, Mordechai Kaplan.  Jerusalem The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore.  Codependent No More, Melody Beattie. Beyond Codependency, Melody Beattie.  The Son, Philip Meyer.  Wild Nights, Joyce Carol Oates. The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene.  Nature Anatomy, Julia Rothman.  The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks.  A Place of Hiding, Elizabeth George.  Play Poker Like the Pros, Philip Hellmuth, Jr.  The Bible As It Was, James L. Kugel.  Value-Based Fees, Alan Weiss.  A Life of Picasso, John Richardson.

  Of these fifty some books, I have never opened thirty some.   As for the rest, I am unsure.  Completed, cover to cover, maybe six.

  This “studio” upstairs is a second office and has a desk covered with other books.  The room also functions as a spare bedroom, for guests or never returning children.  The orange Roche Bobois couch can be unfolded into a bed, though it never has been.  A door near the floating bookcase leads to a cramped bathroom— a shower, a sink, a commode–and to an even smaller space adjacent for hanging a jacket or a skirt and blouse.  There are built-in drawers for socks and underwear, above a built-in mini-refrigerator, for white wine or sparkling water.

  Why all these books on the desk upstairs?  Like so many behaviors, until you make a count of it, there is no accounting for it.   So I made a list of another fifty or so, piled on the desk in seven stacks:

  The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton.  Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman.  The Person and The Situation, Les Ross and Richard Nisbett.  Presence, Arthur Miller.  Golden Dreams, Kevin Starr.  The Currents of the World, Quinn Bailey.  Feeding Hour, Jessica Gigot.  Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation, Curtis Leblanc.  The Marble Bed, Grace Schulman.  Other Poems of Longing, Juan-Paolo Perre.  Body Count, Kyla Jamieson.  The Castle, Franz Kafka.  The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka. Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion.  Dead Boys, Richard Lange.  Hollywood Notebook, Wendy C. Ortiz.  The Dyer’s Hand, W. H. Auden. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.  The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The Russians, Hedrick Smith.  Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson.  Just Kids, Patti Smith.  The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Selected Poems, Anna Akhmatova.  Aimless Love, Billy Collins. Houses, Don Barkin.  Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey.  Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano. The Great Shift, James L. Kugel. Conquest, Hugh Thomas.  Ulysses, James Joyce.  My Struggle Book One, Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Sudden Rain, Maritta Wolff.  Vaseline Buddha, Jung Young Soon.  Vintage Ford, Richard Ford.  Birds of Texas Field Guide, Stan Tekiela.  Within A Budding Grove, Marcel Proust.  Map, Wislawa Szymborska.  Athene Palace, R.G. Waldeck.  Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan.  Catching Light, Joanna McClure.  Masterworks, The Barnes Foundation.  The Reader’s Companion to Mexico, Alan Ryan.  How The Jewish People Lives Today, Mordecai I. Soloff.  The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Robert Alter, editor.  American Judaism, Jonathan Sarna.  Collected Poems, Eugenio Montale.   The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen.  A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway.  The Return of Eva Peron, V.S. Naipaul.  The Exodus, Richard Friedman.  Collected Poems, W. H. Auden.

  Of these, finished, cover to cover, only five of them for sure – Athene Palace, Balkan Ghosts, A Moveable Feast, Aimless Love, and Life and Fate.  Possibly The Gulag Archipelago.   Maybe also The Corrections, Ulysses, and The Brothers Karamazov, though those last two were last read over fifty years ago.

  So, nine books, tops.

  vi

  The Dewey Decimal Classification system is among the most widely used ways to organize books on shelves.   Some 200,000 libraries in more than 135 countries use it.  It is available in English and in over thirty other languages.  The full print edition, in English, filled four volumes.  That stopped in 2017.   Now we have WebDewey, in electronic format and updated online at intervals.  There is also a single-volume abridged edition designed for libraries with 20,000 titles or fewer.   That Abridged WebDewey is still too heavy an artillery for my skirmish with unorganized shelves.

  Anyone who has browsed in a public library has been exposed to the Dewey system.  It is a known artifact, and you may think you know what it is.  But like most familiar things, it is more strange than familiar.   Isn’t everything in front of our eyes just the tip of an iceberg, to use a timeworn, inadequate analogy?   Inadequate, because if you saw the bergy bits of a mountain of ice jutting up from an arctic sea, you would never think that all of it is only what you saw above the water’s cold surface.  But with everyday surfaces, and in your everyday consciousness, what is underneath is not just unseen, it is mostly ignored, and often presumed unreal.

  vii

  Of the books in stacks on the desk downstairs, those at the bottom have been forgotten.  Those with spines facing away, even their names are lost.  Not Louise Gluck though.  She owns the mysterious umlaut over the middle letter of her family name.  Her Poems 1962-2012 has the heft of a lifework.  I have opened it and tried reading, over and over.   Face to face with one of her poems, I have the sense that I am reading a translation.  Her Poems is the second fattest paperback on the desk, next to Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, whose spine stares at me like a sniper.   Both books have been epic battles.

  Ann Patchett, hardbound, is at home on the desk in her slick jacket.  Is it possible that Ann Patchett is as admirable as she appears in the pages of These Precious Days?  As blessed, if that is the right word for the overall impression.  I am taken by a line from one of her essays.    She quotes the answer of a priest, who is himself quoting the wisdom of another, after she asks how he manages with equanimity to be so respectfully engaged with the broken life of a homeless man, who will never change.  “He is not my problem to solve,” the priest says, “he is my brother to love.”   This is an attitude I want to take toward my children and their difficulties, though I have not been able to manage it.   As for the homeless, I keep my car window up at intersections and avoid eye contact.

  Downstairs, these are the seventy-two books on a faux French deco veneered desk, some in stacks, some of them wedged between two art deco bookends sold by the same shop that the desk came from:

  Solenoid, Mircea Cartarescu.  The Plague Year, Lawrence Wright. The Koren Tanakh, author unknown.  The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova.  School Days, Jonathan Galassi.  People of the Word, Mendel Kamelson and Zalman Abraham.  God, Man and History, Dr. Eliezer Berkovits. Justice for All, Jeremiah Unterman.  Majesty and Humility, Reuven Ziegler. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin.  Bittersweet, Susan Cain.  Poems 1962-2012, Louise Gluck.  Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Gluck.  Freeman’s: Conclusions, John Freeman, editor.  Making Toast, Roger Rosenblatt.  Suicide, Eduoard Leve.  The Drunken Boat, Arthur Rimbaud.  Gold, Rumi.  The Amidah, Lawrence Hoffman.  The World of Prayer, Dr. Elie Munk.  Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith.  Love Poems, Pablo Neruda.  Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems, Yehuda Amichai.  Baedeker’s Jerusalem.  Highway 61 Revisited, Mark Polizzotti.  Nutritarian Handbook, Joel Fuhrman, MD.  Introduction to the Poem, Robert Boynton and Maynard Mack.  The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  One Simple Thing, Eddie Stern.  The Gift, Lewis Hyde.  The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal.  Evidence for Special Creation and a Young Earth, Kathleen Dunn.  These Precious Days, Ann Patchett.  Specimen Days & Collect, Walt Whitman.  The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain.  Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz.  Facing The Moon, Li Bai and Du Fu, Keith Holyoak.  The Carrying, Ada Limon.  Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver.  The Trouble with Poetry, Billy Collins.  Ozone Journal, Peter Balakian.  The Mystic Masseur, V. S. Naipaul.  Red Ants, Pergentino Jose.  Poems from the Wilderness, Jack Mayer.  Look, Solmaz Sharif.  The Tool & The Butterflies, Dmitry Lipskerov.  The Last Wolf & Herman, Laszlo Krasnahorkai.  Story of O, Pauline Reage.  The Wisdom of the Heart, Henry Miller.  Talmud Bavli, Tractate B, and it is not erachos, unknown.  The Talmud, A Reference Guide, Adin Steinsaltz.  The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis.  Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.  Victor Brauner, Emil Nicolae.  We Are Children Just The Same, Marie Rut Krizkova.  I Live Again, Ileana Princess of Romania.  An American Landscape, Henry David Thoreau.  Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys.  These Things I Remember, E. M. Altschuler.  The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen.  Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman.  The Acropolis of Athens, Charles River Editions.  Stories, Alexander Pushkin, Russian edition.  Poems, Anna Akhmatova, Russian edition.  The Years, Annie Ernaux.  Hebrew Phrases, Lonely Planet.  Holy Land, D. J. Waldie.  In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky.  The Polish Boxer, Eduardo Halfon.  Poems New and Collected, Wislawa Symborska.  Halls of Fame, John D’Agata.

  Twelve were read cover to cover.  Twenty were started, maybe a few more, but which ones or how far has fallen from memory.   And two other columns might need to be added to the hypothetical spread sheet of title, author, read/unread etc.   One for unreadable, which is the unkind cousin of started.  A check mark goes in that column to the right of The Kraus Project.  Also, another separate column for no comment, with a check mark to the far right of Kathleen Dunn’s Evidence for Special Creation and a Young Earth.  Kathleen, a sweet woman, is a neighbor.  She lives across the street and two doors down from the construction, and she writes about Biblical inerrancy and related topics.  A year or two ago she placed her slim, self-published book about the age of the Earth in my mailbox.   I like to believe that she put a copy in every mailbox on the block.

  No coffee tables in this house, but plenty of coffee table books.  Jerusalem Architecture, a flat, handsomely jacketed book of large color photographs, with text by David Kroyanker, lies on the raised granite hearth of the two-sided fireplace that separates a living room from the snugger space with the downstairs desk.  On the raised glass top of the Platner table in the living room, three more picture books, one on top of the next.  In Walking Near Water, An Artist’s View of White Rock Lake, Sue Benner’s photographs of a local lake.  I only bought because I went to her book signing.  Although I had not seen Sue in twenty years and had to remind her who I was, she signed my copy XOXOX.  Lake Flato Houses is a vanity publication, with architectural drawings and photographs of the firm’s polished work.   This one was bought only because the “Bluffview Residence” on page 224 overlooks my house from the bluff.   The new owner tore down a modest O’Neill Ford historic residence, set back and invisible, and replaced it with the pictured modernist monster.   Beyond Beauty Irving Penn is from an exhibit at the local Museum of Art.  I came home from the gift shop with it shrink-wrapped.  Other than the day it was bought, it has never been opened.

  Crowded by a ceramic bowl of rocks and shells, glass vases from Prague, and a woven hat from Peru, the two other books on this table are not real books.   One is a perfect-bound promotional brochure for a Los Angeles photographer.  His portrait of Kirsten Dunst on the cover is as seductive as a spell; it needs no justification.   The book underneath it, however, needs commentary.   It is voluptuous — Its tawny, calfskin binding, the four ridges on its spine, the   bright gold edges of its pages that look, from the side, like a wedding band.  No title, no author.   Cream colored pages, all of them blank.  A bound-in gold satin sash serves as a bookmark, although there is no content to mark on any of its blank pages.   This book that is not really a book was a gift from my second wife, and not unlike her.   It is a luxury item.

  viii

  Other tables, other rooms:

  The room at the end of the hall was a stepson’s bedroom once upon a time.  The boy is gone, the bed is gone, replaced by a NordicTrack and another desk.   The two side tables in this room have cubbyholes big enough for books.  In the side table to the left:   In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin. The Greater Journey, Americans in Paris, David McCullough.  Great Gardens of the Berkshires, Virginia Small.  And in the side table to the right, Perdurabo:  The Life of Aleister Crowley, Richard Kaczynski.

  None of these books has been read.

  A room off the kitchen that was used as a bedroom during the second marriage is now a den and seldom visited.   Across from a sleeper sofa that has never been opened, a small round table holds a stack of another four unread books:  A Susan Sontag Reader, introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick.  Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong.   Dispatch, Cameron Awkward-Rich.  Book of Jewish Thought, Dr. J. H. Hertz.

  Which is the more interesting name, Ocean Vuong or Cameron Awkward-Rich?   Ocean is a beautiful first name, Awkward-Rich an improbable last name.   Cameron Awkward-Rich, a scholar of trans theory, has a PhD from Stanford. The Book of Jewish Thought, covered in pale red cloth, was published in 1920 by Oxford University Press.   It comes from a distant world.   More than miles separates it from the milieux of Ocean Vuong or Awkward-Rich.   Dr. J. H. Hertz, The Chief Rabbi, dedicates it “to the sacred memory of the sons of Israel who fell in the Great War.”

  There are no books on bedside tables.   There are no tables or bookracks in any of the four bathrooms, either; so, no books in bathrooms.

  ix

  James Van Sweden’s Architecture in the Garden is a planted ornament on one corner of the flat, stainless surface of the kitchen island, near vases with dried thistles and away from the gas burners of the stovetop.  I reclad the island in shiny metal, part of the remodeling that preoccupied me the year after my five-year marriage to a landscape designer ended.  This house and its acre and a half of grounds were bought for her.   Architecture in the Garden is one of the many gardening books purchased in 2007 after our divorce became final and I bought her half of the house back from myself.

  In the kitchen, the metal plates of a Floating Bookshelf hold the cookbooks that are close enough at hand to be used, unlike the dozens of other cookbooks that fill two shelves in one of the hallway bookcases.  Those that made it onto the Floating Bookshelf have more status than the ones in the hallway, but they are equally unused.    From the top:  Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook belonged to my first wife, from before my time.   Same with Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, weighing in at 800 pages.  And The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking, Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz, which has a bookmark on black bean soup, the Sopa de Frijol.   Bits of napkin mark pages in Simca’s Cuisine, Simone ‘Simca’ Beck, and there are Post-its on recipes for Charlotte Rainfreville au jambon and Soupe de Bramafam and Le “Mont Blanc” en surprise, though I have never tasted any of that.  Next, Every Night Italian, Giuliano Hazan, forward by Marcella Hazan.  The New York Times International Cookbook, Craig Claiborne, is one more big book about eating and food.  The Book of Jewish Food, Claudia Roden, a cookbook I use once a year, has a broken spine.  A recipe under the front cover, for matzo stuffing, was xeroxed from Bon Appetit.

  Then, Beard on Bread, never used.  The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, by doomed Herman Tarnower, MD, and Samm Sinclair Baker.   And Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen, Wolfgang Puck.  Of these “recipes from Ma Maison,” I tried Ground Steak with Roquefort Cheese and Green Peppercorn Sauce, or, Biftek Hache au Roquefort avec Poivre Vert, thirty-five years ago.  It is a cholesterol bomb.  A Taste of India, Madhur Jaffrey has bits of torn paper bookmarking recipes with bi-lingual names.   Stir-fried Aubergine is Baigan Kalonji.  Kalonji are nigella seeds, equally mysterious in English.  The same with Baigan, which is brinjal, or just eggplant.

  Modern French Culinary Art, Henri-Paul Pellaprat, is over a thousand pages. The Making of a Cook, Madeline Kamman, another 500 unturned pages.  The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, Zoe Coulson, 800 pages.  It is as if you can never have too many recipes.  Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, another 450 pages of recipes, with a badly broken spine, and a cover falling off.   It needs to be dropped into the rubber trash can in the pantry. despite the two Post-its that mark pages for Pork Dishes and Fruit Salads.

  So far, all these cookbooks are first marriage vintage.  So, at least thirty years old, most of them much older than that, from earlier lives.  The rest on the Floating Bookshelf are second marriage, more mementos than books.  There are no food stains or Post-its in any of them, since nothing was either prepared or eaten from their pages.  For example, Paris Cafe Cookbook, Daniel Young, is a honeymoon souvenir.  The Tea Book, Sara Perry, a souvenir from somewhere unremembered.  National Geographic Food Journeys of a Lifetime places the recipes in sidebars.   Most of the pages are narrative about destination restaurants and foodie locales — Cape Malay in Bo-Kaap or Le Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon or the Asparagus Festival in southern Germany’s “Asparagus Triangle.”  The page about Cusco’s Christmas Market highlights a potato.

  Business cards for restaurants in Northern California fall out of the pages of Cucina Rustica, Viana La Place and Evan Klieman — Fog City Diner, Tra Vigne, others.  They have the flavor of happiness that has since spoiled.   Next, The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, Nancy Harman Jenkins.  A bio on the book jacket flap challenges the reader to not envy Nancy, who “divides her time between Maine and Tuscany.”  Then, Fresh – Healthy Cooking from Lake Austin Spa Resort.  Chez Panisse Cooking, Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters, sports a David Lance Goines graphic on its jacket.  A Kitchen Safari, CC Africa, is another travel souvenir, this time from a trip to Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar with my second wife.   That was a sexy, thrilling trip, though none of these recipes has ever been used.  The title page is signed by CC Africa staff — the guides, the chef, and the white-jacketed guy who served sundowners on the photo safari.  I find a receipt in the middle of the cookbook.   This receipt is dated October 2005, which surprises me.  Pam left the marriage just a few months later.  So, from her point of view, not thrilling enough.

  x

  If the cookbooks in the hallway were ever used, most of those occasions happened in distant, prior lives — in Dolores’s earlier marriages, or in her mother’s house.  Some are recipe collections from a neighborhood women’s group or from school fundraisers or from other collectives, their recipes bound in bright plastic ring bindings.  Altogether, they make a crazy salad of measurements and memories.

  Texas Capitol Collection, prologue by Ann Richards, is one of the plastic, wire-o bound booklets.  Governor Richards submitted her Jalapeno Cheese Cornbread.  Also among the wire-o bound:   Never A Day Without Chocolate, from Neiman Marcus.  Reci Peas from the Black-eyed Pea Jamboree.  Red Chile Recipes, Rosina Rodriguez.  And Martha’s Kean’s Le Petit Gourmet, signed by Martha Kean, who thanks my ten-year-old son for attending her one-day cooking course; she added a biblical quote, Proverbs 15:15: “The cheerful heart has a continual feast.”  Neighbors with Good Taste is a wire-o from the Women’s Club of the neighborhood where Dolores and I lived until her death.  Page 12 has a recipe for Eden Salad, named for our nine-year-old daughter.   It is a very sweet jello mold, calling for marshmallows, lime jello, and pecans.   On page 27, the recipe is for Chicken Benjamin, named for our ten-year-old son.  Chicken breasts, cream of mushroom soup, pearl onions, black olives.  The Best of Cooking in Carrollton has a recipe from my first wife in it as well, though her last name is from an earlier marriage, when she lived in a different neighborhood.  The recipe submitted?  It is for the very same sweet jello mold, with marshmallows, lime jello, and pecans, but she was calling it Bavarian Salad then.  The same jello mold with marshmellows and pecans appears in A Taste of the Hill – Recipes from Greenhill Families, a wire-o book of recipes from our daughter’s middle school.  This time, however, since my wife was no longer living, I changed its name a third time.  Now it is Dolores Delight.

  There is plenty of fat on these hallway shelves.  Before I knew her, Dolores or her mother ordered the American Family Cookbook, McCall’s Cookbook, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, The Terrace Times Minimum Time Maximum Effect Cookbook, The Puddin Hill Cookbook, The Complete Middle East Cookbook, Dear James Beard, Prize Winning Recipes from the State Fair of Texas, Lebanese Cookbook, Dictionary of Gastronomy, The Cranberry Connection, Dining with David Wade, The Complete Book of Pickles and Relishes, The Albert Stockli Cookbook, The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, The Art of Greek Cookery, Old Time Pickling and Spicing Recipes, The Year-Round Holiday Cookbook, Homemade Candy, The French Chef Cookbook, Freezing and Canning Cookbook, Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, Papa Rossi’s Secrets of Italian Cooking, The Good Sense Family Cookbook, The Art of Salad Making, All Manner of Food, The Blender Cookbook, The Art of Viennese Pastry, and on and on.

  Dining with David Wade has a picture of the author on its jacketed cover, wearing an ascot and holding a silver platter of hors d’oeuvres.  Dictionary of Gastronomy, Andre Simon and Robin Howe, lists terms “from Abalone to Zwieback.”  Dear James Beard has no identified author and comes from The Beef Industry Council.  Lebanese Cookbook, Dawn Elaine and Selwa Anthony, has a Post-it bookmark on Baba Ghanuj.  The President’s Cookbook, Poppy Cannon, includes recipes for The Widow Johnston’s Hasty Pudding, which it attributes to Abraham Lincoln’s father’s second wife; its only ingredients are hot water, corn meal, salt, and cold water.  The Albert Stockli Cookbook, with illustrations by Bill Goldsmith, has recipes for Crepes Finlandia with Herring, and for Chestnut-filled Cabbage Leaves.  The Good Housekeeping Cookbook offers another 3,500 recipes; the cover says “over 3500.”  Bill Goldsmith drew the illustrations for this cookbook, too.  Suzanne Huntley’s The Year-Round Holiday Cookbook was designed by Milton Glaser and has his drawings of cakes and cookies.  Homemade Candy is from the editors of Farm Journal.  So is Freezing and Canning Cookbook.  The Art of Salad Making, Carol Truax, is a “Book Club Edition” book, as are many others on these two shelves.  The Blender Cookbook, Ann Seranne, is a Book Club book.  So is The Art of Viennese Pastry, Marcia Colman Morton.  The subscriber may have been Dolores, when she was a young wife.   It may have been her mother; she was a hoarder, buying for the sake of buying.

  What does it mean, to own The Albert Stockli Cookbook, or Papa Rossi’s Secrets of Italian Cooking?   Like every book in this house, these cookbooks are fun-house mirrors, reflecting and distorting.  The never-used Art of French Cooking does the same work as the unread World’s Greatest Books.  Between their covers is the story of life in an imaginary future, when the art of pickling has been mastered, and the frozen pizza or the scrambled egg has turned into dining with David Wade.

  xi

  Melvil Dewey, the New York State Librarian for almost twenty years, and one of the founders of the American Library System, may have been an obsessive compulsive, with his passion for putting things in their place.  Dewey came up with the Dewey Decimal System in 1876, when he was only 25.  He was smart to copyright it.  Today, his copyright is owned by OCLC – the Online Computer Library Center – which licenses it   OCLC is serious about protecting the system. When a hotel with a library-themed décor used Dewey decimals for its room numbers, OCLC sued.

  Dewey also advocated for the reform of spelling.  He changed the spelling of his own first name from Melville to Melvil and briefly tried out “Dui” as a replacement for Dewey.   In his letters, “have” becomes “hav.”  In a publication about his system, he spelled “pamphlet” “pamflet.”  In short, he believed in simplification.  The system he copyrighted is not exactly simple, but it is orderly.  Dewey also believed in other kinds of categories.  He belonged to a private club, with the usual Whites only, no Jews allowed rules.  And he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, most of whom were librarians.

  His system uses Arabic numerals, defined categories, and hierarchies, and it divides the world of knowledge into ten main classes.  Each class is then subdivided into ten divisions, and each division into ten sections.  Melvil Dewey was also an advocate for the metric system.  So, every book in his system starts with three digits.  The first digit will represent one of the ten main classes, the second is for one of the hundred divisions, and the third stands for one of the thousand sections.   Like so many systems, its objectivity is like an iceberg.  The judgment underneath it lies below the surface.  These are the ten main classes and their associated Arabic numerals:

  0 – Computer science, information and general works
  1 – Philosophy and psychology
  2 – Religion
  3 – Social sciences
  4 – Language
  5 – Science
  6 – Technology
  7 – Arts and recreation
  8 – Literature
  9 – History and geography

  A second digit in a Dewey system will gets you into the hundred divisions.  For example, under the class “Philosophy and psychology,” second digits represent:

  0 – Philosophy
  1 – Metaphysics
  2 – Epistemology
  3 – Parapsychology and occultism
  4 – Philosophical schools of thought
  5 – Psychology
  6 – Logic
  7 – Ethics
  8 – Ancient, medieval and eastern philosophy
  9 – Modern western philosophy

  Then It gets stranger, as you come to the thousand sections.  And, after that, the decimal point and other numbers are used, for more specificity.   OLCS explains that all topics not including the ten main classes are part of the broader topics above them.  Meaning that numbers at every level are subordinate to the number to the left of them.  This is the example that OLCS gives in its twenty-page “brief introduction” to the current system:

  600 – Technology
  630       Agriculture and related technologies
  636           Animal husbandry
  636.7          Dogs
  636.8          Cats

  This does not imply that cats are subordinate to dogs.   Despite the difference in their numbers, they have the same number of digits.

  In class number 1, or what the system calls 100, for “Philosophy and psychology,” 196 is “Philosophy of Spain and Portugal” in the Dewey system.

  Does that make sense?
  Not to me, not completely, but I am not a librarian.

  Dewey Decimal is the name of a character in a novel by Nathan Larson from 2011.  In post-apocalyptic New York City, the anti-hero has taken on the bitter task of reorganizing the shelves in what remains of the main public library.   My task is only the books in this house.   My step one, just a list of their titles and locations.  So far, I have done the desks, the tables, two floating bookshelves, and made a start in the hallway, where there are fifty-one shelves to go, on seven separate bookcases.  I will leave those for last.

  Chapter Five
  CUBES AND GLASS

  The room behind the kitchen might have been the garage of this three-bedroom house in the 1950s.  It is the only room that is not pier and beam.    It became a master bedroom after I bought the house for my second marriage.  Our three sullen teenagers – my two, her one – lived behind their closed doors in the original three bedrooms.  The only other remodeling during those five years of marriage was to add a bath to this garage turned bedroom.   We added a tub, a floor of twelve-inch granite squares with a heating element underneath them, a sink, a commode.   These days, the former garage former bedroom is a den, and the only space in the house that needed no further remodeling after the divorce.  Just the removal of the king-sized bed and the addition of a freestanding bookcase.

  This bookcase is cheap wood, stained the darkest brown.  Against an ochre wall, it has the pleasing geometry of twelve backless cubes, in four rows of three, surrounded in its five-foot frame.   I liked its symmetry as soon as I saw it on the floor at Wayfair.   Because no one goes into this den anymore, this bookcase holds the most neglected books, if neglect can be measured or compared.   There are physics and history textbooks with yellow used stickers on their spines.  They come from my children’s failed semesters in three or four colleges.  A twenty-one volume World Book series, early 1990s, was intended to help prepare them for what did not lie ahead.  Other books that they must have lugged in the weighty backpacks that bent them over between classes, in the hallways or across the quads of their high schools, are filling some of the cubes.

  These leftover text books have the flavor of food fed to animals in a public zoo.  Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness:  Documents in American History Volume II, 1861 to Present.    Evolution, a “companion” to an educational television series.  Nature’s Services:  Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems.  I don’t know which child was assigned Longman’s American History Atlas.  I am paging through it and falling under its knowing spell.  Maps of Europe and the United States have been transformed into infographics.  “Voyages of Exploration and Colonial Empires, c. 1700.”  “The Rise of Tenancy in the South 1880.”  “Post-War Immigration to the Sunbelt and West Coast.”

  ii

  The spines and covers of the 21 volumes of World Book are a deep brownish red. Their pages have a gold gleam on their edges.  These books that fill two of the cubes completely were bought for children, but their content is not childish.  I can slide out S-Sn, Volume 17, and open to pages 126-127, if interested Sargon of Akkad or Jean Paul Sartre.

  One cube down holds Making Literature Matter, a thick paperback from my son’s three semesters at the University of Kansas.  Also, Heath Anthology of American Literature, and Exploring Literature, and Readings in United States History Since 1877.   He lasted a year at KU before failing out.  It might have been a combination of not caring, loneliness, drinking, dyslexia, and the personal crises that have never departed.  This same cube shelters two failures of my own:   2001 Yiddish Verbs, never attempted, and Positivity Bias, poorly understood.  One cube over are some leftovers from my first wife:  WAIS Manual, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale,  and Personality, a collection of essays edited by Eugene Southwell.   These are not warm, fuzzy titles, though Erik Erickson’s Identity Youth and Crisis is hugging Harold Gulliksen’s The Theory of Mental Tests, and Theory of Psychology and Measurement sidles up to Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, by Dollar, Doob, et al.

  Other cubes have more titles from our children’s college reading lists.  There are assigned novels and mandatory poetry, dictionaries, reference books.  My son’s name is on the inside covers of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations.  It is no wonder he quit college.  Merriam Webster Desk Dictionary, Webster’s New World Dictionary, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition weigh down the freestanding bookcase.  Also The Everyday Writer, next to Crafting Expository Argument.  There is Biology 1408 and a physics textbook called Physics.  A Concise History of the American People, followed by These United States.   Zen and the Art of the Internet, and Selected Poems of Emily Dickenson, and Mother of Pearl, and a paperback To Kill A Mockingbird — this one is the 35^th Anniversary Edition.  I have never heard of Mother of Pearl, an Oprah’s Book Club selection from 2001, but I discover inside its cover “Love, Dad” inscription to a then 16-year-old daughter.

  In another cube, wafer-thin books from my children’s earliest childhoods.  Memories here, though of nothing in particular; if images, then like a silent film with no intertitles.  Or, if sound, then only echoes from back down a canyon.   Still, who wouldn’t want to remember reading That’s What Friends Are For.  It Is a Golden Book.   Simple Simon’s Nursery Rhymes is a board book, as is Jack and Jill’s Nursery Rhymes, with its price sticker from Toys R Us.   Close to forty years have passed since Oscar’s Rotten Birthday, and Get Well Clown-Arounds, and Puss In Boots.  Hide and Seek is a Mystery Picture Book.   Where’s My Hat is another.  Baby’s First A B C is here, snug in its cube.  And Bear’s Pot of Gold, safe in the den.

  iii

  Every cube in the freestanding bookcase has objects in front of the books.  A framed photograph.  An ashtray filled with rocks.  A sock puppet still in its packaging.  A dead bonsai tree in a blue rectangular pot.  A metal box holding matchbooks from Madrona Manor.   A sand dollar.   Colored, misshapen ceramic bowls that were craft projects; and these bowls are carrying chestnuts, three pinecones, and pieces of twisted wood.  The framed photograph of my son with my sister was taken at her third marriage.  That happened in Denver, when he was working in Boulder, in the produce section of a grocery store, after a semester at another college and again dropping out.  Behind the photograph, there are five books that belong to earlier aspirations; not his, but mine for him.  They relate to Microsoft certifications and imagined careers.  I do not understand a word of these imposing hardbacks.  Whatever dreams they refer to were shelved before the books were.  There is MCSE Windows 2000 Server, MCSE Windows 2000 Network Infrastructure Administration, MCSE Windows 2000 Directory Services Administrator, MCSE Windows 2000 Professional, and MCSE Windows 2000 Four-In -One Core Requirements.   Alongside them, a cheerful orange paperback:  MCSE Study Tips For Dummies.  I was the purchaser.  The reader was no one.

  iv

  Nine Ian Fleming paperbacks are lashed together in another cube, a raft drifting back to my teens.  From Russia With Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice.  And, further back to early boyhood, nine Edgar Rice Burroughs, five from the John Carter of Mars series and four Tarzans.   The titles on their eye-candy covers are like a ticket for a time traveling.  There is Swords of Mars, A Fighting Man of Mars, The Master Mind of Mars, Synthetic Men of Mars, and Thulia Maid of Mars, and then Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan and The Lion Man, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, and Tarzan’s Quest.  At the end of this same row, one hardback:  Tarzan and the City of Gold, illustrated by Tony Sgroi.  When I pry City of Gold out of the cube, its cover detaches.  I am unwilling to do further harm by rereading even one of its golden sentences.

  The twelve cubes serve as shelves for a mixed multitude.   In one of them, three vanity publications showcase the work of commercial graphic designers.  Graphis, Graphic Design USA 10, and Graphic Design USA 11 are all award show publications; the only thing ever read in these books is the index of winners’ names.  In the same cube, All The Whiskey In Heaven, Charles Bernstein, an unopened book of poems.

  Another cube, other unread books:  Feast, Tomaz Salamun.  The Devil in The White City, Erik Larson.  Next, James Hynes.   The Crying of Lot, Thomas Pynchon.  The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, Henry James.  Testimonies: Four Plays by Emily Mann.  The Daily Mirror, David Lehman.  Fear of Dreaming, Jim Carroll.  Art Spiegelman Conversations, Joseph Witek, editor.  Explanations are not reasons, but I can explain why I bought Testimonies two years ago.  In 1972, my sophomore year, I walked into the wrong bedroom, startling my college roommate.  He was on the bed, underneath his girlfriend, Emily.  This naked redhaired twenty-year old was Emily Mann, author eventually of Testimonies:  Four Plays.   When I met her, the two of them were further along than foreplay.  I remember her reaction as she turned around.  Not frightened, not embarrassed.  Annoyed.

  The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector, is in the same cube with Emily Mann.  Also, Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz, The Great Escape, Kati Marton.  And History of the Jews in Sighet, 1600-1940, Ioan Popescu.  I picked up Popescu in the gift shop at the Hotel Gradina Morii in Sighet, Romania, on a trip in 2019 to see where one of my grandfathers came from.   This morning it looks more out of place than any of its neighbors in this cube.  It squeezes in beside A.D.D and Romance, Emotional Freedom, World of Our Fathers, The Bridge at Andau, The Catholic Writer Today, White Privilege, The Byline Bible, and Banthology, a collection of stories from Muslim countries published by Deep Vellum, as a response of sorts to the “Muslim ban” of 2017.

  v

  The last of the cubes in the freestanding bookcase is more narrowly dedicated to my now middle-aged daughter’s childhood.  These books have her breath on them.  Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman.  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman.  Skin, an X-Files Novel by Ben Mezrich.  More Spaghetti I Say, Rita Golden Gelman.  Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert Heinlein.  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Judith Viorst.  The Biggest Pumpkin Ever, Steven Kroll.  The City In Which I Love You, Li-Young Lee.  This Li-Young Lee must have traveled close to Eden’s teenage heart.  The book’s flowery pages are weedy with her penciled comments.  Some of those comments read like poems of her own.   Bought used, The City In Which I Love You is signed by the poet, who wrote in a dedication on its title page, For Sue, My City to yours, Peace.   On that page, Eden added her own poetic response:

  A dedication –
  words written to another,
  a postcard,
  a love note.
  Here I find them,
  these words not meant for me.
  Who will write for me, then?
  Or will all I find dedicated,
  engraved with the echo of my name
  be stones,
  silence,
  ashes,
  hurt.

  The notes she scatters through the rest of the pages are in the same key.  Why tonight do my words return in a blue hour?  Why am I compelled to desecrate margins?  There is nothing lonelier than love.  The darkness of the self.  I wonder if the day will come when I have forgotten your smile.  Always, always waiting. I remember your voice, low and sweet like rain.  I cannot, I cannot let go. My own heart broken and rusted shut.  I am once again a poet, a dreamer, and laughing all the same.

  Truth be told, her penciled phrases are not that different from the printed poems, which were winners of the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets in 1990.  The arbitrary line breaks, the swollen emotion.   They were written “in a blue hour,” as Li-Young Lee might have put it himself.

  One last book in the cube:  The Eleventh Hour, A Curious Mystery, Graeme Base.  It has its dedication, too, on the flysheet: “To Eden, on your 9^th birthday,” it says on the flysheet inside.  “Love, Dad & Mom.”

  This child remains a curious mystery, her path away as crooked as a corkscrew, and yet from the beginning headed exactly where it has led.

  vi

  Before Dewey, libraries put books on shelves using simpler methods.  It was a first come, first served system; a new book took its place at the end of the line.   Impossible to use that method on the shelves in my house.  In Search of the Miraculous, the gift for my sixteenth birthday, might belong near the front in that system.    The Norton Anthology of English Literature, along with all the books that retain their odor of the classroom, could be roughly dated, through my late teens to early twenties.  But what then?  Which came first, Night Train to Turkestan by Stuart Stevens, or Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk?   Did Jonathan Kozol’s Death At An Early Age arrive sooner or later than Birth of the Cool by Lewis MacAdams?   It is impossible to sort it out, a history of purchases, borrowings, inheritances, thefts, and other provenance.  Thefts, because some of the books on my shelves were stolen.  The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats has the Ex Libris from the college library it came from.  At the time, I felt justified taking it.  Rimbaud Oeuvres Poetiques, Garnier Flammarion edition, was pilfered from a bedroom bookcase in the Paris apartment I rented from Catherine Demongeot’s mother in 1973.  I confessed on the page opposite its inside back cover: “20 Mai. Sunday.  Leaving Paris Thursday morning.  Taking Catherine’s Rimbaud with me when I go.”   In a reorganization of shelves by date, this paperback could be put in its place precisely.

  Dewey decided it was better to base a book’s place on its subject matter.  This is clarifying, but only when the subject is obvious.   Does The Anatomy of Melancholy belong among books about human psychology or books of English literature?   Or sandwiched between two books of meandering nonsense?   Dewey’s numbering also has the inherent biases of its times.  The subject of homosexuality began under 132, mental derangements, and then 159.9, with abnormal psychology.   It has wandered since then, first to 301.424, the study of sexes in society, and then to 363.49, social problems, and finally to 306.7, sexual relations.  So, classifying by subject is subjective.  In the beginning, the Dewey placement for subjects related to women belonged next to the category for etiquette.

  vii

  After he finished his afternoons walking on a treadmill at the Verandah Club behind the Anatole Hotel, Bill Gilliland liked to tell me stories of the days when he co-owned bookstores with Larry McMurtry.  McMurtry was a bookseller and collector at scale.   He bought blocks of buildings to house his books.  He also acknowledged the emotional freight of book ownership, and even wrote a book about it.  In Books, McMurtry writes that for both the bookseller and the collector, ownership is only a temporary condition.  Something to think about as I consider any re-organization of my shelves.   What is the fate of these books?  However I rearrange them, they will not be there all that much longer.

  Libraries are also transit stations, although they may seem more permanent.   The Library of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was destroyed by fire.   My shelves are likelier to go by wrecking ball.   The appraisal district values this brick veneer house at only $141,000.   It is the 1.59 acres the house sits on that are valuable.  Total value of house and land, $2,101,000 according to a recent appraisal by the taxing authorities.  Despite my remodeling, which included widening a hallway in order to build seven bookcases into it, this house will be a teardown when I am no longer here.  The shelves and their contents will not be remarkable enough to preserve.  This is not the Vatican Apostolic Library, with 26 miles of shelving for 1.1 million books and 75,000 manuscripts.  The cubes of a freestanding bookcase in the den are not in the Biblioteca Joanina, the library of the University of Coimbra, in Coimbra, Portugal, which has a colony of bats that consume any insects that might damage rare texts from the 16^th century.   What I do have in common with some of the great collections is  ignorance of what actually rests on my shelves.  That is one reason for doing this listing and naming.   It turns out that lots of libraries are unaware of what they own under their vaulted ceilings.   At the Bavarian State Library in Munich, a codex of homilies by the Alexandrian theologian Origin, likely copied by an anonymous scribe in the 11^th century, was only discovered in 2012.

  viii

  A chilly day today, a late February day, grey skies.   When the garage was first converted to a den, a cheap metal fireplace was installed in one wall and recessed spaces were added on either side of the fireplace, with quarter-inch glass shelves for books and keepsakes.  These shelves mostly display family pictures in easel-backed frames – wives, baby pictures, teenagers, a former “significant other.”   Only three of the shelves are used for books, but those three are booked up, packed tight.

  I took the afternoon to open every book on these three shelves – all 75 of them, or thereabouts.   Naming them, thumbing their pages as though they were cards in a deck, and discovering the bookmarks and other bits of paper and notes that fall out of their pages.  Inside A Short History of Byzantium, John Jules Norwich, a Post-it with a quote from Chekhov, who describes the human condition as “a dislike of life strangely combined with a fear of death.”   The bookmark in Journal 1935-1944 The Fascist Years, Mihail Sebastian, is an opera ticket from Saturday, March 17, 2018, a performance that has left no echo.  Reflections, Walter Benjamin, has a boarding pass for economy class on a Lufthansa flight inside it.  The FRA on the boarding pass is airport code for Frankfort, where I may have passed through;, the pass is so faded it could be PRA, airport code for General Justo Jose de Urquiza Airport on the southeast side of Parana in the Entre Rios province of Argentina, where I have never been.    New and Selected Poems, Stephen Dunn, has become a portmanteau, stuffed with printouts of emails.  Then, FSG Poetry Anthology, edited by Jonathan Galassi, and Beautiful Country, Burn Again, Ben Fountain, and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Ben Fountain again.

  I whiled away hours, looking into The Future Is History, Masha Gessen.  Matthias Buchinger, Ricky Jay.   El Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges.  Horoscopes for the Dead, Billy Collins.  A Poet’s Fate, Selected Writings of Louise Bogan.  And yet… Christopher Hitchens.  Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes.   Quichote, Salman Rushdie.   Freedom, Jonathan Franzen.   Finding Home, Jill Culiner.   I had forgotten A Greek Jew from Salonica Remembers, Yaacov Handeli.  The Jewish Nation – Photography from the S. An-Sky Ethnographic Expeditions, edited by Avrumtin et al.   The People and the Books, Adam Kirsch.   People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks.   Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder.  Ultimate Visual Dictionary, Dorling Kindersley.   Chowkidar, which is only a pamphlet, from the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia.   The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield.   To Urania, Joseph Brodsky.  Rome and Jerusalem, Moses Hess.   Last on one of the shelves, The Secret Knowledge On the Dismantling of American Culture, David Mamet, a used, decommissioned library book that is stamped Roselle Public Library District.

  Almost all of these books were filing cabinets for postcards and email printouts.    V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers has an oversized postcard from Tally Dunn Gallery midway through it, advertising a Chihuly exhibit.  A page from Steve King’s newsletter Borne Back Daily hides inside Robert Fitzgerald’s In The Rose of Time.  All 28 lines of The Collectors by Marion Strobel, from Poem-A-Day, were printed out and saved inside Selected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz.
  That day was April 30, 2016:

  The barnacle of crowds-
  Like a tuck
  On a finished skirt, unnoticed –
  He collected his materials
  Covertly:
  A ragpicker,
  A scavenger of words.

  And so on.

  Czeslaw Milosz may never come down from the glass shelf to be looked at it again.  Even less likely, another reading of the bio of Marion Strobel on this Poem-A-Day printout.   Born in 1895.  Lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois.  Two collections of poetry, one published in 1925, the other in 1928.   Died 1967, while I was starting high school.

  The Hindus, Wendy Daniger, subtitled An Alternative History, holds a grey and white card with a red star stamped on it, titled Schindler’s Factory – Krakow, January 18, 1945.   That souvenir is at page 104 of a book with 750 pages about Hindus.   On page 449, a second souvenir from the same July 2017 trip to Poland and the Czech Republic– a black and white photograph of Felice and Franz Kafka taken in July 1917.    Atomic Ranch – Midcentury Interiors, Michelle Gringeri-Brown, has photographs by Jim Brown.  The inside from cover of this coffee-table book is signed Jim, 2013.  Forty-three years earlier, Jim Brown and I used to share the lunch table at high school in Los Angeles.  The Jews of Spain, Jane S. Gerber, carries an expired Individual Charter Member membership card from a Holocaust Museum Center between two pages.   The Wisdom of the Talmud, Ben Zion Bokser, has a printout, too. This one is from “Ask The Rabbi,” a newsletter courtesy of the Torah Association.  A reader has asked the rabbi about souls.   In Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger, I saved an unrelated article about the word “September” – why this word that seems related to “seven” has become the name of the ninth month.  And tucked inside Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems, a printout of the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art”, with its untrue, repeated line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”   Nothing inside Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West, just one thousand unread pages, in paperback.

  More on the three glass shelves:

  The Seventh Sense, Joshua Cooper Ramo.  The Third Kind of Knowledge, Robert Fitzgerald. Super Mind, Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens.  Mudbound, Hilary Jordan. The Sleep Revolution, Ariana Huffington. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander.  Epitome of Desire, Robert A. Wilson.  When Parents Hurt, Joshua Coleman, Ph.D. Torn Windows, Jane Hirshfield.  Turning The Mind Into An Ally, Sakyong Mipham. The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon.  The Art of Flight, Sergio Pitol. The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers.  Dali – Poetics of the Small, 1929-1936, Meadows Museum.  Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin. Budapest 1900, John Lukacs.  The Prophetic Faith, Martin Buber.  So Forth, Joseph Brodsky.  Turn Out The Lights, Chronicles of Texas During the 80s and 90s, Gary Cartwright.  Dallas Noir, edited by David Hale Smith.  More Light, Selected Poems 2004-2016, Frederick Turner.  And Tao Te Ching, the version from Fall River Press, the one with calligraphy by Kwok-Lap Chan.

  Still more:

  The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, Charlotte Elisheva Farrobert, editor.  Seventy Facets – A Commentary on the Torah, Gershom Gorenberg.  A History of Judaism, Martin Goodman, 600 pages, Princeton University Press.  The Broken Road, Patrick Leigh Fermor.   Between The Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor, introduction by Jan Morris.  And The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter.

  In Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, I got no further than page xiii, still in the introduction.  But I buried a postcard between its pages — from Hotel Casino, Morelia, Michoacan.   Also, a business card from Galeria Esmeralda, Patzcuaro, Michoacan.  And a ticket stub from April 21, 2018, for Symphony Hall in San Diego, where I had gone after my mother’s death, to spend time in her Ocean Hills house.   And two unused Dallas Opera tickets, Don Giovanni, for that same Saturday, April 21, 2018.

  Books have become hiding places, full of clues to the past, though the mystery is not interesting enough for anyone to solve.   The afternoon was turning into nightfall.  On a grey day, there may be no seam between the two.   Making lists of titles and counting spines – 75 or so, on these glass shelves – is not difficult work, but it is tiring.  It is like counting grains of sand; each one is different, but the difference has little meaning.  In the end, it is all sand.   I was beginning to feel sorry for myself, and for no good reason.

  Three more books, then done in the den:

  Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce. The prototype of the unread book, a book that was bought with no intention of reading it, or even skimming.   South and West, Joan Didion, is storing the printout of a passage from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” about the time “in every man’s education” when he comes to know that envy is ignorance and so on.   The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon, a slim paperback, conceals a scrap of paper with a Lola Ridge poem.   Do you remember, it begins:

  Do you remember
  Honey-melon moon
  Dripping thick sweet light…

  The glass shelves are thick and unbending under the weight of these books.  This glass is less fragile than memory, and clearer as well.

  Chapter Six
  PHILIA AND PHOBIA

  People are driven crazy by a love of books.  Crimes have been committed.  A man named Blumberg became his own victim of bibliophilia gone wrong.  In The Guinness World Records, Blumberg holds the record for stealing books.   He took more than 26,000 of them from libraries and museums.  Mostly, he stole rare books.  And not for the money, but simply because he wanted them.  He kept them at his home in Ottumwa, Iowa, on his own shelves instead of on the shelves of the nearly 300 libraries where he found them, or in the caged enclosures at museums, or the locked display cases and restricted areas where they had been kept.  After Blumberg’s arrest, the FBI used a 40-foot tractor to haul away the nineteen tons of books he had stolen.   His crime was no spree.   If it was craziness, it was no temporary insanity, because Blumberg kept at it for two decades.

  Bibliophobia is also real.   It can manifest in equally bizarre ways, from a simple nervousness about reading out loud in front of an audience to a crazy fear of just being around books.  The sufferer might have a horror of bookstores or of libraries.  Or, as if this phobia were a Dewey dream, it can manifest as a fear of some specific subcategory of books.  Fear of textbooks.  Fear of historical novels.  Fear of self-help.

  ii

  In March 2020, the ten shelves behind my desk downstairs embarked on a second career as a Zoom background.  They became décor, the books and ornaments behind my balding forehead and the ellipses of my eyeglasses during Zoom meetings.  Other faces appeared on the bright rectangle of the screen, with bookshelves as backgrounds for most of them as well.  It is a shared preference.  Better a bookshelf than the fake beach where some Zoomers lounge, when they are actually at their kitchen tables or sitting on their unmade beds.   So common is a bookshelf background on Zoom that it has morphed into a product.   Bookshelf Zoom Backgrounds are downloaded “to make you look smart.”  That is what the sites say.   The download is free, the background is fake, just like the Caribbean Beach or the Finding Nemo motif, which are also popular.

  iii

  National Geographic Atlas of the World is the tallest book on the shelves behind the downstairs desk.  It lies flat, a large lake of a book in its blue slipcase.  On top of the slipcase, two frames with children’s photos, and a dusty toy wooden ukulele.  I set them aside to take the lost world of the atlas from its slipcase.  It has my name debossed at the lower edge of its blue cover.   The exact year this gift of an atlas was given did not make the journey through my unmapped memory from then to now.   Maybe in 1963, which is the publication date.  If so, this book was the big birthday gift from my parents when I turned twelve that year.

  That turns out to be a wrong guess.

  On the shelf just below it, another book from National Geographic.  Its illustrated jacket is tattered.  Across the torn illustration, Robert E. Peary dashes to the Pole.  Instead of its paper jacket, this book needed the outerwear of an Arctic explorer.  Peary, it says on the jacket flap, got to the Pole in 1909; so, the same year that The Five-Foot Shelf of Books got into print.  Exploring further, I discover a message.  It has been left behind, on the title page:  To Our Son on his 12^th Birthday with All Our Love –

  Great Adventures with National Geographic is a the head of a line forming to its right.  There are 25 other titles on spines, books of different heights, widths and colors.  Five are paperback.  Eleven are sets by author.  Four Graham Greene, three Yvor Winters, two H.G. Wells, two Andre Gide.  Of the remaining fourteen, two are poetry, two are books of letters— actual correspondence — and two are writings about writing.   Two others might fall under a Dewey number 200, for Religion.  The six remaining books are solos.  One a novel, one a book of essays on the Trans-Mississippi West, one in praise of fathers.   One is by a famous feminist, one is the autobiography of an entrepreneurial mystic.

  So, no obvious organizing principle is at work here.

  These twenty-five could be divided into four that were read, eight that were started, and the thirteen that have never been looked at.

  In alphabetical order, by titles only:  3 By Graham Greene, Autobiography of a Yogi, The Book of Goodbyes, The Colony, The Coming of Age, Creating Fiction, The End of the Affair, Entering the High Holy Days, Forms of Discovery, The Frontier Challenge, The Function of Criticism, In Search of a Character, The Journals of Andre Gide Volume I, The Journals of Andre Gide Volume II, Letters on Literature and Politics, Lord Byron Selected Letters and Journals, Our Man in Havana, The Outline of History Volume I, The Outline of History Volume II), Put Your Hands In, Thoughts to Share with a Wonderful Father, To Be A Jew, and What I’m Going To Do, I Think.

  Trying again, right to left, after Great Adventures with National Geographic, this time keeping books together that seem to belong together:

  3 By Graham Greene, Our Man In Havana, Graham Greene.  Then, In Search of a Character, Graham Greene’s two African journals.  The End of the Affair, a first edition still in its jacket.  Under its flap, a trimmed article from 1991 reporting Graham Greene’s death, age 86, at a hospital in Vevey, Switzerland.

  The Outline of History, H.G. Wells, is Volume I of what the cover claims will be “The Whole Story of Man.”  Then, The Outline of History, Volume II.  Volume I of The Journals of Andre Gide, 1889-1913 has an ex libris sticker signed by “Hal.”  The book is inscribed Christmas, 1947, A sincere and honest book for one of the most sincere and honest people I’ll ever know.  Clarice.  The Journals of Andre Gide Volume II, 1914-1927, has the same ex libris.   Clarice inscribed this one, too.  Christmas, 1948, To Wilbur, who has a special place in my affections that no other person can ever fill.   

  There is In Defense of Reason, Yvor Winters.  The Function of Criticism, Yvor Winters.  Forms of Discovery, Yvor Winters.  At this point, things on the same shelf become arbitrary.  Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, is saving a receipt from September 20, 1974, the Self-Realization Fellowship Gift Shop, 17190 Sunset Boulevard.   Next, The Frontier Challenge, edited by John G. Clark.   Then, What I’m Going To Do, I Think, L. Woiwode.  Letters on Literature and Politics, Edmund Wilson.  And Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway, a stiff book of essays as untouched as the day it was published in 1999.

  The tops of the pages of The Colony, John Bowers, are as spotted and browned as the backs of my hands.  To Be A Jew, Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, has a folded review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature inside it and, even more out of place, six mimeographed and stapled pages titled Jesus Fulfilled Old Testament Prophecies As The Coming Messiah.  Then, The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir.  Lord Byron, Selected Letters and Journals.  Entering the High Holy Days, Reuven Hammer.  Both The Book of Goodbyes, Jillian Weise, and Put Your Hands In, Chris Hosea, are slim paperbacks, books of poetry.  Both are also award winners, with silver seals on their covers.

  Last in line, Thoughts to Share with a Wonderful Father, from Blue Mountain Arts, a crafty, homemade-looking small book of sayings, paragraphs, poems, wisdoms.  It includes several quotes from Bill Cosby.

  iv

  If you do not remember a word of a book you have read, have you read it?  If a tree falls in the forest….  The answer to these sophomoric provocations is yes, the book was read, the experience was experienced, the tree fell.  As to whether the tree made a sound, ask the squirrels, ask the birds.

  Despite keeping it at my elbow for a month, I have gotten no further than page twenty of In Search of the Miraculous. 

  The money from the sale of my second wife’s lost-and-found diamond ring has already been spent.  I used it to replace the water heater in my son’s townhouse and repair the broken tiles of his kitchen floor.  He had no hot water for several months before letting me know something was wrong.   This is typical.   It goes with his general depression that neither the talking therapies or Buproprion have lifted.   Water leaking under his kitchen floor had buckled the square ceramic tiles, which broke when he stepped on them.  Repairs had to be made.  The cost of repair matched almost exactly what Agent Scully gave me for the diamond.

  My son has not worked in nearly two years.  He lives in the townhome he bought and moved into when he was working.  This morning we are going together to meet the “weight coach” who will set up the six-month program that promises to help him lose eighty pounds.  If successful, he would then weigh just about 300 pounds.  He would move from morbid obesity to being very overweight.   Neither of us believes it will happen, but one of us believes in trying.  On the drive over, he says, “I have something to tell you.”

  This is never good.  He tells me that is water heater is not working again.   I ask him how is that possible.  He says a breaker tripped, and the new Rheem 50-gallon water heater that was installed never came back on, even after he reset the breaker.   So, no hot water, again.  Also, he says, the sink in the kitchen is not draining and the garbage disposal has not worked for over a year.

  v

  People read less and less, yet more and more books are being sold.  This is according to data that tracks the sales of printed books.   My shelves are also packed with books are both purchased and unread.   Consider the shelf that starts with the fanfare of Great Adventures and peters out at Thoughts To Share with a Wonderful Father.  Twenty-five books, only four of them read.  Of those, two are Graham Greene novels.  And not of trace of them remains in my memory, not a plot, not the name of a single character.  Only their titles, Our Man in Havana and The End of the Affair, have made it through   Likewise with Autobiography of a Yogi.  I remember it mainly as testimony to the real estate genius of the Self-Realization Fellowship, which owns the prime Lake Shrine property in Los Angeles, on Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, and operates the gift shop.  The Colony, John Bowers, is a book that has left its residue.  Published in the 1971, it recounts the year and a half its author spent in a “writing colony” in Southern Illinois.  So, a story of dreams unlikely to come true.  One of its sentences has planted itself.  I am a writer, I am, I am, Bowers wrote.  Such an insistent line; sad, in a way, and yet here it is, appearing in a published book.

  Nine shelves to go in the two bookcases built into the wall behind the downstairs desk.

  Inside U.S.A., John Gunther, came from my parents’ house.  It was published in 1947.  A gate-fold chart tumbles out of it, with data for the forty-eight states.  It quantifies an unfamiliar country, state by state – each state’s total area, its rank by size, the population, its nickname, capitol, date of admission to the Union, number of foreign born, number of Negroes, income per capita, value of school property per pupil, number of rural homes without a toilet or a privy, number of residents in Who’s Who, the percent of population with no library service, telephones per 1,000, number of auto registrations, number of lynchings from 1882 to 1944, the majority’s choice for president in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, the number killed in automobile accidents in 1943, the number killed in World War II.

  Next, A Treasure of the Familiar, edited by Ralph Woods.  The slipcased four volumes of The World of Mathematics, James R. Newman, are next to Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley, Modern Library.  The Way Things Work, Volume One, Simon and Schuster, is an “illustrated encyclopedia of technology.”   It has never been used to fix a leak or rewire a light switch.  The Post-it poking up from the dust on the book’s top edge marks the page with a diagram of the manufacturing process for Plexiglas.  Then, The Way Things Work, Volume Two. Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe.  In Search of History, Theodore H. White, is another book that came from my parents’ house.  I wonder if my father ever read it.   He and Theodore H. White were born one year apart.

  Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys And Sorrows is eye level with In Search of History.   I have read every page of this book, much of it while lying in a hammock suspended between live oak trees near the creek that borders the backyard.  Romania, Debbie Stowe, is an “essential pocket guides” that could be been replaced by a smart phone in your pocket.  Then, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel.  Transfigurations, Jay Wright.  Nil Nil, Don Paterson.  Tucked under the cover of Nil Nil, a printout with these lines from Rabindranath Tagore:

    The raindrop whispered to the jasmine, “Keep me in your heart forever.” 
   The jasmine sighed, “Alas,” and dropped to the ground.

  The War In Eastern Europe, John Reed, is a book “in the public domain.”  It is Illustrated by Boardman Robinson.   Someone has named their child “Boardman.”  Boardman Michael Robinson, an American painter, editorial cartoonist, muralist, book illustrator, teacher and radical socialist.  Husband to Sarah Whitney, who studied sculpture with Rodin and dance with Isadora Duncan.   His friends called him “Mike.”

  Lioness, Francine Klagsbrun.  A Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, George Sampson, is concise at 1,091 pages.  The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Christianity In Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky.  Elijah’s Violin & Other Jewish Fairy Tales, retold by Howard Schwartz.  A Country Herbal, Lesley Gordon, is a handsome hardback book about Figwort and Hyssop and Pimpernel, with engravings.   Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison.  I met Lowell once.  What I recall is the odd way his glance turned away.  As for his biography, I turned away at page four.  Wordsworth, Poetry and Prose, selected by W.M. Merchant, has my sister’s penciled notes in the margins of The Prelude, from Book First all the way through Book Thirteenth.  Also deposited in those pages, a two-dollar legal tender bill from the Central Bank of Belize.  On its front, Queen Elizabeth.  Engraved on the back of the bill, the Maya ruins of Xunantunich.  These are ruins less than an hour drive from Blancaneaux Lodge, where Dolores and I stayed with our two young children on a Spring Break thirty-three years ago.  Like so many of these books, Wordsworth, Poetry and Prose is an unwritten diary.

  vi

  In the introduction, Llewellyn Powys is quoted saying that The Anatomy of Melancholy is “the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose writing.”  But my mouth fills with gobbledygook when I open Burton’s book to a random page and read out loud.  This is the sentence my finger falls on, middle of the paperback, halfway down the page, Part Two, Section Two, Digression of Air:  “If the heavens then be penetrable, as these men deliver, and no lets, it were not amiss in this aerial progress to make wings and fly up, which that Turk in Busbequius made his fellow-citizens in Constantinople believe he would perform: and some newfangled wits, methinks, should some time or other find out: or if that may not be, yet with a Galileo’s glass, or Icaromenippus’ wings in Lucian, command the spheres and heavens, and see what is done amongst them.”   Flipping pages, I can try again, reading this at the start of another paragraph:  “Aetius, 22, 23, commends hieram Ruffi. Trinxacellius, consil. 12, lib. 4, approves of hiera; Non, inquit, invenio melius medicamentum, I find no better medicine, he saith.“

  This is how it goes on, page after page.   There seem to be no rules, and it is not going anywhere, despite all the traveling.

  Much more plainly, Burton quotes Galen about the causes of melancholy.  “It is in vain to speak of cures, or think of remedies, until such time and we have considered of the causes.”   Those causes must be either supernatural or natural.  The supernatural will include God and His angels, and also, by God’s permission, the devil and his ministers.   For melancholy that is brought by God, there are no cures, other than through God.  As for troubles with devils and spirits, Burton devotes page after page to their kinds, their qualities and numbers, the fiery and aerial, the watery and terrestrial, the ghosts, the omens, and their powers, and those instruments of the devil, the witches and the magicians.

  Natural causes begin with the stars.  Then Burton brings things down to earth.  Old age is a cause of melancholy.   Yes, it can be.  Parents are also a cause, and Burton asserts that a mother’s influence begins even before birth.  “If she be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented and melancholy, not only at the time of conception but even all the while she carries the child in her womb,” he writes, “her son will be so likewise affected, and worse.”   Someone named Fernelius is Burton’s go-to when he describes the influence of the parent on the child.  According to Fernelius, “If a great-bellied woman see a hare, her child will often have an hare-lip.”   Burton is not a eugenicist, not exactly; he wrote in the sixteenth century.  But he agrees with Fernelius, “It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for humankind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry.”

  Burton then fills pages with the ways parents screw up their children.  It reminds me of Philip Larkin, on a shelf nearby, the Larkin poem that begins:

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
  They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

  However comic, it is not entirely funny.  Philip Larkin Collected Poems sits snug on a shelf behind the desk downstairs.  Its spine wears a bright green jacket.  It is part of my bookshelf background on Zoom.

  Other causes of melancholy that Robert Burton considers?  Bad diet in all its variations, meat, fish, vegetables.  And what he calls “retention and evacuation.”  Then he is off to the races, chasing down every cause imaginable.  Bad air, too little exercise, too much exercise, idleness, solitariness, imagination, sorrow, fear, envy, malice, hatred, discontents, miseries, desires, ambition, covetousness, hawking, hunting and gaming, wine and women, pride, too much study, bad nurses, education, scoffs and calumnies, poverty and want, loss of friends, loss of goods, fears of the future, superfluous industry, unfortunate marriage, disgraces, infirmities, and distempered body parts.  All those things, among other things.  As if everything is a cause of melancholy, or can be.

  vii

  Books that share the same shelf with Philip Larkin:  The five World’s Greatest Thinkers series, from Carlton House.  The Last Post, Ford Maddox Ford, a faded blue, cloth-bound book, published in 1928 by Albert and Charles Boni.  Why Are We In Vietnam, Norman Mailer.   The Same Door, John Updike.  The Coup, John Updike.  On Writing Well, William Zinsser.  Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Josip Novakovich.  Craft of the Short Story, Richard Summers.  I borrowed Craft of the Short Story fifty years ago from the Lamont Library at Harvard College.  It still has its 813 Dewey number glued to its spine.  It also saves a Thai 20-baht bill as a bookmark on the short story Fifty Grand.

  The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Janet Lewis, is next World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow.  Then, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship, Gore Vidal.  The Republic of Plato, with translation, introduction and notes by Francis Cornford.  Next, A Glastonbury Romance, John Cowper Powys.  I have not read one page of these 1,109 pages.  Romania, A Photographic Memoir, Florin Andreescu.  This book of photographs of Romania is a gift from Costin, driver and guide on a trip in 2019 from Bucharest to Piatra Neamt to Cluj.  I was trying to touch the spirits of unknown great grandfathers with names like Jacob and Reuven.  God Save Texas, Lawrence Wright.   When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron.  The subtitle of Chodron’s book is Heart Advice for Difficult Times.  There are printed emails and torn-out articles about grief between many of its pages; also, a note on stationery from the director of The Warm Place in Fort Worth, where I took our children for peer counseling during most of 1998 after their mother’s death.   We went two times a month.  As the note says, “The head does not know how to play the role of the heart for long.”   The Heart Advice for Difficult Times book jacket hosts a blurb from Alice Walker, who – allegedly — keeps David Icke books about reptilian people on her bedside table.   Walker is “one of Pema Chodron’s grateful students,

  Art books, vanity publications, and oversized magazines with hard covers lie on top of each other in a horizontal stack at the end of a shelf.   Graphic Design America, Communication Arts, and Art in America.  Herculaneum To Malibu, a souvenir from the first J. Paul Getty Museum, on Pacific Coast Highway.   Audience, November December 1971, Volume 1, Number 6 begins with an interview between Arthur Miller and William Styron.  Softbound Posts and Rugs, H. L. James, tells “the story of Navajo rugs” like the grey, brown and black one on the floor next to the downstairs desk.  In 1978, it hung on a wall in the gift shop at the La Fonda Hotel.  It was sold as the real thing, a Teec Nos Pos, and for all I know, it is.

  Two books are upright, wedged at the end of this shelf.  Short Stories, Guy De Maupassant, and Plain Tales from the Hills, Rudyard Kipling, belong to Immortal Masterpieces of Literature, a series published in 1937 by The Spencer Press in Reading, Pennsylvania.   They have blue bindings.  Their titles and author names are gold on their spines.  They have formal frontispieces and nine other illustrations.  I still wonder, what was in the air or the era that the child of immigrants from eastern Romania wanted De Maupassant and Kipling?   Taken as spoils from my parents’ house, they were probably Aunt Bertha’s.  They have that odor of aspiration.  “Man owes it to himself,” the Spencer Press says in the Maupassant introduction, “ to see that the right books are upon the bookshelves in his home.”

  If they were both thrown away, or taken in bags down to Half-Price Books for sale, I would not like the emptiness left behind.  Bookshelves are like that.  So much of what is on them is for the sake of having something, instead of nothing.   On my 100 shelves, two desks and four tables, there are a thousand books that fit that category.

  viii

  Winning Chess Strategies, Yasser Seirawan, International Grandmaster, is part of a three-book series.  The other two are Winning Chess Tactics and Play Winning Chess.  I own all three, have never opened one, and last played chess in 1972.  Next, volumes of The Babylonian Talmud from the Art Scroll edition – Berachos, Avodah Zerah I, Avodah Zerah II, and Sanhedrin – they compete with each other for the title of least likely book to be read for pleasure.  Nicolas Berdyaev’s Christianity and Anti-Semitism, next to Sanhedrin, was an easier read; it makes the point, pointed then and now, that hating Jews is incompatible with being Christian.  Next, An Armenian Sketchbook, Vasily Grossman.  The Mythic Image, Joseph Campbell.   Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volume 2, edited by Cyril Birch.  If Volume 1 is on another shelf, I am unaware of it.

  The rest of this row:  Pilgerman, Russell Hoban.  A second hardbound copy of World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe, as if a second 700 pages are needed.  20 Master Plots and How To Build Them, Ronald B. Tobias.   Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories, A. Conan Doyle.  The Droll Stories of Balzac.   A Distant Episode, The Selected Stories, Paul Bowles.   Between its pages, a postcard from Sue Benner promotes her fabric art show in 1992 at the Lucy Berman Gallery in Palo Alto, She adds a note to the promotion.  Her father has died, “a peaceful end to a long, hard struggle,” she writes.   Peaceful for whom?   The Life of Captain James Cook, J.C. Beaglehole, 760 pages.   Borodino: Napoleon Against Russia, 1812, Christopher Duffy.   The Torah, A Modern Commentary, edited by W. Gunther Plaut.  Its bookplate is on the inside front cover, which is the inside back cover.  The Thousand Nights and One Night, Volume I, translated by Powys Mathers.  Also here, Volume II, Volume III, and Volume IV of The Thousand Nights and One Night.  They have been here unread for more than a thousand nights.  According to Wikipedia, Powys Mathers, the translator, was the pioneer of cryptic crossword puzzles.

  Then, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume I, edited by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters.   Symonds is an industrious Victorian – poet, translator, essayist, and prodigious letter writer.   There are 619 of his letters and notes in the 867 pages of Volume I.   The 838 items in The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume II, fill another 1,011 pages.  He was not finished.   There are 660 more letters and 930 pages in the final volume, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume III.  So, around 2,000 letters and notes on 2,500 pages.  I know as little about John Addington Symonds today as I do about what I was thinking decades ago when I thought I wanted all three volumes.

  Of the last 20 plus books, I have read two, An Armenian Sketchbook and Christianity and Anti-Semitism.  I waded into two others.  The rest are a salt sea, with not a bare toe even dipped into them.

  The Letters of John Addington Symonds volumes are too tightly fitted on the shelf.  I forced the first volume free.  It was a wrench more than a slide.  Volume I begins with ten pages of introduction.   I tell myself I will read that, just out of curiosity, though I do not make it through all ten pages.  According to the editors, “the reader will be struck by the presence of a profound melancholy in the letters, of a personal angst almost Dostoyevskian in its scope.”   They write about Symonds’ “advanced consumption, poor eyesight, and a traumatic sexual drive intensified by an exaggerated moral idealism.”  They admit he “confused his torments with St Augustine’s,” and that he “revealed himself in a way he perhaps only vaguely understood.”   In short, “Symonds, the man, is an absorbing subject.”  This is not very convincing.   The only thing certain to be absorbed by the pages of these three volumes is a lot of time.

  So, back it goes, spine out.   No one ever said not to judge a book by its spine, though that is all that the shelf will show.   A book’s secrets are inside.  Flysheets, title pages, dedications, epigraphs, forewords, prefaces, acknowledgements, and lengthy introductions — this insect world of activity hides under the rock of a book’s spine.

  Israel, Martin Gilbert, begins another row behind the desk downstairs.  Then Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald.  Jefferson’s Children, Leon Botstein.  Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Gloria Steinem. The Shifting Point, Peter Brook.  The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud.   The Crisis of the Aristocracy, Lawrence Stone.  The Crisis of the Aristrocracy was required reading for a college course I do not remember taking, though my note about the word “manred” is on its flysheet.  “Manred, meaning control of persons for military purposes.”   Next, Taoism, Eva Wong.  The Torah, The Jewish Publication Society of America, has my name is on the flysheet, below Presented To.  It is a gift from the Sisterhood and Brotherhood of Temple Jeremiah, Los Angeles, a synagogue in a former union hall, where the big macher was a plumber.   It is dated October 25, 1967.  An index card inside is still holding my place in Genesis, Chapter 41, at the story of the dreams of Pharoah and their interpretation by Joseph.  It is a tale of chance, if chance is how you interpret it.

  More in the same row:

  Prize Stories 1984 The O. Henry Awards.  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards. The Sufis, Idries Shah, introduction by Robert Graves.  In The Western Night, Frank Bidart.  Two place holders in this one:  An entrance ticket to Musee Maillol Fondation Dina Vierny 59-61 rue de Grenelle, Paris, and a business card from Madeleine Gely, the parapluie store at 218 Boulevard St. Germain.  The Basis of Criticism In The Arts, Stephen Pepper.  A Krutch Omnibus, Joseph Wood Krutch.  Love is a Stranger, Rumi.  Inside the Rumi, a torn-out article on testosterone replacement therapy.

  Then The Cuts, Malcolm Bradbury.  The Truth About Lorin Jones, Alison Lurie.  The Last Old Place, Datus C. Proper.  Success Stories, Russell Banks.  Defending Pornography, Nadine Strossen, signed on the flysheet and dated April 1995.  Lancelot, Walker Percy.  Wilderness, Robert Penn Warren.  Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth.  The Bureaucratic State, H. R. Shapiro.  Mother Goose, selected by Michael Hague.  The Limits of Language, edited by Walker Gibson, is a slight paperback assigned in an advanced placement course I took at UCLA while I was in high school.  I remember none of it, not one word, other than the epigraph from T.S. Eliot.  It has stuck somehow.  Not chiseled; more like graffiti, spray painted on the wall of memory:  I gotta use words when I talk to you.

  Hand To Mouth, Paul Auster.  Poems 1934-1969, David Ignatow.  A Book of Memories, Peter Nadas.   Its 700 pages are unread, despite the quote from Freitag on its back cover, that it “must clearly be placed alongside the great works of the century.”  I admire the accents over the first “e” in Peter and the first “a” in Nadas on the jacket.  The bookmark in The Five Stages of the Soul, Harry R. Moody, PhD, is at page 26; so, not even to Stage One.   Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, modern as of 1919.   Next, The Gilberto Freyre Reader, translated by Barbara Shelby.   Then Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Imre Kertesz, bought in Budapest in October, 2019.  The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, read cover to cover in 1977.  The Blood of San Gennaro, Scott Harney, a small book of poems published by Arrowsmith Press.  Folded up under its cover, a Poem-A-Day printout of this Mina Loy poem.   Sounding like a sext, it is in the public domain:

  We might have coupled
  In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
  Or broken flesh with one another
  At the profane communion table
  Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips.
  We might have given birth to a butterfly
  With the daily news
  Printed in blood on its wings.

  What Happens After I Die, Rifat Sonsino and Daniel Syme.   I copied “Teach us to number our days, that we may get ourselves a heart of wisdom” on its blank last page.  This book is a buffet of answers.  It is more overview than insight.   But, on a bit of scratch paper kept between pages, someone else’s wisdom, copied down and saved.  The light is far away, it says. The only way to see it is to close your eyes.

  Then, another Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, this one with inscription from my first wife, dated December 1977.  That is the month after we met.  So, this was a first gift.

   Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and the best
  that Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
      Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
    And one by one crept silently to Rest.

  Dolores was also a fan of Broadway’s Mame and its life-is-a-banquet message.  She never mentioned Kohelet, though he offers some of the same advice.

  ix

  Somewhere between 1969, a senior in high school, and 1971, home from college for the summer, I enrolled in the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course.  Maybe it was a year or two later, during the summer I lived on Beach Street in Venice.   According to my childhood friend Richard, I was sharing that house on Beach Street with Steve Miller, and Steve was a student at UCLA’s School of Dentistry.
  “Who?”
  I told Richard that I have no memory of a Steve Miller on Beach Street, but he insisted, Steve Miller was my roommate.  Steve had rented the house and needed someone to share the expenses.
  “He wanted you to pay extra to cover the cost of the houseplants.”
  “I do remember Beach Street,” I replied.  Meaning, I have a fuzzy image in my memory of a small wooden house and a chain link fence.  But the only Steve Miller who came to mind is the one who sings Fly Like An Eagle.

  This conversation with Richard occurred last summer, over lunch at the Hungry Bear Deli in Vista, while I was in California and staying at the house in Ocean Hills that my sister and I inherited.   Richard is one of those people who remembers high school as clearly if not better than he does what he ate that day for breakfast.  He told me that long after my time in the house on Beach Street, Steve Miller was found in the trunk of his car, murdered.   He was a practicing dentist by then, and married.  Before the body was discovered, his wife had reported him missing.   Richard added that Dennis Weaver, the actor, had made an appeal to the public on the local evening news, asking for help finding Steve.
  “You know,” Richard said, “the guy from Gunsmoke.”

  Dennis Weaver’s involvement had nothing to do with dentistry.   According to Richard, Weaver knew the woman Steve was married to.  Weaver was her godfather.

  This morning, taking a break from bookshelves, I looked all this up.  Sure enough, an article exists online, from the archives of The Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1986.  Local News in Brief:   Missing Dentist’s Body Found in Car’s Trunk.   According to the Times, it was no murder.  It was suicide.   There was a note.   Deputy Fosselman is quoted.  “Steven Michael Miller, 36, last seen leaving his Encino office, died of an overdose.”

  In the refrain that the other Steve Miller sings, Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’.  In the song, however, time is slipping into the future.

  The slipperier slope is into the past.

  x

  The classroom for Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics was in Westwood.  It may not have been a classroom, it may have been an office.  There were definitely classes, though the room is a ghost of a memory.

  No one named Evelyn Wood ever appeared.  There must have been a teacher, someone teaching the students, if there were students, how to sweep the fingers of our right hands faster and faster across sentences and paragraphs down the pages.  The point was to see the writing not word by word but in blocks of text.  To take it in, swallowing it whole.  No loss of comprehension was the promise, but the goal was speed.

  The Evelyn Wood theory was that people can read faster if they learn to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page.   If more could be taken in at a glance, thousands of words could be read per minute.

  As the fingers zigzag down the page, the hand becomes a pacer.

  Evelyn Wood herself claimed she could read 2,700 words a minute, which is ten times faster than the average reader.   Before she invented her system, she and husband Doug were living in Utah, where she taught remedial reading in high schools.  They were entrepreneurial.   Eventually, they opened Reading Dynamics institutes around the country, as speed-reading became a craze.  President Kennedy sent his staff to the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute in Washington, D.C.   President Nixon did the same.   I saw the ads on TV as a teenager, sitting on the sofa near a brown braided rug in my parents’ house in Los Angeles.   Reading Dynamics was in the air and ib the air.   For the speed reader, the main thing was to consume words in blocks, and never ever say words silently to yourself as you read.

  Reading Dynamics is still around.  It still claims to accelerate reading speed and improve vocabulary.  It even claims to enhance memory.   In 1986, Encyclopaedia Brittanica bought the name and the system, then sold it a few years after that, to a company that sells business training.

  I do not know what has been proven or disproven in the science of speed reading.  I also do not know whether the system would have worked for me if I had stuck with it.  I tried, but quit, because speed reading is like speed eating.  Words have a taste, and Reading Dynamics wanted to stuff them down my throat.  Also, the sound of a word is a charming part of its personality, and saying a word aloud, or even silently, is a pleasure.

  xi

  There are red ants in the back yard.  This afternoon I kicked one of the anthills and poured granules of poison on the excitement.   Back inside, two last shelves to go through, behind the desk downstairs.   Both are rows of travel books.  Most were bought before traveling, others after dreaming of traveling, for trips never taken.  There are pocket-sized phrase books, travelers’ narratives, Rough Guides, Frommer’s, and Fodor’s.  There is Access, Lonely Planet, Baedecker, and Cadogan.   In all, ninety of them.  Handouts and tear-outs are stuffed inside them.  Street maps, country maps, pages ripped from a glossy travel magazine, a printout of an online article, itineraries and travel agent “literature.”

  Not always, but often, the publisher is the brand.   Top 10 Hong Kong from Eyewitness Travel was picked without my knowing or caring whose eyes did the witnessing.   Same with the Fodor’s Pocket Beijing The Best of the City and Frommer’s Buenos Aires Day By Day.  These books are closest in spirit to cookbooks.  They are filled with recipes to be followed.  Where to stay, what to see, where to eat, what to buy.  As a rule, they have less personality than the cookbooks.  There is a fandom for Julia or Wolfgang.  But the sensibility of travel guides seems to belong to the publisher, to Fodor, Frommer, Cadogan, or Baedeker.  Who wrote the guide might not be who did the staying, seeing, eating and buying.  Travel guides are like little cathedrals, constructed by teams, anonymous masons working for the greater glory of Frommer.

  That said, these books are among the more personal on my shelves.   There is a germ of memory on even the most sterile of them.  Some even made the trips that are their subjects. Their pages are littered with snack wrappers and food stains.  They hold receipts and business cards.  They preserve check marks and underlines from prior wives and girlfriends.  So they also articulate the truth that there is no going back.  And not just because the same castle or museum or hotel lobby cannot be stepped into twice, but because the feet taking those steps will not be the same.

  China, The 50 Most Memorable Trips, Frommer, shares a border with Japan, The Rough Guide.  Both are neighbors of Baedeker’s Thailand, and Fodor’s 1995 California.   Lonely Planet Buenos Aires Encounter and Lonely Planet Pocket Moscow & St Petersburg Top Sights keep company with Baedeker’s Tuscany, Cadogan’s Southern Spain, Italy from Berlitz, Frommer’s Beijing, and Fodor’s Pocket London The Best of the City.  There are Access guides to Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Santa Fe/Taos/Albuquerque, Paris, Rome, and London.  Their pages are stuffed with notes on branded hotel notepads.

  Not all travel guides, even from the big brands, pretend to be unauthored.   Lonely Planet Hawaii credits Ned Friary and Glenda Bendur.  The Rough Guide, Bali & Lombok, Lesley Reader and Lucy Ridout.   Choose Costa Rica, A Guide to Retirement and Investment, Special Section on Guatemala, is by John Howells.   Blue Guide Morocco, Jane Holliday.  Switzerland at Its Best, Robert S. Kane, and Steven K. Bailey’s Exploring Hong Kong.   Venicewalks, Chas Carner & Alessandro Giannatasio.  Florencewalks, Anne Holler.

  The writers and researchers who know Where to Eat, or report on the price of a bus ticket, deserve their credits.   The Cadogan guides are good about this.  Cadogan is also loyal.   Cadogan’s Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches credits Dana Facaros and Michael Paul.  The same pair shows up in Paris for Cadogan.   They are also Cadogan’s go-to for Southern Spain, and in Western Turkey as well.  People who know Where to Eat or What to Buy or How To Dress have skills that transfer from place to place.   Portugal, Cadogan, credits a single author, David J.J. Evans.  Cadogan’s Carl Parkes also works alone.  As does Mary Fitzpatrick, though on a Lonely Planet.  Still, these are not books bought because of who wrote them.  Other than James Michener’s Iberia and Lawrence Durrell’s The Greek Islands, only one book on these two shelves of travel books was picked for its author.  The World of Venice, published by Faber and Faber in 1960, was written by the gifted James Morris.  It became an international best seller.   After Morris transitioned from male to female, the four subsequent revisions of The World of Venice were written by Jan.

  Arizona, a Moon Handbook, is written by Bill Weir.   Kim Weir, who must be related, since her book is also from Moon Publications, wrote Northern California Handbook.   I have never opened it before but see now that its foreword is by Ursula K. LeGuin, an excerpt from Dancing At The Edge of The World, used with the permission of Grove Press.  In a foreword to this foreword, Kim Weir writes about the “happy but humbling experience, after finishing a book the size of Northern California Handbook, to discover that someone has already said it all, and in many fewer words.”   This could not be true.  Northern California Handbook is nearly 800 pages.  The Ursula K. LeGuin excerpt is only two pages.  Kim Weir also makes use of an epigraph on the blank page in front of both forewords.  It is from Herman Melville:

  True places are not found on maps.

  xii

  More travel and travel-related books that are going nowhere on the two shelves behind the downstairs desk:

  Frommer’s Italy 1991.  Belize Guide, Paul Glassman.   Richard Saul Wurman’s Barcelona Access.  Lonely Planet East Africa.  Lonely Planet Tanzania.  2 to 22 Days in Asia, Roger Rapoport and Burl Willes.   Also, 2 to 22 Days in France, Rick Steves and Steve Smith.  And Costa Rica, Barbara Ras. Within Tuscany, Mathew Spender.  Madrid, Insight Pocket Guides.  London Step by Step, Christopher Turner.  Fodor’s London 1988.   Morocco, Lonely Planet, Damien Simonis and Geoff Crowther.   Let’s Go France 1994.  Thailand, Eyewitness Travel Guides.   Guatemala and Belize, Cadogan.  Shanghai, Odyssey, Nancy Johnston.  Xian, Odyssey, Simon Hollege, revised by Kevin Bishop.  Baedeker’s China.  Istanbul, Insight Guides.  Thailand, Travelers’ Tales Guides, edited by James O’Reilly.  Route of the Mayas, Knopf Guides.   Beijing, Cadogan, Peter Neville-Hadley.  Fodor’s Pocket Shanghai.   Shanghai, Lonely Planet.  Thai Phrasebook, Lonely Planet.  The Rough Guide to Swahili.  Japanese Phrasebook, Lonely Planet.  Iberia, James A. Michener.  The Greek Islands, Lawrence Durrell.   A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece, edited by Richard Stoneman.  Diving and Snorkeling Guide to The U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John, Susanne and Stuart Cummings.  Buenos Aires, Lonely Planet.   Green Alaska, Nancy Lord.  Alaska Best Places, edited by Nan Elliott.

  501 Must-Visit National Wonders, Bounty Books is a Christmas gift from a neighbor.   It is a picture book, the author unmentioned on the cover.  My neighbor’s name was Betty Lou Linehan.  In 2007, when she brought this gift to me from across the street, she was already in her nineties.  It is Betty Lou’s former house that has been torn down across the street to make room for the colossus the Mexicans are still working on.  Alaska, Insight Guides, is storing a letter from June 1999.  A lodge manager writes excitedly, “Thank you for your interest in Chelatna Lake Lodge!  We would love for you and your sons to enjoy the Alaskan fishing experience of a lifetime with us!”  Someone had neglected to edit out “and your sons” from the standard letter.   Other books in the same row:   Night Train to Turkistan, Stuart Stevens.   Access New York City, Richard Saul Wurman, with a dominant single bagel on its cover.  Fodor’s Virgin Islands, Fodor’s Alaska, Cadogan Western Turkey, Fodor’s Greece, Insight Guides Costa Rica, and Frommer’s Arizona. 

  xiii

  Maybe I thought it would keep Let’s Go France 1994 up to date if I inserted seven pages into it, from Travel+Leisure July 2014, about “The Other Loire Valley.”   As if in a future more distant than any of these destinations I will want to see the professionally propped photograph of the room at La Chanceliere, or the view from the dining room at Prieure Notre-Dame D’Orsan.  Some of these travel books are as packed as a bulging valise with loose paper.  It is past time to unpack.   I am discarding every saved article.  The fact that they will never be looked at again makes them no different than the thousands of photos taken on actual trips that are in photo albums in a filing cabinet in the garage, or somewhere on a phone.

  The language of travel magazine articles is as glossy as their paper.   Amberley Castle is “set amid the rolling chalk hills of the South Downs.”  Lydmar Hotel in Sweden is “a handsome butter-yellow 1829-vintage building.”  Hotel Le Fontanelle is “set on a hilltop overlooking miles of rolling countryside and houses dating from the 13^th century.”  All countrysides are rolling, landscapes are always lush.  Headlines are too clever by half.  The writing has a knowing tone, inviting the reader to be in on the secret.  Small Wonder is the headline for an article on never-visited Ecuador.  Pedal Pushers is the caption for the photo about families bicycling in Denmark.  It’s no myth, a subtitle for the skinny about a favorite Greek island.

  Who knew that El Jacarandal in the Maya Highlands is “a word-of-mouth inn, shared by initiates and their confidants like a secret handshake.”  There must be a school where this vocabulary is taught.   Graduates will have learned that “the reward is not merely experiencing nature at her most seductive but also savoring it surrounded by the ruins of ancient civilizations.”  They will know what to write about The San Miguel Seduction, and how to come up with sidebars headed Culinary Cool and Casa Chic.

  Articles about Villa Bordoni, Banjaar Tola and Tambo del Inka may have been saved as much for their place names as for the likelihood that I would ever stay at these “best places to stay.”  The only journey I ever made with Fernando Broussalis from Patagonia Adventure was the one that went back and forth in the printed-out emails, before being left without explanation between pages of Bali & Lombok, The Rough Guide.  In Let’s Go France, I preserved an article about how “the dollar’s slide” sent the cost of a European vacation soaring, and “the greenback’s rally, when combined with rare deals,” has finally made the trip affordable again. This was timely information once upon a time.  I kept it, from a torn page of Conde Nast Traveler, only to find it today, decades after the economic cycle has turned and turned again.

  Time has also blurred the difference between plans that were imaginary and those that actually came to be.  In Japan, The Rough Guide, someone used a yellow marker, highlighting the fact that Hanabi Taikai happens in late July and August.   It never happened.  In Thailand, “a few minutes in a tuk tuk is enough.”  I can confirm that truth.   Frommer’s Beijing has dogeared pages and the business card of a Chinese guide, whose first or maybe last name is Ding, though neither the name nor exactly where he guided rings a bell.

  There are throwaways that, before you throw them away, they are already gone.  A ticket stub from the Xian Beilin Museum left in Odyssey’s Xian has a note in Chinese and English.  The English says “Please send us to the South Gate,” but of where? Four business cards in Access New York come from the same unremembered meal at Kam Chueh Restaurant.  An article inserted into Wine Country Access details one of the “iconic itineraries,” with its “5 Perfect Days” of driving from vineyard to vineyard and restaurant to restaurant and boutique hotel to boutique hotel.  Some of this may actually have happened, but the recollection is woozy.   And is there really any such thing as a “perfect day”?   Referring to the weather, it is a matter of opinion.  If about experiences, there is no possibility, not for one whole day, and certainly not for five.

  “Sanitary conditions are not up to Western standards.”  So warns a “What To Do There” report from Rudi Steele Travel that falls out of Eyewitness Thailand, along with brochures for River Kwai Village and Tony’s Fashion House on Rajparop Road in Bangkok.  Things to do include kickboxing, river taxi, celadon pottery factory, Lumpin Park, and Klong Damnoen Saduak floating market.  Some of those to-do’s were done.  A celadon serving platter is in my kitchen.  The crackling of its sea-green glaze, a beautiful imperfection.   The factory itself is a memory of corrugated metal sheds and a dirt yard.

  A ticket to St. Pietro In Vaticano Cupola falls out of Frommer’s Italy.  Cadogan’s Paris has a business card from Le Rideau de Paris (Depuis 1924).   What else do these books release?  From China, a “To The Hutong” brochure, courtesy of Beijing Hutong Tourist Agency.  The Hutong Tour is 3 hours.  Or, there is “To Be A Beijinger,” which says “you can step into the ordinary Beijing resident’s home to enjoy a home-made meal.”  This option takes 4.5 hours; luckily, it required ten or more people.  In my second marriage, we were only five.

  Venicewalks is hiding between its pages a xeroxed copy of the Foreword to Luigi Barzini’s The Italians.  I am taking the time today to explore its few short paragraphs.  It has one sentence of special interest.  In Barzini’s opinion, it is rare for any Italian author to have anything to say about the Italian national character, and what they do say is not very trustworthy.  There are, however, “thousands of books by foreigners.”  Of those, he thinks Stendhal is best.  And then he adds this sentence:   “John Addington Symonds is, in my opinion, the next best, although blinded at times by his stern moral views and his hatred for Popery.”  Symonds again, just a few feet to the right and one shelf up from the three volumes of his letters.

  Chapter Seven
  STARING ME IN THE FACE

  A book of average length has between sixty and ninety thousand words.  The average reader reads 238 words per minute.  So, for an average reader, it is possible to read between one and two books of average length a day.  The average lifespan of an American male is 76 years.  Which means that at the outermost limit, the number of average length books that I could read in the years I have left, on average, reading eight hours a day, five days a week, will be close to the number of books on my shelves.  Maybe a little less, but close.

  ii

  Ten more shelves — two bookcases of five shelves each – are built into the wall facing the desk downstairs, opposite the Zoom background books.   First in line, starting on the bottom row right: Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, Lisa Randall.  I slide the book out from its place.  The dried body of a cockroach is buried behind the 500 unread pages.  It is the Texas brown roach, which some call a waterbug, though they are two different animals.   Waterbugs are predators; they hunt.  Cockroaches are scavengers.   That said, the differences between them are hard to see.  Both have bodies that are flat and oval.  Both are tan or reddish-brown.   Both are disgusting.

  Next, Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated by Chana Block and Stephen Mitchell again.  A postcard from Talley Dunn Gallery between its pages promotes the opening reception on a Saturday evening in August, 2015.  The exhibit has its own piquant title, “Monday’s Romance is Tuesday’s Sad Affair.”  Then, Lick ‘Em, Stick ‘Em The Lost Art of Poster Stamps, H. Thomas Steele.  Phoenix, Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson, David Gordon and Maribeth Anderson.  Notes to Myself, Hugh Prather, was published by Real People Press in 1970.  It is a period piece.  The subtitle, My struggle to become a person, gives it away.   A  characteristic sentence:  “Why do I judge my day by how much I have ‘accomplished’?”   And on the same page, “When I get to where I can enjoy just lying on the rug picking up lint I will no longer be too ambitious.”   Ambitious people who write and publish books have been advising others to just relax since the beginning of time.

  On the same shelf:  Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald, 700 pages about Enron.   Practical Gods, Carl Dennis.  Men & Grief, Carol Staudacher.  Men & Grief has the crispiness of the unread page.   Its final page offers a list from the publisher of Other New Harbinger Self-Help Titles.  In contrast, Mourning & Mitzvah, Anne Brener, has been written in and underlined; its pages bulge with stored articles and printouts.   I am coming across it with the surprise of someone who finds a set of lost keys years after losing them.  The locks have already been changed.   In fact, it is so long after, you no longer know what locks – the side door, the chained gate, the filing cabinets in the garage – any of these keys ever went to.

  Mourning & Mitzvah may be the most used book on my shelves.  It is practically a diary.  It was designed as a workbook, with labeled exercises and blank lines to be filled in over the journey through two hundred pages.  I can see that I filled them in, responding to Anne Brener’s prompts and questions.   Mourning & Mitzvah has not been opened in nearly thirty years, and I have no desire to read these responses.   I would rather think about Anne Brener, who writes in her introduction that Mourning & Mitzvah started “with my own journey,” after her mother committed suicide in 1971, and, three months later, Anne’s only sibling, her nineteen-year-old sister, died in a car crash.

  I would never have recalled this conversation:
  “Will you be with me after you have died?
  “If I can be,” she said.
  “How will I know?”
  “You will feel it.”
  “Feel what?
  “A little bird,” she said, “touching you, there.”
  Dolores touched me on the arm with her finger.
  This is written in the lined space Anne Brener provides in the chapter “Remembering the Illness and the Death.”   It is Exercise 5.1 “Telling the Story.”

  Also on this shelf:

  The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by George Lyman Kittredge, comes from the same Encyclopedia Americana set as A Treasury of the Familiar.  The covers of its 1,561 pages are the same dark blue.  Its black and white glamour shots come from productions at the Old Vic.   John Gielgud.  Paul Scofield.  Lawrence Harvey, Anthony Quayle.  Laurence Olivier as King Lear.  Ann Todd is “the ruthless Lady Macbeth.”   Regions of The Great Heresy, Jerzy Ficowski, is a biography of Bruno Schulz.  So, an unread book about a writer I have never read.  Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, Harold S. Kushner, sounds useful.  Its last chapter is titled “How to Write Yourself a Happy Ending.”   The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, John M. Gottman, Ph.D., is hiding a forgotten photo from my second marriage.   It bookmarks Chapter 2, “How I Predict Divorce.”   Next, All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin.  The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron.  Break, Blow, Burn, Camille Paglia. College of The Overwhelmed, Richard Kadison, M.D.  Coming To Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway.  Carpenter’s Gothic, William Gaddis.

  Some books are like the pet turtles that children think they want but soon tire of.  On a shelf directly above, A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram, weighs in at 1,196 pages, not counting twenty pages of index.  The back flap of its jacket shows Wolfram, in a photo the size of a postage stamp.  The text below says that London-born Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech.  He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the age of 20, “having already made lasting contributions to particle physics and cosmology.”   In the photo, tufts of white hair rise on either side of his bald forehead, far above his eyebrows.

  The Collected Plays, Lillian Hellman.  Pentimento, Lillian Hellman.  Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman.  The pictures of Dashiell Hammett include one of him in handcuffs.  How does a boy get the name Dashiell?  It sounds posh.  Next, Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler.  When Cats Reigned Like Kings: On The Trail of the Sacred Cats, Georgie Anne Geyer.  Istanbul, Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk.  Loyalty Myths, Timothy L. Keiningham.   Loyalty Myths is a business book, about customers.  In An Uncertain World, Robert E. Rubin, has a center section of photographs.  A sample caption: “I’m holding a sea-run brown trout in Tierra del Fuego on a fishing trip with President Jimmy Carter.”  The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon.  The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, Caroline Alexander.  The inscription on its inside cover from my second wife references a trip to Alaska and is signed “with love,” It is also dated, August 1999.  This helps me recall that both the trip and the sentiment predated the message.

  iii

  These days I read more online than I do in books.   So I am reading a woman blogging about her book-hoarding father and the room in her childhood home she called The Book Room, which could not be entered from inside the house, since books blocked the doorway.  She recalls the musty smell in that room.   It had to be entered through a small window, from the outside of the house.  There was no space to read in The Book Room, either; there is hardly space to breathe.  The rest of the house was no different.   The piano cannot be played because clothing is piled on it.  What she calls “worthless knick-knacks” covered everything.

  Another true story online:   A former and very successful art dealer found that he could make an even better living selling the trivial possessions of celebrities.  The worn platform heels or the sweaty t-shirt that a rock musician wore at an arena concert.  The cheap prop that some star held onto from a movie set.  Anything that has the touch of the famous on it, and could be authenticated.  The fame of the life would mysteriously transfer to a pair of pants, a harmonica, an ashtray.  People would pay outrageous prices for them.   It is a story that calls into question the meaning of value.

  No one will want the t-shirt I wore.  My books, and whatever spills out of them, are worth next to nothing.

  iv

  There is an age in life where the past seems less understandable than the future.  Less certain, even less predictable, despite having already happened.  The unremembered past is fragmented and in shadows.  The older I get, what lies ahead seems very clear in comparison.

  On the same shelf as The Endurance, fourteen more books:

  Tibet, Life, Myth, and Art, Michael Willis. a coffee table book of color photos of collectibles, treasure after treasure, and a foreword by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, who writes nonetheless that compassion is the most important treasures a person can collect.   Welcome to Your Crisis, Laura Day.  This I have no memory of having ever opened this book before, but its pages are full of my comments.  Next to the sentence “Is something important – pleasure, success, a relationship – missing in your life?” I wrote, “No doubt.”   Page 14 has a longer list of questions meant to help determine whether there is a crisis in your life or not.   “Crisis is our way of evolving,” Laura Day writes, “when we lack the courage to do so on our own volition.”   I underlined this sentence.  I must have liked its compound of comfort and criticism.  The last of my notes appears at page 268, only two pages before the last page.

  Next, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion.  Then The Essential Confucius, translated and presented by Thomas Cleary.  Children of Light, Robert Stone.  Birth of the Cool, Lewis MacAdams.  Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  The Best American Poetry 1998, John Hollander, guest editor.  Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen.  Crossroads contains a photograph of Portola Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, from a trip my son and I took in 2022 to see the redwoods.  He wanted to do that.   He weighed around 400 pounds then and was unable to walk the trails without stopping every few feet.  I was seething with open impatience.   I needed The Essential Confucius, which I have never read, or maybe lorazepam.     

  The Collected Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer is a fat paperback, over 600 pages.  A “Happy birthday, with all my love –Mom” message is on the flyleaf and dated 2004.  This is the passing of forty years since In Search of the Miraculous in 1964.   It seems like a long way, from a thirteenth birthday to the fifty-third.  And even though my father was still alive in 2004, he no longer gets co-billing.

  The stiff pages of Where The Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein, have a never-turned quality.  Uncommon Therapy, Jay Haley, is a book my first wife left behind.  Ditto, Families & Family Therapy, Salvador Minuchin, and Clinical Uses of Dreams:  Jungian Interpretations and Enactments, James A. Hall, M.D.  Clinical Uses of Dreams is inscribed by the author “with warm regards.”

  Of these last 25 books, two were read for sure – Robert Stone and Joan Didion.  Welcome To Your Crisis, already confessed.  Three others were sampled, two of the Hellman, it is impossible to recall which too, and Freakonomics.  The rest might as well have been left in an Amazon warehouse.

  v

  What is the most widely read book in the world?  The Bible is the right answer if the ranking based not on reading, but on the number of copies out in the world.  That number according to research by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 2021 is between five and seven billion copies.

  According to Guinness World Records, these are the top ten best-selling books of all time, in ranked order:

  The Bible
  The Quran
  The Little Red Book: Quotations for Chairman Mao
  Don Quixote
  Selected Articles of Chairman Mao
  A Tale of Two Cities
  The Lord of the Rings
  Scouting for Boys: An Instruction in Good Citizenship
  The Book of Mormon
  The Little Prince

  Six of the ten are on my shelves.  No Book of Mormon, Scouting for Boys, or The Lord of the Rings.   No Selected Articles of Chairman Mao, either, though his Little Red Book is somewhere down the hallway.

  A History of Experimental Psychology, Edwin G. Boring is one of the books that may never be opened again on a shelf across from the Zoom background shelves.  Same with Learning Theory and Symbolic Processes, O. Hobart Mowrer.  Theories of Personality, Gardner Lindzey.  And Fundamentals of Social Psychology, Eugene L. Hartley and Ruth E. Hartley.  Rorschach’s Test, Samuel J. Beck, is a book about the ten famous ink blots.  It sounded intriguing, so I took it down and opened it to the middle.   It is a muddle.  “Persistent efforts on the part of E could not evoke M in this response,” it says.  “It must be scored F, in spite of the fact that S produced the extraordinary total of 19 M….”  Next, Psychotherapy and Growth, W. Robert Beavers, M.D.   The author writes “warmest regards” on the flysheet.  Games Divorced People Play, Dr. Melvyn Berke and Joanne B. Grant, also has a message from one of the authors.  It says, “I shall return!” — odd, even for a psychologist.  A heavy broken brass clock keeps these books from tumbling to the left.

  Only two more books on this shelf until the brass clock bookend.  Rebuilding When Your Relationship Ends, Dr. Bruce Fisher and Dr. Robert Alberti.   I am certain I never read this book, but then my notes appear in its margins and its sentences are underlined.  Principles of Electricity, Leigh Page, Ph.D.

  Thirty books on the next shelf down:

  Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini, William Weaver.  La Boheme, the libretto, published by G. Schirmer, in Italian and in English.  Puccini’s Turandot, William Ashbrook and Harold Powers.  Shakespearean Pragmatism, Lars Engle.   A New Dictionary of Quotations, selected and edited by H.L Mencken. The Polish Texans, T. Lindsay Baker.  The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, Robert Byrne.  Each quote is numbered.   Megatrends, John Naisbitt.  The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, Nicholas Carr.   The McKinsey Mind, Ethan M. Rasiel and Paul N. Freiga.   The McKinsey Way, Ethan M. Rasiel.  The Money Lenders, Anthony Sampson.  eBoys, Randall E. Stross.   Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey A. Moore.  The Anatomy of Buzz, Emanuel Rosen.   David Ogilvy’s Confession of an Advertising Man.  Then We Set His Hair on Fire, Phil Dusenberry.  The Dusenberry book celebrates a career.   According to the jacket, Dusenberry is a legend.   His catchphrases for Visa or HBO are not just slogans, they are “game-changing insights.”  Dusenberry is the man who worked with Gillette to distill the insight that Gillette’s razors and blades are “the best a man can get.”   There is a puddle of regret soaking into the spine of this book.  If not regret, then a resigned acceptance of the fact that my years earning a living in advertising was the best this man could get.

  On the same shelf, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright.   A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean.  The Maclean book has wood engravings by Barry Moser, mostly of fishing flies.  Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage, Mark Twain, foreword by Roy Blount Jr.  Down The Highway – The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes.  The Judge is Fury, J.V. Cunningham.  This slender book with a plain grey cover is a first edition, from The Swallow Press, 1947.  A receipt under its cover from Booked Up, Larry McMurtry’s bookstore in Archer City, Texas, reminds me of a forgotten Saturday morning in early July 2002, when I made the long drive there.    I had forgotten all about that.  I was by myself.  My first wife was already spending her weekends elsewhere.  On this extended July 4^th weekend, she was probably at the acreage she owned in Montalba, in East Texas.  Archer City is west, beyond Wichita Falls.  The Judge is Fury is marked in pencil on the receipt at thirty dollars.   It also marks My Day for twenty and The Materials for ten.  No idea at the moment what those two books are.  It is possible I will find out, when I get to the hallway shelves.

  Pens and Needles, David Levine, a book of caricatures selected and introduced by John Updike, has a thank-you note between drawings of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, pages 20 and 21.  Engraved on a card, this perfect statement:  The family deeply appreciates your kind expression of sympathy.  The deceased was the mother of one of my former neighbors.  When the card unfolds, it has a handwritten message from my neighbor.   Thank you so much for your thoughtful note.  It meant a great deal to all of us.  Sincerely, J.    I doubt this is sincere.  It is well-behaved, though, and that is not nothing.

  On the rest of this row, from right to left:

  The Empress of Elsewhere, Theresa Nelson.   Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Leon Edel. Selected Poems Theodore Roethke, edited by Edward Hirsch.  Questions About Angels, Billy Collins.  Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier.  Back to the Sources: Reading The Classic Jewish Texts, edited by Barry W. Holtz.  Restoring Relationships:  Five Things To Try Before You Say Goodbye, Peter M. Kalellis, Ph.D.   The copyright is 2001, so its wisdom was available during my failing second marriage and before my estrangement from my daughter.   The epigraph for Chapter One, “When we pollute our relationships with unloving thoughts, or destroy or abort them with unloving attitudes, we are threatening our emotional survival,” is credited to Marianne Williamson, who ran for President of the United States twice.

  Some books are read at the time when they are most needed.  From that time forward, they may become like the tune of the pop song on the radio you first heard in your teens.  Their titles or just the sight of them on the shelf will evoke the past.  They are conjurors of moods and climates.   But, unlike the song that you can still hum five or six decades after its time, the strong song with lyrics that you might even remember word for word, book memory is puny.  It may have shriveled.  It may be reduced to an image on a cover, or nothing more than the name on a spine.

  vi

  There are those who finish what they started, and those who only claim to.   I think of myself as someone who finishes.  I stay on the path.  I stick to the program.  But these shelves are evidence to the contrary.  The ratio of unfinished books to those I have completed must be a hundred to one.  If the ones I never even started are excluded, the ratio falls, but it is still ten to one.

  There are two other kinds of people in the world.  Those who don’t know the truth about themselves, and those who only think they do.

  Even if I complete this project of naming every book, a task so silly on the surface and also ridiculous underneath, it will express a truth both personal and universal:

  People are rarely who they think they are.

  The browns and blues and yellows and auburn of the spines on the next shelf are like a length of an autumn scarf.  Escape from Childhood, John Holt, is followed by Death at an Early Age, Jonathan Kozol.  Then Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, Volume One, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett, introduction by Thomas Mann and illustrations by Philip Reisman.  Volume One was published by Random House in 1939, as was Volume Two, next to it.  These could have been Aunt Bertha’s books.  Probably not, though, since the receipt inside Volume One says $5.00, $5.25 total for “two vols”, including tax.   Aunt Bertha died before the sales tax rose to five percent.

  Someone left a business card from Williams Western Tailors, 123 W. Exchange, Fort Worth, Texas between pages 218 and 219 of A La Mode, Rene Konig, introduction by Tom Wolfe.   On its reverse, the tailor or salesman wrote 45”.   What could that number of inches be?  Not waist size.  Not the length of my inseam.  Not chest size, either, as far as I know.

  Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother…A Case of Parricide in the 19^th Century, was never read. Collected Plays, Bertolt Brecht, Volume 7, edited by Ralph Manheim, 437 more unread pages.  Members of the Tribe, Richard Kluger, another 470 unread pages.  Busted Scotch, James Kelman.  The bookmark on page 19 is a ticket stub from Musee Rodin, 77 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, and comes with a warning:  Toucher, c’est salir.   On the title page of From A Logical Point of View, Willard Van Orman Quine., my notes are lines copied from the book:

  How much of our science is merely contributed by language and how much is a genuine reflection of reality?

  And:

  The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.

  And:

  Everyone has the best seat.  John Cage.

  This last statement makes the most sense, though it is illogical.

  LOGIC Techniques of Formal Reasoning, Donald Kalish and Richard Montague, is a shabby, used textbook.  When I was sixteen or seventeen, in 1968, I took Logic, the beginning course, with Kalish, and after that the next course in line, with Montague.  This was part of Advanced Placement at the University of California, Los Angeles.  The Kalish classes would meet outside on perfect Spring days and discuss the war in Vietnam.   Professor Montague leaves a memory that is even crisper.   In his classroom a week before the end of the term, a student raised his hand and argued that the fearsome final exam should be untimed.  His logic:  it makes no difference how long it takes to arrive at an answer, as long as the answer is correct.  The request was denied.  “Other things being equal,” Professor Montague said, “speed is a virtue.”  Professor Montague drove a gold Rolls Royce.  Also, some years later, heard that he had been murdered by one of his Chinese houseboys.

  Next, Herzog, Saul Bellow.  To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow.  Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow.  Then, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie.  In his picture on the flap of the book jacket, young Salman Rushdie looks like the twin of the comic Arab terrorist in True Lies, one of the Schwarzenegger movies that play all the time on television.  I have watched True Lies over and over and always enjoy the stereotyping but have never read a page of The Satanic Verses.   Johnno, David Malouf, has a printed paragraph in Thai on thin brown paper, bookmarking page 15.  Below the Thai script, in English: “Your fortune is so proper and middle, not the worst and best.  Don’t think to do a big project, it will make you confused and troubled in the futurity.  Wait for your hope including your lover.”   There is something pure about this awkward translation.  It, too, is “a true lie.”

  On the rest of this shelf:

  The Optimistic Child, Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D.  About Fiction, Wright Morris.  Rotten Reviews, edited by Bill Henderson.  Rapture, Susan Minot.  The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel.  Facing Codependence, Pia Mellody.  Americans’ Favorite Poems, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz.  Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves, edited by Rachel S. Mikva.  How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman.  Ordinary Horror, David Searcy.  Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, the “illustrated journey” version with Stephen Mitchell’s translation.  A Light in the Prairie, Gerry Cristol.  Oh What A Paradise It Seems, John Cheever.  The Shipping News, E. Annie Prolux.  The Meaning of Life, His Holiness The Dalai Lama.  Healing Anger, His Holiness The Dalai Lama.  The last three pages of this glossy paperback are a glossary, from Abhidarma to Yogachara.  The definition of Yogachara:  a synonym for Chittamatra.

  This evening, I am not reading the Saul Bellow novels on the shelf across from the desk downstairs.   Not Herzog, its sideways title appearing in blue on the silver lozenge on its blue spine.  Not Mr. Sammler’s Planet, its title in blue type on its white jacket.  Instead, I am scrolling down the book review that appears in my inbox.   It is open on the screen, its golden page as illuminated as a medieval manuscript.  It is a review of a biography of Saul Bellow.  In this review, Bellow is quoted saying that he has the “infinite excitement…of having appeared on this earth.”  He thinks that simply being alive is “delicious, ravishing.”  And that “nothing happens that is not of deepest meaning – a green plush sofa falling apart, or sawdust coming out of the sofa, or the carpet it fell on….”   It is a good attitude to have, however impossible it may be to sustain it.   How would Robert Burton with his hundreds of pages on melancholy have responded to Bellow?   I think he would have agreed.  He could not have sustained his hundreds of pages otherwise.

  vii

  A friend suggested throwing out any book belonging to the “self-help” genre or used as a kind of therapy.  Even if there are sentences underlined, notes in margins, and asterisks.  Especially if there are.   Get rid of Facing Codependence or Healing Anger.  Drop them into the white cylinder of the wastebasket under the desk. The wounds these books were meant to heal can turn into holes on a shelf

  “If you drop dead tomorrow…” she said, half smiling, not wishing it, but pointing out that tomorrow is coming soon.   These books must go.  She is implying that I would not want anyone to read my comments and sometimes overwrought responses on their pages to the mundane sorrows of life.

  Agreed, in theory.
  “But after my death,” I said, “why not?”
  I told her it would not be a problem, and, anyway, I would be unaware.
  “You are making an assumption,” she said.
  “So are you,” I said.
  She was making the assumption that anyone would be interested.

  My talented landscape designer second wife had returned to the home and yard she owned before our marriage.  Designing With Water, James Van Sweden, second shelf down, bookcase on the left, is a gift from Berit Hudson, who supervised the redoing of the landscape that stayed put.   Berit’s work includes the fountain just outside the window nearest the desk downstairs.  The fountain’s core-ten steel cladding has turned from blue to a lovelier rust, and its water serenades.   Next, Wooden Houses, Judith Miller.  This book has a Post-it note from Susan Brook, on a page with pictures of floors.   “Silver floor stain,” Susan notes, “I hope you are as pleased with this as I am.”  Susan, an interior designer, played her part in the redoing of every room, ceiling to floor, after 2007.   Since the house has no silver-stained floors, I must not have been as pleased with that idea as she was.  Susan was also a Jehovah’s Witness.  Coloring a hardwood floor with a silver stain was one of the less strange of her ideas.

  After Henry, Joan Didion, holds a postcard in place on page 253, at the start of a chapter titled “Sentimental Journey.”  It is a tarjeta postal my first wife sent from Mexico to her mother, Monday, August 25, 1975.  “Dear Mother,” she writes.  “Our room has a balcony on the beautiful Paseo de la Reforma Ave, with its flowers and trees.   Saturday night we visited a local café where we had all kinds of native food.” That I do recall.  I ordered the stuffed green bell pepper with pink pomegranate sauce and did not recover quickly.  Then, The Talmud, A Biography, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer.   Systems of Psychotherapy, Donald H. Ford and Hugh B. Urban.  Sentences are underlined in red pen throughout its 700 pages.  The underlines are perfectly straight.  Under the inside back cover, a paper ruler, advertising Stedman’s Medical Dictionary on one side and, on the back a chart of Normal Blood Composition, with figures for the normal ranges of Bilirubin to Uric Acid.  And then the six dark green spines of the Psychology:  A Study of a Science set, Volumes 1 through 6, edited by Sigmund Koch.  These books will never be read again, if they were ever read the first time.  The have become decoration.  They are props, half recalling, half imagining the past.  If there is any reason for keeping them, it is psychological.

  Last in this row, The Conquest of the Incas, John Hemming.

  viii

  When I think about Dolores, my thoughts are never of will-we-meet-again.  Instead, I think about my approaching opportunity to share an experience with her again.  It may not match the five-and-half months of dying from cancer that she did in 1997.   No port in my chest, not the same injections of heparin and lorazepam in an upstairs bedroom.  The experience is unlikely to be exactly the same.  But, one way or another, I will have the experience.  It will be sooner rather than later, given my age.

  In the interim, I could share the experience of reading the books that she read.  Maybe one of the six volumes of Psychology:  The History of a Science.   But I never saw her turn a page of that.   Maybe Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, which has a personalized message to her from Gloria Steinem.   Or the signed Nadine Strossen book, Defending Pornography.   Truth be told, I never saw her reading those books either.  They were more like merch, like a t-shirt brought home from the concert, a proof that she had been there.

  The first four books on the next shelf are slight, shirt-pocket booklets.  They have no author.  No titles on their white covers, either, just the names of genres in black. They are “No-Frills” paperbacks, copyrighted by No-Frills Entertainment Associates.  The copy on their covers is a spoof:

  No-Frills Book Mystery.   Complete with everything:  Detective, telephone, mysterious woman, corpses, money, rain.

  No-Frills Book Romance.  Complete with everything:  A kiss, a promise, a misunderstanding, another kiss, a happy ending.

  No-Frills Book Western.  Complete with everything:  Cowboys, horses, lady, blood, dust, guns.

  No-Frills Book Science Fiction:  Complete with everything:  Aliens, giant ants, space cadets, robots, one plucky girl.

  ix

  National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds Eastern Region is the work of John Bull and John Farrand, Jr.   Next to it, Birds of North America, Chandler S. Robbins, Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim.  Then The Rocky Mountains, also Herbert S. Zim.   And then the series of field guides.  A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, George A. Petrides.  A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets, Donald H. Menzel.  A Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, John J. Craighead, Frank C. Craighead, Jr., and Ray J. Davis.   And A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, Frederick H. Pough.

  The amount of information in these books is terrifying.  The quantity on their thin pages, the lifetimes of study to produce it, the lifetime required to read a portion of it.  How jaw-dropping it is, to come to terms with what is known about something as ordinary as a sparrow.  In the National Audubon Society Field Guide, page 28, a drawing of a bird is labeled with the names of all its parts.  Top to bottom, there is so much to know.  There is the crown, the eye-stripe, the nares.  Auriculars, upper mandible, lower mandible.  Nape, chin, side of neck, throat, mantel, back, breast, scapulars.  The bend of its wing, and its shoulder.   The wing coverts, the side, the secondaries.  It has a rump, flank, abdomen, upper trail coverts, primaries, undertail coverts, tail feathers, and tarsus.

  I cannot recall when I bought Mockel’s Desert Flower Notebook, Henry R. Mockel and Beverly Mockel., but I know why and can guess where.   Both Mockels have signed the flysheet, “Sincerely.”  Their book was in the window of a bookstore somewhere on the way to Anza Borrego Desert State Park.  Maybe in Twentynine Palms.  In the late 1970s, or into the early 1980s.   On page 55, the illustration of Wild Buckwheat, Eriogonum Wrightii, is stained with the brownish orange remains of a plant.  Same on page 131, where I find a piece of Brittle Bush, smashed like a moth between pages.  On page 159, the sample of Creosote Bush, Larrea divaricata, collected in the desert, makes a mess.  Its brown smudge is spotted with yellow, as if a thing so dry could also splatter.  Between pages 190 and 191, an Ocotillo sample has held its own far better.  Better by far than the Chuparosa on the following page, smashed on top of a color illustration.  The last of these specimens, Arizona Lupine, keeps its color between 256 and 257.  The Mockels assert on page 256 that the color of the Arizona Lupine blossom is much more delicate than that of other lupines.   This holds true for my specimen.  Its delicate blossom seems perfectly preserved, though the purple tips, as slight as hairs, have faded and flattened.   Some of the same affect is captured in the title of Walt Whitman’s book, in a pile on the downstairs desk — Specimen Days — his memories preserved, faded, flattened.

  Alongside the Mockels, Roadside Flowers of Texas, Howard S. Irwin.  Then, The Life of John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe.  History of the Sierra Nevada, Francis P. Farquhar.  The Anza-Borrego Desert Region, Lowell and Diana Lindsay.  Cacti, Shrubs and Trees of Anza-Borrego, Paul R. Johnson.  The Complete Indoor Gardener, edited by Michael Wright.  The Plant Kingdom, Ian Tribe.   Early Uses of California Plants, Edward K. Balls.  The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale.  Beyond The Wall, Edward Abbey, has saved a receipt from Furnace Creek Inn, in Death Valley.   Check-in, March 15, 1994.   Also inside, a folded page with map and descriptions of twenty different day hikes in Death Valley.  Number two is Desolation Canyon.  Thirteen is Coffin Peak, which is not up Coffin Peak, but only a hike to a view of it.

  In How To Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest, Jill Nokes provides 566 pages of instruction.  What is it all about, all these books about plants?   Pam, the landscape designer, could point out every plant by name.  Maybe that was it.  I wanted to compete.

  Same shelf, last three books:  Lost In America, Isaac Bashevis Singer, with paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer.  Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, published by the World Syndicate Publishing Company.  Its pages are the color that cream-colored paper becomes over time.  Not brown, but a brown with an orange tint, the brown of age.  Alongside Gulliver’s Travels, another tattered book, Heidi, Johanna Spyri, translated by Louise Brooks and illustrated by Roberta MacDonald.  Its binding is separating.   Pages are discolored and spotted.  This Heidi from childhood must have been my sister’s.  The phone number in the upper corner on the title page looks like her handwriting.   The OR in OR-O4891 stood for Orchard.   No need any longer for this phone number to be written down.  Not just because it no longer exists, or because it has not been dialed in sixty years.

  My sister calls me in the evening.  I ask her if she remembers how our parents fussed at us about toll charges and long-distance calls.  I ask her if Heidi was hers, and if she can remember our old phone number.   She can, without effort.
  “What are you doing every day?” she asks.
  I tell her I don’t know exactly but hope to have enough years left to figure it out.’

  x

  The television miniseries Roots appeared in January, 1977.   In April, I had an idea.  I was at my first job after college, at the local PBS station in Dallas.  Why not a multi-generational drama about a different minority.   Black had been done.  Let’s do brown, an original series for Public Television about the Hispanic Southwest and a family named Chavez, half fictional but plausible, since the name Chavez turns up everywhere, from a statue in Santa Fe to a ravine in Los Angeles.   I spent nine months in archives and working with scholars.  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded the research, including the purchase of related books.   Some of these books are on one of the shelves across from the Zoom background books.

  Spanish Archives of New Mexico 1621-1821, is nothing more than a list of archival documents on microfilm, indexed in order of their dates.   There are circles and check marks throughout its 180 pages. The first entry, Roll 1, Frame 1, Twitchell Number 1, Jan. 9 1621, Royal Audiencia, Mexico, are instructions to Fray Esteban de Perea concerning the conversion of the New Mexico Indians.  Next, Old Spanish Missions, Guidelines for a Texas Mission, transcript and translation by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger O.F.M.  Then Fr. Jose Rafael Oliva’s Views concerning the Problem of the Temporalities in 1788, translation by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger O.F.M.  And Journal of a Texas Missionary 1767-1802, the Diario Historico of Fr. Cosme Lozano Narvais, another translation by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger O.F.M.   And then Origins of New Mexico Families in the Spanish Colonial Period, Fray Angelico Chavez, illustrations by Jose Cisneros.  Fray Angelico dedicates his work “To My True Father Saint Francis of Assisi,” stirring a mixture of malice and self-pity into his dedication:  “Failing to find a Maecenas or a Lord Chesterfield to finance this venture,” he writes, “even among those who ought to care, I dedicate it to thee, so lacking in funds, like myself.”

  On the same shelf:  The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton.  It was read but has left no trace of either its plot or the name of the heroine.  What remember is Edith Wharton’s former estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, because its name is on a wrapped bar of soap I brought back from the gift shop twenty years ago.  This soap souvenir from The Mount is on a ledge above my bathtub, still in its ornately patterned packaging.   Then, September 1, 1939, Ian Sansom.  Goodbye to a River, John Graves. Snobbery, The American Version, Joseph Epstein.  Walking the Black Cat, Charles Simic.  And a chapbook, This Is Where I Find You, Tom Geddi.

  Two photos of my daughter and her high school boyfriend are wedged between Charles Simic and Tom Geddie.  One of the photos was taken at the creek behind our house.  The other, at the school dance they were going to.  These snaps of two teenagers in 2002 somehow came to be buried between two books on an untouched shelf.   My daughter and this boy married ten years further on.  He was her second marriage, and they did seem destined for each other.  But the boy had physical problems and, eventually, a drinking problem, and he committed suicide in the summer of 2022.  They were arguing in their apartment just before it happened.  He shot himself in the head.  They had argued, she had left the room, she heard a shot a moment later.   Or so I was told, second hand, because we have no contact with each other.

  Next in line, A Brief Illustrated Guide To Understanding Islam, I.A. Ibrahim.  The Search for Modern China, Jonathan D. Spence, 718 pages of text and 138 more of appendices.  My bookmark is on page 11.  This Time, New and Selected Poems, Gerald Stern.  The Pueblo Revolt, David Roberts. The Afterlife, Penelope Fitzgerald.  Ten Little New Yorkers, Kinky Friedman.  Scenic Driving Texas, Laurence Parent.  Jesus and Yahweh The Names Divine, Harold Bloom.  The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren.  All Consuming Images, Stuart Ewen.   Bird Checklist Tanzania & Kenya, CC Africa, is more pamphlet than book, as is Grumeti River Camp, Serengeti – Tanzania, also from CC Africa.  Next, Sydney Laurence, Painter of the North, Kesler E. Woodward.  And then An Image of Monhegan, John Kleinhans.

  An Image of Monhegan is a book of platinum prints and memories of a trip to the island off the coast of Maine when my second wife was still only a girlfriend.  Its black and white photos of rocks and empty skies have a cool and prophetic, beauty.  In Denali, Kim Heacox, is another book of photographs, this time in color, and also a souvenir, from a trip with that girlfriend.  We brought our three combined teenagers along, but then flew them home after a week, so we could be by our besotted selves.  HIP Hotels, Herbert Yoma, is about nobody’s real life; it has hundreds of color photographs of hotels in France, food on plates, beds, windows, gardens and pools, and nothing to remember.

  Interpretations of Life, Will and Ariel Durant, is another birthday gift from my parents.  This one on my nineteenth, in 1970.   There is the usual message from my mother on the inside cover.  “If the man you are becoming lives up to the potential of the boy you have been,” she writes, “the world will be a better place.”   A birthday card from the drugstore is also inside, still in its envelope.   It carries a handwritten message as well.  “This is the first time the family is not together for your birthday,” my mother begins.  “Nevertheless, you are in our thoughts and in our hearts always.”   I never read the Durant book.  My mother died at 96 in 2018.   It would not have occurred to me when I was nineteen, but it is obvious now that mothers are the irreplaceable woman in our lives.

  xi

  Last shelf, opposite the desk downstairs:
  The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer.   Lost & Found, Kathryn Schultz.  A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders.  W. B. Yeats The Last Romantic, edited and with an introduction by Peter Porter.  Yeats, A Selection of Poems, a beautiful little book from Heritage Press.   Stacks of magazines with hard covers and catalogs of exhibits.   Eros, Summer, 1962, Volume One, Number Two, Ralph Ginzburg Editor and Publisher, Art Director: Herb Lubalin.  Eros, Winter, 1962, Volume One, Number Four, with its “Black and White in Color” photo sequence of a naked white woman and naked black man, and an editorial from Allen Ginsburg about government and sex.  These were Dolores’s, before my time.   A Create magazine, Fall 2005.     A Neiman-Marcus 1985 Christmas Book.   A flat, “easy-to-assemble” paper model of The Executioner, still in its shrink wrap, from the gift shop in Her Majesty’s Palace and Fortress The Tower of London.   Dallas Museum of Art, Selected Works, Dr. Anne R. Bromberg.  Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong, Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, another colorful book from a museum gift shop and a forgotten exhibit.  Palace and Mosque, Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tim Stanley.  Monet’s Passion – Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter’s Gardens, Elizabeth Murray.

  Then, more books about gardens and gardening.  The Glory of Gardens, edited by Scott J. Tilden.  The Flower Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, Michael R. Van Valkenburgh.  Gardens by Design, Noel Kingsbury.  The Butchart Gardens is a souvenir booklet, from a trip in 1988, first marriage, when our children were four and three.  I am throwing out garden enthusiast magazines from 2008.  They are part of the post-divorce redoing, left here by Roundtree Landscaping.  Magazines like Hardscaping were left “for ideas; so was Fine Gardening (“31 Shrubs for Great Fall Color!”), Garden, Deck & Landscape, and the rest.

  Home, Kim Johnson Gross, is part of the “Chic Simple” series.  It claims to be “a primer for living well but sensibly in the 1990s.”   Mostly pictures, its pages are sprinkled with quotes as well.  This is the one on the first blank page: “The more you know, the less you need.”  It is attributed to Australian aborigines.

  End of the shelf, done.

  xii

  Sunny, all day today.  I am saving the start of the hallway shelves for another day.   Resisting the beginning, in part because I do not want to finish.  It is warm outside, not summer yet, but warm.   The kitchen door is open to a retractable screen door.  A bird, one of the familiars of the yard, is repeating the same notes.   Two squirrels chase each other around a tree trunk.  Down they go, the paths of their descent as inevitable as a corkscrew.

  Of the 207 books on the ten shelves facing the downstairs desk, only twenty were read cover to cover.  Probably the most eye-opening is Conquest of the Incas, John Hemming’s account of a gang of Spaniards that overthrew a civilization.  The book with the largest gap between the promise of its title and what it delivers?  That prize can go to His Holiness The Dalai Lama, for The Meaning of Life.

  One last look at Monet’s Passion, which I thought was a gift from Pam.  A glance at the inside cover, but there is no message.  Not on the flysheet, not on the coated title page.

  Chapter Eight
  DOWN THE HALLWAY

  The cedar waxwings that feed on berries from the yaupon hollies just outside do not know when enough is enough.  They fly together to the glossy leaves of the trees.  They eat their fill and then some.  Like the drunk at a bar, they are the accident waiting to happen.  And it does happen.  I hear a thump.  One of the birds has flown into a windowpane on the south side of the house.  It is stunned or has broken its neck.  It lies on the wooden deck.  Perfect in stillness, as if nothing were wrong.   It looks exactly like the description of Bombycilla cedrorum on page 645 of the Field Guide To North American Birds that I bumped into.  It belongs in a beautiful still life, in a painting reproduced on the pages of the textured book from the Barnes Foundation on my desk upstairs.  Not the Paul Cezanne Still Life (Nature Morte), on page 153 in the Barnes book.  That painting is fruit, fabrics, a bowl, and a water pitcher, the pitcher decorated with unliving flowers.  The dead bird on my deck, smaller than a robin, is sleek, crested, and brown.  It is as described, with its black mask, the bright yellow tips on its tail feathers, red tips on its secondary wing feathers.  Those are the red tips that the experts call “wax-like,” though I do not see why.  According to the Field Guide, this bird is always seen in flocks.  It is not so in death, lying on the wooden deck.  In death this cedar waxwing has been abandoned by all the living of its kind.  For that, I feel some kinship with it.  The flock has moved on.  I use a broom and a blue dustpan from the kitchen closet and gather up the cedar waxwing.  Even as the broom straws hit it, this bird maintains its perfect shape.  Not a feather out of place as it is rises, on its ride to a trash can by the garage.

  ii

  At the Top of the Muletrack, Carola Matthews, is on the top shelf of the first of seven bookcases from the head of the hallway to its foot near a bedroom door.  These bookcases are recessed, built into one side of the hallway.  Each has eight shelves.   At the Top of the Muletrack is one of those books by someone who spends three summers on a Greek island and publishes a book inset with black and white photographs, writing captions such as “Costa in his garden” and “Langatha, the view from the house.”

  Next in this top row, A Promise to Ourselves, Alec Baldwin.  Then, A History of English Prose Rhythm, George Saintsbury.  Selected Poems 1942-2006, Donald Hall.  Orpheus Last, Janette Turner Hospital.   Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves.  A Shooting Star, Wallace Stegner.   Matters of Fact and of Fiction, Gore Vidal.  August 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Bullfinch’s Mythology.  Lincoln, The Biography of A Writer, Fred Kalman.  Four Complete Novels, Mark Twain.  Then, the twelve banana-yellow Twains fill out the rest of this shelf.

  At some point in school, I was required to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  But otherwise not a single book on this shelf has been read to the finish. Wallace Stegner’s The Shooting Star is a first edition.  It reminds me of my friend Peter, who was a Stegner Fellow but spent his scholarship year in Palo Alto watching Perry Mason reruns in his apartment.  Then he found work as a janitor.   After two years of that, Peter tested into the Foreign Service.  That was followed by a career, early retirement, and an early death at 54 of pancreatic cancer.   The Solzhenitsyn book uses a strip of Kodak film for a bookmark.  Its ten frames are color images of my sister holding a baby against her left shoulder.  The baby is her eldest, in his fifties now, who was diagnosed with tongue cancer in his twenties.  Most of his tongue was removed.  He has not eaten solid food since.  The Robert Graves book is an autobiography of a thirty-three-year-old.  He dared to tell the truth… according to the book jacket.  A sticker on the inside of Four Complete Novels explains why there is yet another Mark Twain on the shelf.  The Duke University Talent Identification Program presents this book in recognition of outstanding performance in the Talent Search for Mathematically and Verbally Gifted Seventh Graders.  My daughter took a test and won Four Complete Novels as a prize.  Back then, she was a shooting star.

  iii

  Second shelf from the top, first bookcase in the hallway:

  AIDS, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.   A Book of Luminous Things, Czeslaw Milosz.  The Journals of John Cheever. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, Ernest Hemingway.  Beloved, Toni Morrison.  The Sonnets of Shakespeare, Heritage Press.   Night/Dawn/Day, Elie Wiesel.  My Losing Season, Pat Conroy.  Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D.  The Art of Happiness, His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutter, M.D.  The Joy of Living and Dying in Peace, His Holiness The Dalai Lama.   A Simple Path, His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  Montezuma, C.A. Burland.  Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes.  Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein.  Digging to America, Anne Tyler. Collected Poems, Thom Gunn.  Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck and E.F. Ricketts.  Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 25^th Anniversary Report.   Dubliners An Illustrated Edition, James Joyce. Thoreau, The Library of America.  The Oxford Book of English Verse, Christopher Ricks.  Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace.  India: A Million Mutinies Now, V.S. Naipaul.  Selected Poems, Seamus Heaney.  St. Peter’s Day, Anton Chekhov.  Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow.

  Third shelf down:   John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Short Stories of De Maupassant.  Dare to Forgive, Edward M. Hallowell, M.D.  The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.  Fire and Blood, T. R. Fehrenbach.  The Sultans, Noel Barber.  The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov.  Classical Scientific Papers – Chemistry, arranged and introduced by David M. Knight.  Bay of Souls, Robert Stone.  Writings 1902-1910, William James, The Library of America.  The Art of Travel, Alain de Boton.  A Johnson Reader, E. L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne.   Cultural Amnesia, Clive James. Turtle Moon, Alice Hoffman.  Illumination Night, Alice Hoffman.  Local Girls, Alice Hoffman.  Statutes of Limitations, Monroe Engel.  Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy.  Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire, Alan Dundes. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll, Chancellor Press.   Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon.  Nine Horses, Billy Collins.  Then The Rain in Portugal, The Trouble with Poetry, and Sailing Alone Around the World, Billy Collins.  Box of Matches, Nicolson Baker.  My Day, Jean Rhys.  The Poets Corner, Max Beerbohm.  Animi Figura, J.A. Symonds.  Hopkins, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets.  Late Wife, Claudia Emerson.  City, Uncity, Gerald Huckaby and Corita Kent. The Art of Friendship, Roger Horchow and Sally Horchow.  The Courage the Heart Desires, Kathleen Fischer.  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro.  And On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz, Arthur Kurzweil.

  Sliding it from its place, I look at Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, wondering if the book jacket will have a photo of Alice Munro, which it does.  Here she is, on a porch and dressed in velour.  Poor Alice, more lately the subject of an unflattering tell-all written by her daughter; but then, sooner or later, every parent is guilty.  And what would Kerouac think of On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz, the last book on this shelf?

  In any group of any kind, there are oddities.  There will be a fact that has no forerunner, a reality that arises without explanation.  On this shelf, there are the three Alice Hoffman novels – why three, since not one of them has been read?  They may be here only because I like the name Alice.  Alice Hoffman, Alice Munro, Alice Kramden, Ralph’s wife on The Honeymooners.  And these three unread Alice Hoffman novels are not as odd or misplaced on this shelf as the appearance of another J.A. Symonds.  His Animi Figura catches me by surprise.  J.A. Symonds has already had his say, and more, in the three volumes of The Letters of John Addington Symonds behind the downstairs desk.  Animi Figura, where did you come from?   And what are you?

  iv

  Animi Figura is a slight, dark grey book, a dark green grey that is almost black.  The thin red rectangle near the edges on Its cover forms an incised border.  Its title is in gold and sinks into the cover, like a hidden treasure.   As for the treasure, it is nothing but sonnets, with names like Mystery of Mysteries and On The Sacro Monte.  Where Animi Figura came from, that mystery is solved inside, on a pink 3 x 5 index card.  The book was a gift from Bill Gilliland.  “I left the price in,” Bill writes, “not to show my generosity but Larry’s pricing.”    He means Larry McMurtry.  This Animi Figura was stock from the days when Bill and Larry McMurtry co-owned a bookstore.  On the reverse of the card, this printed message: “Books to be signed by Mr. McMurtry should be sent with return postage and mailing envelope to 249 N. Brand Blvd., #582, Glendale, California 91203.”   The message continues and concludes: “Mr. McMurtry will not sign galley proofs, screenplays, posters, magazine appearances, photographs, reviews, interviews, or books or articles written about him.”   It is both a warning and a rebuke.  The price, “50,” is penciled in an upper corner of the page before the title page.  Maybe there had been no buyer at fifty dollars for Animi Figura by John Addington Symonds, published in 1882 by Smith, Elder & Co., 15, Waterloo Place, London.  As for what happened to the rest of Bill’s books, they were scattered after his death, not unlike his cremains.

  Bill Gilliland died in August 2010.  I was unaware of it, because he died the same year and month as my father and only five days after.  I must have been in California then, keeping my mother company in Ocean Hills.   Bill’s death did not go unnoticed though.  It was officially noted and recorded by the State of Texas.

  The Center for Health Statistics Vital Events Data Management Team of the Texas Department of State Health Services aggregates birth and death data and can provide it for a specific year or range of years.  The Center will make it available upon request.   It turns out that it is not an easy process, requesting and receiving this data.  I wanted to verify the date of death of my former son-in-law, my daughter’s husband Keith, who died, as far as I knew, in June or July, 2022, either in Denton, Texas, or in Fort Worth.  A $10 charge is required in order to receive this “Index of Deaths” for 2022.   I could see this requirement on the state’s website.   Although the site provides a request form that can be sent back electronically, there is no option that I saw for online payment.  So, after attaching the completed form, I emailed a request for clarification, asking for an instruction on how and where to submit the ten dollars.

  That email was sent in December, 2023.  It provoked a series of responses and replies to responses, back and forth, eighteen in total, seven of them thanking me for my emails and promising a reply within three to five business days.

  v

  On the fourth shelf down, travel souvenirs, including two from Buenos Aires.  A round tin with Eva Peron’s face on its lid contains a candle, and a lapel pin with the same, tinier face of Eva Peron.  Also, a carved wooden bus, folk art that could have come from Mexico, but came from the Horchow store.  And a pile of tickets is spread like an opened fan.   There are also three perfect-bound Art in America magazines from the early 1970s.  The most meaningful image in these three magazines is the image that subscribers wanted of themselves.

  Next, A Day In the Life of Lon Tinkle, edited by Robert S. Sparkman, M.D., published by The Friends of the Dallas Public Library, in an edition limited to 500 copies.“  This copy is number 259.   It was distributed as a gift to FoDPL board members.  Dr. Sparkman wrote the foreword and the afterword and snapped the photos at a Friends’ tribute to Lon Tinkle that was held at Margaret McDermott’s ranch in 1977.  His photographs are tipped onto the books textured oversized pages.  By coincidence, Dr. Sparkman and his wife Willie were my elderly next-door neighbors in the house in Greenway Parks where I lived from 1987 until my first wife’s death in 1997.  He was a martinet.  He walked upright as though he wore a back brace.  He was into his seventies when I knew him; so, my age now.   Willie liked to wear a passion flower in her hair.  Passiflora, beautiful and complicated, grew on the vines on her side of the wooden fence that our homes shared.  Once, when our daughter was eight, she went down the Sparkman’s driveway and picked one of the blooms.  Willie Sparkman came over to rap on the door and rebuke us all.

  I have never looked at A Day In the Life of Lon Tinkle before.   It is a crafted production.  In the hallway, I am inspecting the tipped-on pictures of Stanley Marcus and Jacques Barzun that Dr. Sparkman took at the event.  Typography and book design by Bill Chiles, and Carl Hertzog handled the printing —   all of it, including the people pictured, from a time when fonts came from typographers, not from Adobe, and design was done with hand skills, using exacto knives, not software and mouse clicks.

  A second book on this fourth shelf is slipcased, a picture book of American landscapes.  Like the Lon Tinkle tribute, it is a vanity publication, though it has less to be vain about.  The book and its packaging were produced for a mortgage banker operating “from sea to shining sea, with offices in thirty-eight of the fifty states,” as it announces in its introduction.  Its sponsor collapsed in the late 1980s, along with so many other bloated banking and real estate businesses in Texas.  Holding companies, most of them.  This untitled book has a 1986 copyright; so, it came out just before the fall.

  Bertha’s twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books take up most of the fifth shelf in the first hallway bookcase.  These twenty are held upright by seven oversized books lying on their sides in the remaining space.

  Austin, A.C. Greene, a slender history of the city, written in 1981, is dedicated to American National Bank, “Mercantile Texas Corporation’s flagship in Austin,” another business disappearing in the later eighties.   Fernand Leger is the catalog for a traveling exhibit that reached Dallas in 1982.  The Book of Houses, Geoffrey Hindley, a picture book.   Inside Masks of Black Africa, Ladislas Segy, I discover a folded flyer from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Realm of Texas.  It proclaims that the Knights will march in Houston on April 2, 1983, “to show contempt and total disgust for these vile faggots that do not believe in family in the Christian way.”   It is the era of the AIDS epidemic, and the Knights want their readers to know that “it won’t be a cake walk, if the queers think they are going to turn Houston into San Francisco.”   No idea what this found flyer is doing in a book about African masks.

  A glossy Art of the Huichol Indians, introduced and edited by Kathleen Berrin, reminds me of the Huichol yarn painting I bought in Tijuana for $139 fifty-three years ago.  It is long gone.  Green, black and yellow yarns, pressed on wax, mounted on a sheet of plywood five feet across.   Odd geometries, figures like space aliens, with antennae and elongated arms and animal heads.   It was vibrant while it lasted.  Next book down, Birds of North America, A Personal Selection, Eliot Porter.  And, bottom of the stack, Poetry Speaks, edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby.   According to the text on its jacket, Walt Whitman himself is speaking on one of three CDs that are included with Poetry Speaks.  So is Robert Frost.  And Edna St. Vincent Millay.   This hardback has poems, biographical introductions, essays by famous poets about even more famous poets, and recordings of 150 poems.  The three CDs are still in their sealed packaging.  There is an insert that lists the voices.  On Disc One, Alfred Lord Tennyson is reading from The Charge of the Light Brigade.  Robert Browning is reading How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.  Is that even possible?

  vi

  The craftsman who built these hallway bookcases also made the heavy front door, which is Honduran mahogany.  Using a hand tool, he worked a texture into the wood, leaving the stained surface of the door beautifully bumpy.   He also built the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, the shelves for clothing, the drawers and the hanging spaces.   As a hobby, he makes lutes out of rosewood or maple and, sometimes, ukuleles from Hawaiian koa.

  The bookcases he built in the hallway drop all the way to the bleached hardwood floor.   Looking closely at the spines of books on the three bottom shelves means feeling it in the knees.

  Sixth shelf down:

  White Buildings, Hart Crane, introduction by Allen Tate. The Bridge, Hart Crane, commentary by Waldo Frank.  The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932, edited by Brom Weber.  Words for the Wind, Theodore Roethke. Willie Boy, A Desert Manhunt, Harry Lawton.  Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison.  Shorter Novels: Eighteenth Century, Everyman’s Library.  Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer.  The Vestal Virgin Room, C.W. Smith.  The Piano Players, Anthony Burgess.  The Obituary Writer, Porter Shreve.  The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler.  The Fermata, Nicholson Baker.  The Best American Poetry 1996, edited by Adrienne Rich.  The Old Patagonian Express, Paul Theroux.  Darkness Visible, William Styron. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin.  A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry. Timeless Healing, Herbert Benson, M.D.  The ice Age, Margaret Drabble.  War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy.  Coming Into the Country, John McPhee.  Giving Good Weight, John McPhee.  La Place de la Concorde Suisse, John McPhee.  The John McPhee Reader.  The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman.  The Unwritten Philosophy, F. M. Cornford.  The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Ernst Cassirer.  The Blue and Brown Books, Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Language Truth and Logic, A.J. Ayer.  Principium Sapientiae, F.M. Cornford.  The High Window, Raymond Chandler.  The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler.  Playback, Raymond Chandler.  Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg.  The Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley.  The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, Suzette Haden Elgin.  A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart Tolle.  Choice & Chance, An Introduction to Inductive Logic, Brian Skyrms.  Methods of Logic, Willard Van Orman Quine.  Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz.

  Naming these books was like taking attendance from 1969 – 1979.  Next, seventh shelf, another rollcall of snugly fitted paperbacks:

  The Breakthrough Imperative, Mark Gottfredson and Steve Schaubert.  Trading for a Living, Dr. Alexander Elder.  Winning on the Stock Market, Brian S. Millard.  Rule Breakers, Rule Makers, David and Tom Gardner.  No Man’s Land, Doug Tatum.  The Only Three Questions That Count, Ken Fisher.  Russian In Ten Minutes a Day, Kristine Kershul.  The Movement Toward a New America, Michell Goodman.  When You Paint, Ward Brackett.  City of Night, John Rechy.  The Vintage Mencken, selected by Alistair Cooke.   Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, introduced by M.L. Rosenthal.  Poet’s Choice, edited by Paul Engle and Joseph Langland.  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashberry.  The Sea, John Banville.  The Last of the Just, Andre Schwarz-Bart.  World’s End, T.C. Boyle.  When Someone You Love is Wiccan, Carl McColman.  The Secrets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz.  Bullet Park, John Cheever.  Another Country, James Baldwin.  Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry.  The Resurrection, John Gardner. Nickel Mountain, John Gardner.  Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed.  The Bus of Dreams, Mary Morris.  Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, William Kennedy.  Legs, William Kennedy.  Ironweed, William Kennedy.  Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence.  Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence.  The Complete Short Stories, D.H. Lawrence.  Short Novels of D.H. Lawrence.  The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence.  Passions, Isaac Bashevis Singer.  Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer.  The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Paule Marshall.

  In a way, this listing of books is no more informative than those passages in the Bible where the chiefs of each of the twelve tribes are enumerated; their names, and who they were the son of.   Tradition declares that God Himself is the author of these lists.   They are tedious to read and impossible to recall with any accuracy, but so be it.  A listing is good enough for Him, even if the instinct of most readers is to skip over these parts and get to the storytelling.

  vii

  The seven hallway bookcases are the outcome of a widening and a narrowing. It was life that narrowed.  Where once there were five in this house, there is one.  One plus a dog, though there always was a dog.  Second wife, gone; son, daughter, stepson, gone and gone.  The widening was in the hallway itself.   As part of remodeling, two bedrooms behind the hallway were combined into one, making a so-called master bedroom.  The hallway leading to this master bedroom was widened, so that seven bookcases could be recessed down the length of one of its walls.  The bookcases rise to the ceiling.  They fall to the floor.   The books on the very bottom shelves are at my ankles.  They are only seen at eye level by the dog.

  The very lowest books should be those that matter least.  The pulpiest, the leftovers, all the books that belong nowhere else.  Turns out, classics and favorites are packed on this first bottom shelf.  The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy, sits tight against T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a dusty paperback, with bits of bugs on it.  Corinne, who comes to clean every second Wednesday, never pushes the Swiffer duster into the open space above Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad.  I  am on my belly to report on Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley.  The Ox Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence.  The Plumed Serpent, D. H. Lawrence.  Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor.  Bright Lights, Big City, Jay MacInerney.  The Tennis Handsome, Barry Hannah.  Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  The Bull from the Sea, Mary Renault.   Possession, A.S. Byatt.  The Magus, John Fowles.  The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing.  The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Alan Sillitoe.  The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Affliction, Russell Banks. Mohawk, Richard Russo.  Half a Life, Jill Ciment.  The Ebony Tower, John Fowles.  The Collector, John Fowles.  The Four-Gated City, Doris Lessing.  Terms of Endearment, Larry McMurtry. Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry.  The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty.  And White Noise, Don DeLillo.  The Three Coffins, John Dickson Carr, is buried here, too, next to Isadora, Isadora Duncan.   Then, The Bridge in the Jungle, B. Traven.  The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry.  The American Dream and The Zoo Story, Edward Albee.  Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis.  The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas.  The Foreigner, David Plante.  A Narrow Time, Michael Downing.   The Mystic Mullah, Kenneth Robeson, “A Doc Savage Adventure.”  Despite the dust, many of these titles are shimmering, like speckled trout in the headwaters.   Maybe not The Mystic Mullah though.  It is a bottom-feeder.

  Mika has wandered over to see what I am doing on the floor.  She is limping some.  The smell of the books holds no interest for her.  The vet has said she might have torn a cruciate ligament in her left hind leg.  I needed the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary down the hall to trace the relationship of “hind” to “behind.”  How Mika happened to limp is not known, and she cannot say.  She likes to run orbits on the acre of grass between a back deck and the creek.  She may have made too sharp a turn in the spotty St. Augustine or through the Asian jasmine that creeps along the slabs of a stone walkway.  It could have happened charging after one the squirrels that dart between tree trunks.  Mika is a sprinter, but she has no warm up routine, and harms can come to any athlete.  At her evening meal, I am feeding her chewable carprofen for pain and inflammation.  If nothing changes, she will go back to the vet.  First, for radiography.  Then, depending on the verdict, though that verdict is foretold, for surgery.

  Chapter Nine
  VITAL STATISTICS

  The day I learned the news that my daughter’s husband had shot himself in the head, the news was second hand.  My son called.  His sister had left him a voice message.  It was about the suicide, which had happened a week before on some undefined day.  It could have been two weeks before.   My son called to tell me as soon as he picked up her message.

  I have not seen or spoken to my daughter in years, but I will look at her LinkedIn profile from time to time.   I did make an effort the first year after she announced she did not want to talk to me.  I sent emails and birthday gifts for two years.   There was no response.  In this silence there was also a residue of relief, a kind of “counting my blessings” feeling.  It was the imbalance, I suppose, the heavy hostility of a child on one side of the scale, my obligation as a parent on the other.   After so many years of her disdain, the sheer unpleasantness, my desire to overcome her rejection of me was weaker than my conclusion that it was easier, if not better, to do nothing about it.

  Somehow, surfing online, I also found out that she had set up a GoFundMe to pay for the funeral.  So I contributed to it.   My contribution was not anonymous, but there was no acknowledgment.   Neither was there any funeral as far as I knew.  And no obituary notice, either.   I sent a condolence note to her dead husband’s parents, at the address I have for them.   That, too, was met with silence.  The note did not come back to me, as it might have for an addressee unknown.

  The public GoFundMe was successful.   The specific amount initially requested was soon surpassed.  So she upped the request.  She raised something like $9,000 to fund the funeral and, as she wrote on the site, “other expenses.”

  That was in the summer of 2022.  In early 2023, I emailed the State of Texas to request an index of all deaths that had occurred in the prior year.   For reasons that do not speak well of anyone, I was curious and wanted confirmation that her dead husband was on the list of the officially dead.

  The initial email provoked an automated response that the actual response would be forthcoming within 3 business days.  When that response arrived, it said the “digital death index” for 2022 would not be available for another year.

  Eleven months later, I emailed again.

  I wrote that I wanted to verify a date of death for a deceased son-in-law who died either in June or July of 2022.   I gave his name and provided the name of the city where he and my daughter had lived, half an hour north, traffic depending.  “Also,” I added, “please let me know how to send the $10 fee to receive this index of deaths in 2022, because I do not see an option for payment online.”   Three days after the automated reply, I received an email from a Data Request Coordinator, thanking me for contacting the Center for Health Statistics Vital Events Data Management Team.   With “Kind regards,” the digital death index for 2022 would not be available to order until January, 2024.

  That January 7, I emailed the Data Management Team.  “Following up, as you suggested.  Is the digital death index for 2022 available to order now?”   I received the reply that I would receive a reply.

  On January 15, I forwarded for the second time the filled-in Digital Vital Event Index Request Form that I initially sent in December.

  On January 18, this:

  Hello, 

  Thank you for contacting the Center for Health Statistics Vital Events Data Management Team.

  We received your request for the 2022 death digital index(es) and prepared the attached invoice #100529.  Please send a copy of this invoice and your payment to the address listed at the top of the invoice. 

  Now I knew to whom all checks or money orders should be payable and that each index is prepared “by the order and subjected to an approval process.”   Also, I should please be advised that once the Team received confirmation of my payment, “the expected processing time is 20-30 business days.”

  The Team also asked me to verify that what I was requesting would satisfy my intended use, which was to find my former son-in-law’s name on the index for the specified year, alphabetized by name, and containing county of event, date of event, and sex.   I should feel free to contact them when I send payment or if I had any further questions.

  I wrote the check as instructed and mailed it in.

  On the last day of the following month, another email to the Team, asking for the status of my request for the 2022 digital death index.  “Can you please tell me,” I whined.  “I mailed a completed form with my $10 payment to the required address more than thirty days ago.”

  Within three business days, Kristin responded.   Kristin is the Data Request Coordinator.  Kristin thanked me for bringing this to the Team’s attention.  She asked if my check had been cashed and, if so, could I please provide a six-digit number stamped on the front of the check, and the check number as well.

  I emailed Kristin on March 6.  Yes, the check was cashed.  Bank of America does not return cancelled checks to me, so, no, I have not seen a six-digit number on the cancelled check.  Since I do not do online banking, I said I would need to drive over to Bank of America, sit in one of their padded arm chairs in the lobby, wait, wait some more, and then ask to view an image of the cancelled check and its six-digit number.   I wrote it might be faster to just mail Kristin another check.

  Kristin responded on March 7.   “Thank you for providing that information.  We have reached out to our payment team and will follow up with confirmation of your payment.”

  On March 12, I wrote again.  I told Kristin that I did go to Bank of America.  I now had a xerox of the check that the Department of Vital Statistics had cashed.  So, I could provide her the so-called DLN number, stamped on the cashed check by the Texas State Comptroller of Public Accounts.

  Kristin responded the next day.   “Good morning,” she wrote, setting a new tone. “Thank you for providing the stamped 6-digit number.  We have forwarded this information to our payment team.  They will help us locate the payment.”

  Then there was no further response.   It is April, and I am still going through books on the hallway shelves.  I emailed Kristin once again.  “What would you suggest as a next step?” I asked her.  “Should I call the Texas State Auditor’s Office hotline to report the theft of my $10 fee by DSHS VSTAT, since my check was cashed in January, and I provided the requested six-digit number, but I have not received the requested document?  What if I drive four hours to your office in Austin with $10 in cash, might this be resolved immediately while I wait there?  My experience seems emblematic of something, though of what I am not sure.”

  Kristin responded within three business days.  “We confirmed your payment and are currently preparing your index.  We will do our best to expedite delivery of your index and provide it within 5-10 business days.”

  “Two weeks,” I whined again, “to send an email with an attachment?”   I thanked her.

  When the file at last arrived, the reason for all the delay may have arrived with it.  There are so many deaths in the state of Texas in a single year.  An astounding number, so many you might expect to stumble over dead bodies in the street.  In 2022, just the dead Garcias alone numbered in the thousands    It was probably a matter of volume.  Thousands of requests for records, and Kristin, all by herself, doing the best she can.

  My daughter’s second husband was indeed on the list.  Male, Denton County, July 22, 2022.  Cause of death not provided.

  Chapter Ten
  A LETTER FROM MY FATHER

  The Jerusalem Bible, in Hebrew and English, English text revised and edited by Harold Fisch, has a recipe between the Hebrew and English pages in my daughter’s pre-teen handwriting:  ¼ cup rolled oats, ½ cup raisins, yeast, 4-5 cups all-purpose flour.   As a teenager, she declared herself to be a Wiccan.  Even at 11 or 12, she was preparing to live by bread alone.  The next book in line belongs to my son.  It is Pentateuch & Haftorahs, edited by Dr. J.H. Hertz, whose Book of Jewish Thoughts is dedicated to those who fell in the Great War.  Its Hebrew text and English translation were used in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah.  That event fell in June of 1997, on a cloudless Saturday.  His mom attended.  She sat toward the back in a rented wheelchair, her left hand holding the morphine pump attached to the tube leading into the port in her chest.  That day turned out to be her last day out of the house until her death in the dark early morning of July 13.   In Pentateuch & Haftorahs, a yellow Post-it is bookmarking a passage from the days of the Judges.

  Much of this top shelf of the second hallway bookcase is devoted to prayer and prophesy.  A jacketless brown book, New American Bible, is an illustrated St. Joseph Medium Size Edition that has my son’s name its first page.   The labeled illustrations on the inside front cover of New American Bible depict the tellers of the old testimonies — Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.  Drawings of a generic Saint, Bishop, Pope, and Priest, Mary Mother of God and Jesus Christ take over on the inside back cover.   I would not have thought there was risk of theft at the Jesuit high school he attended, but he also wrote his name on the top edge, using black marker on the gold tips of the pages.

  A hardbound Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, fits in-between New American Bible and Talmud Bavli, Tractate Sanhedrin, the Schottenstein Daf Yomi edition.  Two books over, On The Doorposts of Your House, Central Conference of American Rabbis.  Next, The Union Prayerbook for Jewish Worship, a gift “with love, October 6, 1979.”   Gates of Prayer has my daughter’s name debossed in gold on its bright blue cover.  Many of the bibles and prayerbooks are gifts to one or the other child on the occasion of some milestone – the thirteenth birthday, a graduation from confirmation class — though both of them left any interest in religion behind, along with these books in the hallway.   Gates of Repentance has my son’s name debossed in gold on a deep red cover.  Mishkan HaNefesh, Machzor for the Days of Awe, is stuffed with the perforated stubs of admission tickets and “book of remembrance” pamphlets that provide mourners with lists of the names of the dead.

  The rest of the shelf is a mixed multitude.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume I, M.H. Abrams, General Editor.   The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume II.  A Revenger’s Comedy, Derwent May.   Inter Views, James Hillman.  Inside Texas, Cactus Pryor.  A second hardback of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellion, Gloria Steinem.  Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead, Molly Ivins, signed.  Moving Beyond Words, Gloria Steinem.   These last four are author-signed, from events my first wife attended.

  France on Foot, Bruce LeFavour hides a newspaper article from 1997.  The article is about Montolieu, the village in France that “devotes itself to books.”  In the village of Montolieu, the narrow streets have “one bakery, one grocery, one butcher, one bistro and 12 bookstores.”  There are an estimated 250,000 books for sale there.   Next, Italian Days, Barbara Gruizzuti Harrison.  Crazy, Pete Earley, subtitled “A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness.”  The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal, Julia Cameron.  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards.  The College Survey of English Literature, Volume One, edited by B.J. Whiting, published in 1949. Volume One covers The Early Period through The Eighteenth Century.  On the title page, someone with Sunshine as his nickname wrote “Property of Harry W. ‘Sunshine’ Kelley, Jr.”   The College Survey of English Literature, Volume Two, is last on this shelf.  It includes The Romantic Period, The Victorian Period, and The Contemporary Period, although “contemporary” is a slippery concept.

  Second bookcase, second shelf:

  Collected Poems, Philip Larkin.  The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, Stephen Potter. Spring Shade, Robert Fitzgerald.  Seascape: Needle’s Eye, George Oppen.  Collected Poems, George Oppen.  Martial Epigrams II, The Loeb Classical Library, edited by T.E. Page, a little red book.  It has Latin on one page and English on the facing page.  Its pages also have my penciled scan marks and translations.  Miraris veteres, acerra, solos/nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.  Ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti/non est, ut placeam tibi, perire.  Your pardon, pray, Vacerra:  It is not worth my while, merely to please you, to die.   Next, Tape for the Turn of the Year, A.R. Ammons.  It was a birthday gift from a college classmate, who wrote on the flysheet, “Let not vicissitudes bend friend from friend.”  Is this a quote, or did he talk that way?  Also inside, a green card with GRE scores.  My math score is two hundred points lower than the verbal.  The Sum, Alan Stephens, is published by Alan Swallow, Denver.  Then, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach.  Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, Thomas Parkinson.  Skip To My Lou, William Martin Camp, rescued from a bin at a public library book sale.   Psychochemotherapy, Edmund Remmen, M.D., Sidney Cohen, M.D., Keith S. Ditman, M.D, and John Russell Frantz, M.D, a book presented “compliments of Roche Laboratories.”  The Best-Known Works of Voltaire is another Aunt Bertha from my parents’ house.  It is one of the Walter J. Black Co. Blue Ribbon Books, copyright 1927.

  Poema del Cante Jondo, Romancero gitano, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Proceso a una madre lesbiana, Gifford Guy Gibson, are both paperbacks from the sidewalk bookstand in Mexico City, circa late seventies.   A Personal Anthology, Jorge Luis Borges, is in front of Greek-English Lexicon, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott.  The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, is in front of Poetry of the English Renaissance 1509-1660, selected and edited by J. William Hebel and Hoyt H. Hudson.  Then, Passions and Ancient Days, C.P. Cavafy, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis.  Elogio de la Sombra, Jorge Luis Borges. And El Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges.  Canasta de Cuentos Mexicanos, B. Traven, is a slender black paperback with its title in bold yellow type on its cover.  Inside it, a business card from Hotel Los Amates, Actores No. 112, Cuernavaca, Morelia, Mexico, where I went to study Spanish for three weeks in 1978.   Then, a catalog, 1979 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of Art, and Master Paintings from The Phillips Collection, Eleanor Green.

  Books that belong with their Spanish Southwest amigos opposite the downstairs desk fill the rest of this shelf in the hallway..  Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds, Elizabeth A.H. John, is 800 pages on confrontations between Indians and Europeans, from 1540 to 1795.  Vol 1, No 3 of Go Ahead! Davy Crockett’s 1837 Almanack of Wild Sports In The West, reproduces “in facsimile” a pamphlet housed in the Huntington Library.  It claims its text was written by Colonel Crockett himself.  It, offers no credit to the illustrator of its woodcuts, xylography of Colonel Crockett shooting a wild boar, shooting a grizzly bear, and shooting a catamount.   Next, With The Makers of San Antonio, Frederick C. Chabot.   Apache Chronicle, John Upton Terrell.   A Distant Trumpet, Paul Horgan.  Great River, Paul Horgan.  History of New Mexico, Gaspar Perez de Villagra, translated by Gilberto Espinosa, was published by the Quivira Society.  Its spine is the color of dried blood.  The Frontiers of New Spain, Nicolas de Lafora’s descriptions, 1766-1768, translated by Lawrence Kinnard.   Last on this second shelf, History of Texas 1673-1779, Fray Juan Agustin Morfi, translated by Carlos Eduardo Castaneda.

  ii

  There is a letter from Robert Fitzgerald stored between pages of his book of poems, Spring Shade.  Its small, elegant handwriting describes the man himself, on a street in Cambridge in 1974, wearing a Harris tweed jacket with elbow patches and a black beret on his head.  The letter is nothing personal.  It is a typed sheet of corrections on Notes on Sound & Form in Modern Poetry, Harvey Gross.  Sound & Form was one of the books he assigned in his poetry class.  For the correction on page 5, he wrote, “The third line of Pound is best heard as a hexameter.”    A second letter inside Spring Shade is from my father.  His letter also touches on the subject of poetry.   He wrote it on the notepaper no larger than an index card that was always next to the black rotary phone on the rolltop desk, in a dim corner of the “family room” on Belton Drive in Los Angeles.  He wrote in block print.  In every sentence, he capitalized random words.  This was typical, it was his style.  “It is Rainy here today,” his writes, “so having not much Else to do I thought I’d give you a Chance to answer a trivia question, whose answer You should know.”  His letter is dated at the top, December 11, 1993.  “Who wrote the Following poem?” my father asks.  Then he copies down the entire poem.  He added the word “over” in parentheses at the bottom, because it continues on the back:

  In sunburnt parks where Sundays lie,
  Or the wide wastes beyond the cities,
  Teams deploy through sunlight. 

  Talk it up, boys, a little practice. 

  Coming in stubby and fast, the baseman
  Gathers a grounder in fat green grass.
  Picks it up stinging and clipped as wit
  Into the leather: a swinging step
  Wings it deadeye down to first.
  Smack.  Oh, attaboy, attyoldboy. 

  Catcher reverses his cap, pulls down
  Sweaty casque, and squats in the dust:
  Pitcher rubs new ball on his pants,
  Chewing, puts a jet behind him;
  Nods past batter, taking his time.
  Batter settles, tugs at his cap:
  A spinning ball; step and swing to it,
  Caught like a cheek before it ducks
  By shivery hickory: socko, baby:
  Cleats dig into dust. Outfielder,
  On his own way, looking over shoulder,
  Makes it a triple. A long peg home.

  Innings and afternoons. Fly lost in sunset.
  Throwing arm gone bad.  There’s your old
     ball game.
  Cool reek of the field.  Reek of companions.

  Then, “Love, Dad” and, under that, “Know the Answer?  Write me.”

  My father is one of those people that I love more openly after their death more than I did during their lives.  His love was baseball.  I wonder, where did he find this Robert Fitzgerald poem?  It must have appeared in the sports section of the Los Angeles Times.

  iii

  A ticket inside Seascape: Needle’s Eye, George Oppen, grants permission to use a chair.  Fauteuil, F. Lallemand, Concessionnaire.  Location de chaises toute quantites.  My French is rusty, and the English translation on the reverse is unclear.   “Seat hiring fee available for whole day,” it says.  Seascape: Needle’s Eye also saves a postcard that I sent in November 1974 to Asphodel Books, 306 Superior Ave, Cleveland, Ohio, requesting the titles of other books of George Oppen’s poetry that Asphodel published.  The postcard came back with a Returned to Sender No Such Number stamp on it.  Still, it successfully brings back an afternoon in March, 1973, at George Oppen’s apartment in San Francisco.  I am at the kitchen table with the poet and his wife, Mary.  I had met his niece, Mari, and she brought me there.  When I told George that I knew his poems, he seemed either very pleased or completely indifferent. That part of the memory has been lost.

  And that is exactly how memory works, or fails to work.  Two other postcards, inside Greek-English Lexicon, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, do the same fragmentary work.  Both postcards were received in 1971.  On one, from Mexico, the entire message is a quote from Ulysses:  “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.  Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.  Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: colored signs.   Limits of the diaphane.”   Signed “Roger.”  I have no idea who that was.  The front of the card is a tinted photo of a mother and child, with a large Mil Feliciades in script across their faces.  The other postcard comes from Cali, Columbia.  It is signed “Z.T.”   I squint at it in the hallway.   I am trying to remember, as if the effort can make a difference.   I had a college sophomore roommate Zachary Taylor from Mississippi.  It could be him, though we were never friends.  “Good work on the rug,” Z.T. writes.  His phrase is like the puzzle piece that fits nowhere, even though it comes from the puzzle box and therefore must belong.   “Jackson got boring so I headed South.”  That helps.  Zachary Taylor III was from Jackson, Mississippi.  Z.T. is probably him.

  Second bookcase, third shelf:

  Growing Up Free, Letty Cottin Pogrebin.   Handbook of Rational-Emotive Therapy, Albert Ellis and Russsell Grieger, belonged to Leonard Kirby, whose name is on the inside cover.  Bald, stocky Leonard practiced biofeedback therapy in the 1970s.   For reasons I never knew, Marshall McLuhan visited Leonard’s office on Fairmont Street, while I was visiting over lunch.  Leonard wanted to hook McLuhan up to a biofeedback machine.  Raising both eyebrows, McLuhan refuses.  He wanted to know how it worked, but not how it works on him.  In One Man’s Meat, E.B. White, I rediscover one of my favorite wisdoms, handwritten on a tear-off from a Kwik-Kopy notepad.  “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said has come to pass.”   It is Lord Melbourne’s comment after the British tried to soothe the Irish with Catholic emancipation, and then found them “more pestilent than ever.”    Next, Man & Woman Boy & Girl, John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt.  Regression in Group Therapy, A Negative View, Myron Weiner, M.D.  And Introduction to Psychiatry, O. Spurgeon English, M.D. and Stuart M. Finch, M.D.  There are rivers of wavy underlining in this textbook.

  The core text of Aeneid, Books I-VI, Virgil, with introduction, notes, vocabulary and appendix by Clyde Pharr, is in Latin.  On an enclosed class handout, Anchises is in the underworld, pointing out Rome’s glory in English:   “Some will hammer quivering bronze with more grace, I know so, or lead the living face from marble, argue their causes better, and mark pathways of heaven with circles, naming stars as they rise.  Remember, rule nations by your sway, Romans.   This is your art…”  And so on.   Writings From The New Yorker 1927 – 1976, E. B. White.  The Pit, Frank Norris.  Greek Lyric Poetry, selected by David A. Campbell.  Its text is in Greek.  Its bookmark is a pink ticket to the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture, Leonard Bernstein, Admit One, October 16, 1973.   Horace, Satires and Epistles, with introduction and notes by Edward P. Morris.  De Re Medica, Eli Lilly and Company.  Then, The Arrow of Gold, Joseph Conrad, published by Doubleday, Page & Company, 1919.  The hard cover is separating, webbing and bits of possible cloth exposed in the seam.  Between pages, a bright red business card for Betsy Berkhemer & Associates, Glendon Avenue, Los Angeles.  Betsy’s name rings a bell, but there is no one to answer it.

  Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z. Hobson, Simon and Schuster, 1947.  The Black Arrow, Robert Louis Stevenson, a Registered Editions Guild books, Art-Type Edition.  The “editor’s note” is comforting: “The work is dedicated to Stevenson’s wife, yet she never read the book.”  The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, illustrations by John Tenniel.   Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen, from Blue Ribbon Books.  The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, introduction by John Szarkowski.  There is a handwritten message on the title page, from December 25, 1977.  “The last edition to complete your collection,” it says, “with love and affection, Sandy.”  So, a Christmas gift from Sandy.  Do I know any Sandys?  Did I, in 1977?   These smooth pages have the touch of having never been touched.  They are “like new.”   Next, The Call of the South, Robert Lee Durham, copyright 1908, L.C. Page & Company, thick dust on the tops of its pages.  DelCorso’s Gallery, Philip Caputo.  The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch.  In this book about the science of parallel universes, I got no further than Chapter 2, “Shadows.”  The writer of an article in The New Yorker that is saved between pages 22 and 23 quotes a scientist named Ekert. “Of all the weird theories out there,” Ekert declares, “I would say ‘Many Worlds’ is the least weird.”

  The 1,042 pages of War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk, are from my parents’ house.   So is Abba Eban’s An Autobiography.  In Eban’s book I find a tapered bookmark with a children’s poem on it.  “Hello book,” the poem begins.  “What are you up to?   Keeping yourself to yourself, shut in between your covers, a prisoner high on a shelf?”  The Devil Tree, Jerzy Kosinski.  Ten Little New Yorkers, Kinky Friedman.  The Butterfly Hunter, Chris Ballard.   Rationale of the Dirty Joke, G. Legman.  His “G” stands for Gershon.

  iv

  The loose, xeroxed pages of “Seven Stages of Process” are sleeping under the cover of Rational Emotive Therapy.  The xeroxing is fading.  “Seven Stages of Process” dates from my first wife’s school days, when she was on her way to becoming a therapist.  So, over sixty years ago.  It outlines a process developed by Carl Rogers for the person who is remote from his own experience, as he moves “toward a new way of being” in therapy.   In On Becoming A Person, 1961, Rogers posits that Individuals in therapy move not from a fixed notion of themselves through change to another, better fixed notion, but “from fixity to flow, from stasis to ongoing process.”  In Stage 1, the person does not have a clear sense of his own feelings and blames others for his troubles.  According to Rogers, nobody at this stage comes in for counseling.  In Stage 2, there is less rigidity, but only a little less.  The Stage 3 person begins to accept some responsibility for how he feels, though he generalizes and focuses on the past.  That is the stage when people are open to therapy.   Stage 4, the person can admit how he feels but is ashamed of having these feelings.  In Stage 5, things start to change.  You see things more clearly, you take some ownership, you think about taking action.  Stage 6, you accept yourself.   Stage 7, you are “a fluid, self-accepting person who is open to the changes that life presents.”

  Bullet points separate the characteristics for each stage.  Stage 1, an unwillingness to communicate except about externals, no desire to change, no problems recognized.  Stage 2, problems are noticed but they are all external.   Stage 3, an emerging sense of feelings but little acceptance of any weaknesses, because “feelings are all about the past.”   The Stage 4 bullet points are pivot points.  You occasionally accept your feelings; you have some sense of self-responsibility, but not enough.   Stage 5, feelings “seep through” despite your fear and distrust, and there is more acceptance of responsibility.  Then, at Stage 6, the flows of feeling are experienced, and “the self is no longer an object.”  By the seventh stage, you are “accepting ownership of your changing feelings,” and, whatever the situation, you experience it “in its newness,” and not as the past.

  I am spending a few minutes in the hallway reading and re-reading these bullet points, trying to make sense of them.  Also, trying to find myself in one stage or another.

  Stage 4?  Stage 6, the self is no longer an object?  I could be Stage 3.

  The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal back on the second shelf is also a surprise.  It is one of those books that are also journals, and my handwriting is on page after page.  I signed my name on page xi, not once but in both of two blank spaces in the “contract,” affirming my commitment to “the daily process” and to acknowledge that I “further understand working with these tools may create deep change, some of it turbulent.”

  The contract is dated.  So, what was I thinking, that December day in 1998?  Or on the days following, since I was the one who filled in all these pages.   As it turned out, I broke the contract, but not until stopping at entry 139.  The rest of the journal is blank.  Nothing, other than the printed prompts that Julia Cameron provides.  The last of the prompts is on page 250.  “Do not let anyone,” it advises, “throw cold water in your direction.”

  v

  Hard rains yesterday.   Not yesterday, but on a Saturday in December in 1998, according to the Julia Cameron journal.   A dark grey all day.  I am writing about myself at age 47, after my first wife’s death, when I am in perfect health.  Ten pounds overweight.   Blurred vision.  Arteries closing with a crust of plaque that a daily dose of Zocor is not preventing.  I mention that I am going on a trip with our two children, who are twelve and thirteen.  I write that I have called my mother to give her the name of the hotel where we will be staying.   I write that she tells me there is no need to give her my hotel name or phone number, because she will not be calling.  I ask her what if my father has a heart attack while I am gone, will I only learn about his death until ten days later, after I return?  I add that it is my impression my mother wants to get off the phone.  That she will tell me she wants to talk, but it does not seem like it.  

  The people I am reading about are not alive now.  My father has been dead for fourteen years, my mother for six years.   The 47-year-old is not around anymore either. 

  Even if I do not see how the dead can be embarrassed, Morning Pages is nothing that some stranger needs to discover on a future morning after I am gone.  Even worse if it is not a stranger.   So, it goes into the trash.   This may prove that I am at one of the earliest stages of the Seven Stages of Process in the Carl Rogers schema.  I have not advanced beyond Stage 3, if I am even that far.  I am the person who begins to describe his present feelings but is ashamed of having these feelings.

  vi

  Every pre-teen boy growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s was in a garage band, or thought about it.  You wanted to be one of The Ventures.  Or, after 1964, one of the Beatles, if you could sing or were nice-looking.  I was in a garage band for a while.  After age fifteen, I wanted to be poet, or at least a writer.  But what is a writer?   Donald Barthelme answers it this way: “A writer is someone who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.”

  This not-knowing-what-to-do describes what I am doing, making lists of books, calling up an associated memory, reading a penciled note, dislodging a postcard or a ticket stub or a bookmark.   It describes how I have come to think about life generally.  It has been a task embarked on, not knowing what to do.

  In his forties now, my son does not know what to do either.  He lives by himself in a condominium on Church Street.  He has his food delivered.   They are Factor meals, which is a service that a nutritionist recommended, in order to help him count calories.  The meals are delivered a week at a time.  It may be twenty-one meals a week, it may only be eighteen.  They arrive on his doorstep in a large box, with ready-to-heat packages inside.  There is a lot of padding and insulation to throw away, which he lets pile up, because it is a longer walk to the dumpster than he is willing to make.

  He is too heavy to stand for very long.  He has not worked in years.   To the degree that he has a plan, he does not plan to go back to work.  I write him a check every three months that he deposits into his bank account, and from that he pays his mortgage, his homeowner’s association fee, and insurances, utilities, gasoline for his car, and for the Factor meals.  When I think of him, which I do daily, I try to keep in mind that line from Ann Patchett’s essay about the priest in Nashville or wherever it was, who helps a homeless man and, when asked how he does it, how he keeps at it, despite knowing that this man and his conditions will never change, he replies, “He’s not my problem to solve, he’s my brother to love.”   This is why I read, for the one applicable wisdom that might be found in hundreds of thousands of pages.

  My listing of the books on shelves is leading to no conclusions.  Like the bodhisattva ideal in Alan Watt’s The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, it is acting with no attachment to the fruits of the action.  The task itself will conclude, if only because there are a finite number of shelves.

  Watt’s book is in the second bookcase in the hallway, fourth shelf down.

  Its bookmark is a scrap with lines by Yechuda Amichai, translated by Robert Alter:

  God’s fate now
  is like the fate
  of trees and stones, sun and moon,
  when people stopped believing in them
  and began to believe in Him.

  On the same fourth shelf, six tall books, lying on their sides.  Top of the stack, Gustav Klimt, Nina Kransel, a souvenir from the giftshop at Neue Gallerie.   A note on its title page says “Valentine’s Day 2008 with Debra.”   Former girlfriend.   A Passion for Collecting: The Eye of Stanley Marcus is the Sotheby’s catalog picked up on an earlier trip to New York, with the same girlfriend, six years earlier.  Turning its pages reveals the Eastern Zambian Mask ($3,000- 4,000) and Ellsworth Kelly’s Colored Paper Image XVIII, “colored, pressed paper pulp, with hand-coloring on handmade paper, signed Kelly in pencil lower right and numbered 9/22 lower left.”   Our only purchase at this Sotheby’s sale was this catalog.   Next, The Governor’s Mansion of Texas, published and edited by Friends of the Governor’s Mansion, 1983.  Then, a perfect-bound Pictorial History of the Capitol and of the Congress, 8th Edition.  “Best wishes, Lloyd Bentsen” is scribbled on its table of contents.   At the bottom of the stack, like worms in soil, The Book of Garden Design, John Brooks, and Neil Sperry’s Complete Guide to Texas Gardening. 

  The Humbling, Philip Roth, is upright, like a metal edging alongside the two prone books about gardens.  Next to it, The Yosemite, John Muir.  Then, in a greatest hits sequence, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, The Portable Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, This Gun for Hire, The Heart of the Matter, and A Burnt-Out Case, and The Quiet American again, a duplicate of the Viking Press paperback seven books ahead of it in line.  In 1975, I almost always agreed with the Boston Transcript blurb on the cover of This Gun for Hire: “We challenge anyone to read the first seven pages and stop.”

  “For an interesting view of Mexico, try Graham Greene’s Lawless Roads.”  Peter Whaley offered this advice on a yellow index card he mailed to me in 1977.   It has stayed between two pages of A Burnt-Out Case ever since.  Peter was a student in California when I first met him in 1972.  Then the Stegner Fellow at Stanford, then a janitor in Somerville, then a career in the Foreign Service–in Haiti, Ruanda, Zaire, where he was taking calls at three in the morning from Joseph Kabila.  We were mostly out of touch during those years.  After he returned to the States, we talked once.   He mentioned a marriage and a custody fight.  By the time of his pancreatic cancer and his early death, we were again out of touch.  I learned about all that from the obituary his life merited in the Times.  I knew Peter best at twenty-one or twenty-two, walking up and down hills in San Francisco, both of us lost, literally in those days, and pretending not to be.

  The Graham Greene phrase came to an end by 1980.  Last book in the streak of Greene – this one unread — a hardback Travels With My Aunt in a bright pink jacket.

  The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts, is a slender container for other thinning memories.   Between two pages, a drugstore-developed color photograph of my son, the high-schooler in 2001, slight, even bony.   Blue jeans, curly red hair.   He stands beside a boxy black Volvo, which was his new, used car.    Within the month, heading south on Inwood Road, after pausing to go east at Mockingbird, he turned in front of the car speeding north with the right-of-way.  He totaled the Volvo.  Somehow no one was hurt, though the other driver sued.

  Movie ticket stubs are also along for the ride with Alan Watts’s wisdoms.   They are for admittance to Event Horizon at the AMC Grand 24, August 23, 1997.   I asked my son if he could recall that experience.
  “Remember Event Horizon?”
  He did.  He said it was the creepiest movie he has ever seen.  He recalled how we stumbled out of our seats and stood outside the theater, after the show.   He was thirteen, his sister eleven, when I took them both, five weeks after their mother died of colon cancer at two in the morning in the bedroom down the hall from where they were sleeping.  Event Horizon is a film about a rescue mission.   A spaceship, the Event Horizon, disappears while on a mission to Neptune, 2.8 billion miles from Earth.  When it mysteriously reappears, it is 2047.  A distress signal is heard.  This signal is nothing but the sounds of screams.  And when the rescue crew arrives and boards, they discover a massacre.  And the rescuers begin to hallucinate, and in those visions they see all of their fears and sorrows.

  The Histories, Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, has its own history.  I lifted it from the Library of John Winthrop House in 1974.  Maybe I had been unwilling to do without the library’s bookplate, with its lion rampant.  Or I was enamored by the last sentence of the lengthy introduction:  “Men differ, Herodotus implies, but let us be grateful for the difference; for in spite of it they are all dominated by the same unsearchable Fate, which even the gods themselves cannot escape.”  Then, Abraham Lincoln Selected Speeches, Messages, and Letters, edited by T. Harry Williams, one of the Rinehart Editions paperbacks.  Between pages of Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by busy Stephen Mitchell, I find a drugstore-developed photo of my son in his dorm room at the University of Kansas.  He has a new moustache and a sparse goatee.  His billed cap is on backwards.  The Jayhawk sits on his brow.  This was on freshman Move-In Day.   Moving out day was coming soon, by the same unsearchable Fate that even the gods cannot escape.

  Next, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell.   Poems, Wallace Stevens, selected and with an introduction by Samuel French Morse.  La Chute, Albert Camus, published by Gallimard, 5, rue Sebastien-Bottin, Paris VII.  The Great English and American Essays, edited by Douglass S. Mead, another Rinehart Editions paperback.  Its essays ramble on from Francis Bacon to Lewis Mumford.  On page 95, in front of Henry David Thoreau’s Life Without Principle, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863, there is a letter on the letterhead of Rabbi Mordecai I. Soloff, 8333 Airport Boulevard, Los Angeles, from 1972.   “I am delighted,” Rabbi Soloff writes, “that you are prepared to address the congregation on Friday, December 22^nd.  I trust the announcement of your appearance will add to the size of the college audience.  If possible, provide me with a title that I can announce in advance.”  Did this happen?  What was that title announced in advance?  Did it add to the size of the college audience?  Those answers are under a rock is too heavy to be lifted, despite being weightless.

  Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Bob W. Law and Walter W. Timmerman, is a nature trail guide, more booklet than book.  The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, a picture book of pontifications.  War and Peace in the Global Village, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, has lost its paper cover, exposing its yellowed flesh.  Then, Le Cimetiere Marin, Paul Valery. Music & Imagination, Aaron Copland.  The Children of Dynmouth, William Trevor.  Another Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, this one hardbound and jacketed.  The Life of a Useless Man, Maxim Gorki, translated by Moura Budberg.  Penny Candy, Jonathan Norton.   And One Hundred Saturdays, Michael Frank.  Bookmarking page 32, a souvenir picture postcard of Siegfried and Roy, with tiger and disco ball.  The two Superstars of Magic are appearing in Beyond Belief, an Amazing Spectacle, produced by Irwin Feld and Kenneth Feld at the Frontier Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1983.

  To the end of the shelf:

  Ask The Dust, John Fante.  A Short History of the Movies, Gerald Mast.  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans.  Agee on Film, a book of five scripts, with the foreword by John Huston.  A business card from Zeitlin & Ver Brugge Booksellers has held my place at the beginning of The Night of the Hunter for fifty years.  If I ever visited Zeitlin & Ver Brugge on N. La Cienega in Los Angeles, that memory has vanished.  So has this bookstore, which became part of a mini-mall in 1988 after its owner’s death   A desiccated brown leaf, wrinkled and saw-toothed, falls from the pages of Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot.  A hundred pages deeper in, and in the middle of an essay on underground film by Manny Farber, I find a membership card from the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen.  It certifies “the below named individual is a registered Competing Oarsman in good standing.”   Valid October 17, 1973 to Oct 16, 1974 is stamped in a red on the card   Last on this shelf, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather.  This is a withdrawn library book, found in the bin at a used book sale.  It has the library standard monochrome pale green cover.   Title and author’s last name are pressed into its spine in black.

  vii

  Some memories are on a chain, one pulling the next into consciousness.  Others flow from one into another, a moving stream   Sometimes, though, there is no connectivity, just isolated objects.  It is as if a discard from the past has broken free.  It is caught in the thorny brush by the side of the stream, like litter, an empty plastic bag, a Styrofoam cup.

  Memory is in the hard drive, and it is in the cloud as well.  It is behind you, and as stubborn as a stump on your road ahead.  It is neighborly, but in dreamland, too.   As close as breathing, to quote a thought from Gates of Prayer, first shelf, second bookcase, and farther than the farthermost star.

  “At the end the drops of life evaporate, and the light begins to disappear.  It is night—where is hope now?  But death is a night that lies between two days—the day of ‘already was’ and the day of ‘not yet.’  The ultimate hope in the darkness is the birthing of a new dawn.”  These lines appear without attribution, written on the piece of lined notepaper that falls out of the Willa Cather book, the one with the pale green cover that found itself discarded and stamped Withdrawn.   Maybe this message was left by the last of its public library readers, although it also sounds like something an archbishop would say.

  On a notecard beneath the back cover of Philip Roth’s The Humbling, I left a printout of Derek Walcott’s Love After Love, which ends:
   

  Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

  all your life, whom you ignored
  for another, who knows you by heart.
  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

  the photographs, the desperate notes,
  peel your own image from the mirror.
  Sit.  Feast on your life.

  The letters I am taking down from the bookshelf are not love letters, the notes are not all that desperate, and the photographs are mostly on souvenir postcards.  As for this meal, I would not call it a feast.   Still, Walcott seems to understand what I am doing.  There is a need for nourishment, for a meeting with that stranger who has loved you all your life.

  viii

  My sister was the same distance from 18 as she is now from 80 when she wrote “Life is freedom from passion” in pencil on page 853 of Poetry of the English Renaissance, Hebel and Hudson, second bookcase, second shelf.   It Is her note in the margin off to the right of Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”  She was an English major.  She probably wrote down whatever the professor said, as she sat in a theater seat of the lecture hall.

  She still lived at home then, commuting to UCLA in Westwood.  Nineteen or twenty, a sophomore or junior.   On page 853 of Poetry of the English Renaissance, she drew a curving bracket beside a Marvell couplet:

  No white nor red was ever seen
  So am’rous as this lovely green.

  Above the words “white nor red” she wrote the word “women.”

  There is nothing natural about gardening.  It is a tussle with nature rather than part of it.   It is an alternative to wilderness, where what is natural either stings or sticks or stinks.   Still, compared to cultivating human relations, plants might be less trouble.  Three shelves below Poetry of the English Renaissance, two overgrown gardening books.  Neil Sperry’s Complete Guide to Texas Gardening and The Book of Garden Design are weedy with memories. Newspaper articles, handwritten lists of flowers and shrubs, plots of backyards, scaled measurements, and multiple shopping lists with names of plants and their quantities are pressed between pages.  These books are an account of decades in the company of wives who gardened, one of them professionally.   As it turned out, neither was a perennial.

  My first wife gardened as part of her homemaking.  The Neil Sperry book was hers.   Under its front cover, she left her instructions for the house we lived in from 1987 until her death ten years later.  She made headings for Front Yard, Planters, Summer Planting, Vines, Side of Garage, Back Yard, Around Fence, Back Corner Right, and Back Corner Left.   The trees, shrubs, and flowers are named and counted.  Banana plants for the pool pots, white caladiums out front, caladiums in pink for the back, flats of impatiens, four Burford hollies, five Savannah hollies, two dogwoods, one Bradford pear, five spirea.  Gravel is needed from Lewis Fields, along with six yards of landscape fabric.  We are buying sandy loam, fescue, Bermuda, and 17 yards of organic compost.  Also bronze leaf begonias, dark purple petunias, moon vine and morning glory seeds.  And red tip photinias, spiral cut juniper, sweetgums, lady banksia roses, crepe myrtles, monkey grass, Asian jasmine, and Boston ivy.  She drew outlines of the exterior lengths of the house and labeled them.  Her notes distinguish between connections to down spouts and the black corrugated drainage pipe.  Index cards give the counts of plants by season, the numbers depending on the spacing.  She circled Carnation for Feb-Mar and Daisy for Jan-Mar on a Flower Planting Guide from a local nursery.   She underlined phlox and statice.  Also, whether that flower is sun, sun and semi-shade, sun to partial shade, or full shade.   Then there are newspaper clippings, pages from magazines, and the circled or underlined captions.  She has left a reminder that “white and yellow flowers ‘pop’ out of the garden and are excellent choices of colors for gardens that will be viewed from the street.”   Surely not one of these plants are alive any longer, thirty years after her death.

  Maybe that is their glory.   Part of the profundity of gardening is its mixture of the unnatural and the deeply human.   Our thoughts about living are reproduced in the Asian jasmine creeping as ground cover, the fig ivy climbing for however many seasons up a brick wall.   We share exposure to the seasons with the hydrangea and the dogwood.   As the poets tell us so often in Poetry of the English Renaissance, our blooming is temporary, delightful and even surprising, just like the appearance of the phlox and the flowering of a Lady Banksia rose on a side of the garage.

  The two people posing in an 8 x 10 photograph hidden in The Book of Garden Design look happy enough, as we might have been, though the photograph is streaked and we are dressed in chemical stripes.   The film had been bathed by my daughter in a dark room for her high school photography class and printed on a sheet of Fujifilm paper.   My second wife and I are standing in front of a bench.  We are both in our forties.  In focus, a gold watchband on her slender wrist. Blurry purple flowers in the foreground, a tower viewer nearby.  Further on, a sward of grass, and then a lake, and trees and hills, distantly.   Back goes the whole scene, between two pages of The Book of Garden Design, where it can stay for another twenty years.

  Between other pages, an unopened package of Forget-Me-Not (cynoglossum amabile) sent by a heating and air conditioning company that was offering a Spring Service Call Special.   And the newspaper clipping about clay soils and how to use filed-down boulders as creative outdoor seating. It is vintage 2002, as is John Brooks’ book.  And five or six other articles, tips for creating a secret garden, options for areas with dappled sunlight, sunny spots for a birdbath and the plants to surround it — native foxglove, blue fax, and Aster Frikartii.   I am tossing out all these articles, and leaving the photograph.

  ix

  Leaving is a very odd word.  Leaving, meaning to let go of.  Leaving, meaning to keep something where it was.

  Fifth shelf, second hallway bookcase:

  The Sweet Cheat Gone, Marcel Proust.  This pale lavender paperback is sixth in the series of seven titles of Remembrance of Things Past.  Five of them are as far away from being read as the horizon from Combray.  I finished Swann’s Way, and started the second title, Within A Budding Grove.   Two or three pages of its labyrinthine sentences in C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation are the most I could digest at one sitting.   As a result, I stopped Within A Budding Grove a dozen pages in.   Swann’s Way is either upstairs or on the desk downstairs, but it belongs back in the hallway, in the space ahead of The Sweet Cheat Gone, which is beside the pink cover of Cities of the Plain, the fourth in the series.  Next, out of order, the tinted orange of number three, The Guermantes Way, and then the olive brown cover of book five, The Captive.  Last, the pale tan of The Past Recaptured, “newly translated” by Andreas Mayor.

  The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets, compiled by J.C. Squire, is another gift from Peter Whaley.  Peter liked old books and the notion of “lesser poets.”   His undated, forgotten letter is stuck between pages 356 and 357, behind Charles Wolfe’s poem To Mary and in front of John Clare’s I Am (Written in Northampton County Asylum.   On the letterhead of the Embassy of the United States of America, Peter writes that Lesser Poets is my birthday present.   And he has news.  His next assignment is to Kinshasa, Zaire.  He goes there in September, after 24 weeks of French training.  It is not his first choice, but he wants the Department to teach him French, and he gets both 20 percent hardship pay and 25 percent cost of living pay on top of his salary.  He adds that his work is boring.  Then he shares that he had lunch with Doris Lessing.  He obtained a visa for her and so she took him out to a restaurant in Soho.  He reports that he has a girlfriend, “another vice counsel,” and although he doesn’t like the idea of seeing someone in the office, “loneliness is very bitter.”  Also, he has written some short stories.

  Next, Paul Valery Prose et Vers, presente par Henri Peyre.  Then 12 Spanish American Poets, translations, notes and introduction by H.R. Hays.  Le Petit Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery, introduction, vocabulary, and bibliography by John Richardson Miller.  Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald, one of the World’s Popular Classics, Art Type Edition, published by Books, Inc.  The preface by Michael Kerney is dated 1887.  Its introduction, by Edward FitzGerald, is dated 1868.

  The Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by John Butt, Yale Paperbound, 850 pages, $4.95.   Francis Bacon, A Selection of His Work, edited by Sidney Warhaft.  Notes in the margins, none of which will be helpful on a trip to the grocery store.  The Identity of Man, J. Bronowski, stamped by Jesuit College Preparatory Student Library.   This must be a book my son borrowed and did not return, though it is an unlikely text for him to be reading.   Sentences in Chapter One, A Machine or a Self, are heavily underlined.  The Swimming Pool Season, Rose Tremain.  Then, Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal, presente par Roger Nimier.  In the hallway, I am skimming a page, to test what if anything I remember of high school French.   The Plays of Anton Tchekov, translated by Constance Garnet, preface by Eva Le Gallienne.  Sleeping Beauty, Ross Macdonald.  Serenade, James M. Cain.   Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Philip Roth.  The picture postcard of windmills and wildflowers from Solvang, California bookmarks my place in Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews.”

  The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and The Complete Poetry of William Blake, introduction by Robert Silliman Hillyer.  These 1,043 pages are part of The Modern Library.  The Atomic Nucleus, M. Korsunsky, translated from the Russian by G. Yankovsky.  Counterblast, Marshall McLuhan.   Waterland, Graham Swift, a gift from my mother.  She writes Mom after from and my name after to and May 1988 on the first page.  So, it was not a November birthday gift, and I have no memory of the occasion.   If ever read Waterland, that memory, too, has evaporated.

  Selected Poems, James Schuyler.  A Night At The Movies, Robert Coover.  Dubliners, James Joyce.  The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka.  Berlitz Self-Teacher Hebrew, from Berlitz Schools of Languages under the direction of Robert Strumpen-Darrie and Charles F. Berlitz.  Modern Hebrew Reader and Grammar, Part One, Reuben Wallenrod, Ph.D., published in 1942.  The Portable Darwin, edited by Duncan M. Porter and Peter W. Graham, carries a Star Wars Trilogy Super Wide Movie Card, a newspaper clipping of an article on echinacea, and a bookmark in a clear plastic sleeve.

  Faith Hope Love is written underneath three Chinese characters on the bookmark in The Portable Darwin.   A tiny paper doll wearing a brightly patterned Chinese coat is pasted on the bookmark as well.  A yellow ribbon is threaded through a punched hole.   Below that:  From John and Esther 1997 Malaysia.

  John and Esther were our children’s favorite babysitters.  They were visitors in Texas, while John was studying Christian theology at Southern Methodist University, then returned home to Selangor, in 1991.  When they had their first child, they named her after our daughter.  In 1997 her cancer diagnosis, Dolores reached out to them.  She sent the news in May, when the outcome was certain.

  The tops of the books on this fifth shelf are over 40 inches from the ground.  Still, even at this height the dust has collected between the ridges of their covers.  Dust gets around.  We are made of it, we return to it.  I can provoke an uprising of it, flipping through pages of The Portable Darwin.

  x

  Each of us has two responsibilities in this life.  To appear.  And then to disappear.  We are guests here.  We are visitors of our own lives.  At this point in my own life, I am asked how I like retirement.  This a question that will come with this variation:
  “What are you doing these days?”
  If I answer that I am reading a lot, it begins an unpredictable sequence, after the obvious “What are you reading” opening.
  Things go off track when I say I am looking at books I may or may not have read and making a list of the titles on every shelf, desk and table in my house.  That I am looking through their pages at postcards and ticket stubs and whatnot.  And I leave it for others to take the conversation from there.  Most people change the subject.

  I know this project makes no sense and no difference.  There is no rising action to encourage the reader of a list and commentary.

  Do I have to pretend that what I am doing matters?   Every thinking person comes to doubt that at some point.   Some doubt it more secretly than others.

  So, I am working my way through the shelves, just as I have been working my way through the decades or the hour.

  I could say more here about the vanished daughter, the troubled son, a departed first wife, the second wife who left.  I did not know what to do with them in life.  It is not obvious what to do with them in this recounting either.  Old friends?  Girlfriends, past or current?   Minor characters, too minor to mention other than in passing.

  There is the dog, the dog does matter, the dog is here, sleeping on a low black couch, its head cradled on its spotted forelegs.

  A folded sheet of paper with a poem by Yeats has been hiding for the past fifty years in The Atomic Nucleus.   The typewritten lines are so error-free, the sheet must have been a class handout, though there are none of the other indicators of an assignment.  No junior class number, no professor’s name.  In my seventies, I am the finally the senior ready to read the lines I mouthed at nineteen or twenty.

  “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” is a lesson in the physics of living.  It was published six years before Yeats’ death in 1939.  Verses alternate like a dialogue.  The soul asks the self to look into the sky and be free “from the crime of death and birth.”  The self chooses life, even knowing the distress and clumsiness and defiling.

  I am content to live it all again
  And yet again, if it be life to pitch
  Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
  A blind man battering blind men…

  I am reading the ending as if for the first time:

  I am content to follow to its source,
  Every event in action or in thought.
  Measure the lot, forgive myself the lot;
  When such as I cast out remorse
  So great a sweetness flows into the breast
  We must laugh and we must sing,
  We are blest by everything,
  Everything we look upon is blest.

  There is no better secret than this.  Not in all the Dalai Lama on the hallway shelves.   Cast out remorse, it says, if you can.  Nice, if you can do it.

  xi

  Next shelf, sixth down:

  LIFE, The ‘60s, introduction by Tom Brokaw.  The New Yorker Album of Drawings 1925-1975. Then, Who’s Who in the South and Southwest, 18^th edition 1982-1983.  This South and Southwest edition includes Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and even Mexico.  Dolores Dyer, psychologist, has her entry on page 212, between Robert Glinn Duval, accountant, and Henry Lee Dyson, confectioner.   Excavated from the 720 pages of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, two ticket stubs for “Politics of Fertility,” Germaine Greer, First Unitarian Church, October 4, 1981.   Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated and with a preface by Walter Kaufmann.  On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale.  The Portable Nietzsche, newly translated, edited, and with a critical introduction and notes by Walter Kaufmann.  I was pretending to read these Nietzsches in high school.  An asterisk marks a sentence from Twilight of the Idols, Or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer.  “To have to fight the instincts – that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.”  It must have appealed to me as a teenager, despite having no instincts.

  Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse, introduction by Joseph Mileck, another book from those teen years.  The War Game, Peter Watkins.  The Voyeur, Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard.  On Reading, Marcel Proust, translated and edited by Jean Autret and William Burford, has both French and English on facing pages.  Its false first sentence:  “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.”  Or, on the same page, another smug sentence that starts, “Who does not remember, as I do…”  Then, Candide, Voltaire, with an appreciation by Andre Maurois.  The ABC of Relativity, Bertrand Russell, a Mentor Book, price 50c.  A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, is a yellowed Penguin paperback.  Its pages smell as precious as papyrus.  Age, which removes it from human beings, gives the cheapest books more dignity.

  The Wisdom of the Fathers, selected and translated with an essay by Judah Golden. The Prince and The Discourses, Niccolo Machiavelli, introduction by Max Lerner.  The Waste Land And Other Poems, T.S. Eliot.  French Symbolist Poetry, translated by C.F. MacIntyre.  Aristote Poetique, texte etabli et traduit par J. Hardy, in French and in Greek.   Some of its pages are uncut.  When I was nineteen, I wanted this unreadable book.  No memory of where it came from or how I put my hands on it, but I can reimagine the desire, some Aunt Bertha-like ambition, some deficiency I was making up for.  The same with Aristophane Les Guepes – La Paix, texte etabli par Victor Coulon et traduit par Hilaire Van Daele.

  House of Corrections, Doug Swanson is A Jack Flippo Mystery.  So is Umbrella Man, Doug Swanson.  Next, The Hotel, Elizabeth Bowen, copyright 1928, The Dial Press.  Unclouded Summer, Alec Waugh.  Then, The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, David N. Holvey, M.D., Editor.  This is the Twelfth Edition.   An empty matchbook from a La Quinta separates page 673, section 7, Gastrointestinal Disorders, from the start of Abdominal Pain on page 674.  Next, The Handy Home Medical Adviser and Concise Medical Encyclopedia, Morris Fishbein, M.D.  A layered tissue in I’m OK – You’re OK, Thomas A. Harris, M.D., is bookmarking Chapter 8, “Marriage.”   The chapter heading epigram is one of La Rochefoucauld’s:  We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.  End of the shelf, Inside South America, John Gunther, from my parent’s house.   It is A Book of the Month Club Selection.

  xii

  The seventh shelf holds nothing but bony paperbacks.  Most are old timers, holding each other up for support.  Tom Jones, Henry Fielding.  Jews, God and History, Max I. Dimont. Walden or Life in the Woods, Henry D. Thoreau, a Doubleday Dolphin Books.  Hotel Du Lac, Anita Brookner.   This Is My God, Herman Wouk has a postcard from Eye-40 Motel & Restaurant, Dickson, Tennessee, tucked between pages 160 and 161.  The postcard is from friends who are iced in, spending “a swinging N.Y. Eve” at the motel and wishing “all good things in 1977.”   Next, Julian, Gore Vidal.  Messiah, Gore Vidal.  When The Troubled Meet, Cornelius Beukenkamp, Jr. M.D., “stories by a Certified Psychoanalyst” of people in group therapy.   Go Tell it On The Mountain, James Baldwin.  Blues for Mister Charlie, James Baldwin.  The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin.  Another Country, James Baldwin.  The cover of Another Country has separated, its binding dissolving.  “The great nation-wide bestseller at $5.95, now 75c” is falling apart.

  Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson.   A Room With A View, E. M. Forster.  Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson.  Between pages 6 and 7, I hid a flattened Abba-Zaba wrapper.  It is an aesthetic keepsake.  The iconic black type, the yellow rectangle, the checkerboard of black and yellow, the yellow that is almost orange.  It is an invocation in the hallway of corn syrup, sugar, peanut better, and dextrose, of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, coconut, palm kernel, palm, soyabean, cotton seed, the lecithin, the salt, the mono and diglycerides.  These ingredients belong to a potion.   They meet at the intersection of the chemical and alchemical.   Palm kernel and palm, q conjuration of Arabian deserts, and of Abbas and Zabas.

  Next, Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  How many helpings of this book do I have on the hallway shelves?  At least two, one for each child, assigned high school reading.  I have tasted neither of them.  The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike.  Assorted Prose, John Updike.  Then, The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by A.H. Gross.  Enemies, A Love Story, Isaac Bashevis Singer.   The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer, holds onto a pink receipt from Neiman Marcus, 8/29/85, for will call, alterations, Klein suit, houndstooth.

  Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe.  Bussy D’Ambois, George Chapman, edited by Maurice Evans.  The Africans, David Lamb.  Reflections of a Public Man, Jim Wright.  The Thirties And After, Stephen Spender.   His Natural Life, Marcus Clarke, edited with an Introduction by Stephen Murray-Smith.  Readings In Philosophy, edited by John Herman Randall, Jr., Justus Buchler, and Evelyn Urban Shirk.   Existential Psychology, edited by Rollo May.  Love and Will, Rollo May.  The author has signed Love and Will.  Either that, or somebody simply enjoyed writing “Rollo” on the title page.

  Memory may not be arbitrary, but it is unpredictable.  I cannot remember one word that Michael J. Arlen wrote in his essays about television in The Living Room War, and cannot forget Updike’s blurb on the book’s back cover.  “Michael Arlen writes like a water bug skates.”  Then, The Summer Before the Dark, Doris Lessing.   A Man and Two Women, Doris Lessing.  Daniel Martin, John Fowles.  The Car Thief, Theodore Weesner.  A Passage to India, E.M. Forster.  The Deer Park, Norman Mailer.  Mama Makes Up Her Mind, and Other Dangers of Southern Living, Bailey White.  The Odyssey, Homer, translated by E.V. Rieu.  October Light, John Gardner.  The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner, has an art card reproduction of The Vision After the Sermon, Paul Gauguin, as its bookmark.  It is a wild, vivid scene.  Jacob wrestles with the angel, and the women watching are wearing white bonnets.  Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein, squeezes on to the shelf, the end of a row of paperbacks, cutting ahead of Love’s Executioner, Irvin D. Yalom, M.D.

  xiii

  For Proust, the smell of a sponge cake invites memory.  In The Polish Boxer, Eduardo Halfon writes that sight is the trigger for whatever he remembers.  On the art card bookmark In John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, it is the small type that says Gauguin’s The Vision After The Sermon hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland.  This is enough, in the indirect light of the hallway, swarming with motes, to raise a distant memory of a family that I stayed with in Edinburgh between Christmas and New Years in 1971.  Also, recalling how they ask me to be the first over their threshold after New Year’s Eve, because my hair was black then.  Like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day here in the South, in Scotland, they explained, a dark-haired man is good luck.  This superstition may have had to do with Vikings, with their raids and rapings, and their blonde hair.   Tugging on the thinnest line of memories, I am able to bring the name James Drummond Young up to the surface.  James was the goofy friend of a college roommate, who invited us to Edinburgh to visit his family that winter break.  This morning, I am visiting him again, googling this goofball.   In the photograph on Wikipedia, he is the Right Honorable Lord Drummond Young, retired Senator of the College of Justice.  Bald, eyeglasses, wisps of white hair that touch the tops of his ears.

  xiv

  Towers of babbling phrasebooks, pocket dictionaries and teach-yourself-a-foreign-language manuals rise from the bottom shelf of this second bookcase down the hallway.  Some are from school days.  Most are for tourists, for learning to say “where is the drug store” and other phrases that will only be needed for ten days to two weeks.

  Chinese At A Glance is Barron’s Phrase Book and Dictionary for Travelers.  The ticket stubs to gardens and shrines left inside it are all in Chinese, so color pictures of bridges, pagodas, green water and rock gardens on these tickets bring nothing to mind.   On a business card, a native speaker writes Mi Bei Yan under three printed Chinese characters.  It could be a transliteration, how to say the name of a restaurant.  Or it could mean “Please help.”

  The Italian Travel Mate is “An A to Z Phrasebook,” compiled by Lexus with Annelisa Franchini. Dizionario Tascabile Mondadori, is Italian-English, English-Italian.  German Phrasebook, from Lonely Planet, has the business cards inside for Minotel Suisse, Livio Tuena-Triacca, Poschiavo, and for Cantinetta Antinori, Augustinergasse 25, Zurich.  Each one evokes a memory of wives and children, but nothing specific, more the idea of them.  Italian In Three Months, Milena Reynolds, Hugo’s Simplified System, is dogeared at page 81. It looks like I worked my way through to Dimmi la verita on page 80.  On earlier pages I copied down phrases, such as E la loro specialita!, and conjugations –  vai va andiamo andate vanno.  Next, Diccionario, another Spanish-English English-Spanish dictionary, this one from The University of Chicago.  Then, Putnam’s Contemporary German Dictionary.  And College Yiddish, Uriel Weinreich, preface by Roman Jakobson.  Basic Italian, Charles Speroni and Carlo L. Golino.  And Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, the abridged version.

  Pan-American Spanish Self-Taught, Francisco Ibarra.  Dictionnaire Larousse, French English, English French.  Portuguese is a Rough Guide phrasebook.  French Stories and Tales, edited by Stanley Geist.  Collins Latin-English English-Latin Dictionary.  Follett Vest-Pocket Dictionary – French.  And then A New Introduction to Greek, Alton Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips, Jr.  Material Auxiliar, CIDOC Idioma, Cuernavaca Language School, was used during on-site study three weeks in 1977.  Carcel de Mujeres, a comic book no bigger than a business card, was found on the street in Cuernavaca.

  The cover has disappeared from Frederic M. Wheelock’s Latin, An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors.   The pages are scribbled on.  Each chapter in this school book has its Sententiae Antiquae, with asterisks and underlining on the formerly famous phrases.  201 Italian Verbs, Vincent Luciani.  Berlitz Basic German Dictionary.  Spanish In Three Months, Isabel Cisneros, another of Hugo’s Simplified System. The cover is also gone from Follett’s Vest-Pocket Spanish Dictionary.   Cassell’s Latin-English Dictionary, the last of these language books, has my son’s name on its inside cover.  Jesuit Prep must have encouraged him to study Latin.  Or he may have preferred it to required Spanish or French alternatives.   He left a small square of paper in the middle of this Latin dictionary, with his blocky printing on it, some Latin along with a translation.  “To the gate Publius and Furianus, slaves in the carriage,” he wrote.  “Four horses pulled, dragged and ascended.   Mother and sister cried and said ‘Goodbye!’”

  A foreign phrase stronger than “where is the drugstore” is needed for my stiffening back as I sit cross-legged on the hardwood in the hallway.   An Innocent Millionaire, Stephen Vizinczey, follows Cassell’s Latin-English Dictionary.   Stephen Vizinczey was also the author of In Praise of Older Women, a book that Penny Borax used to carry around with her at Westchester High School; olive-complected Penny, who rejected my Valentine in 2^nd grade at Kentwood Elementary in 1957.   Memories are echoing, as if Stephen Vizinczey has called out from the shelf into the canyon of the hallway.

  Next, Growing Young, Ashley Montagu; the author has signed the flyleaf.  Then, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, William A. Rossi.  New Stories from The South, edited by Shannon Ravenel.  Selected Poetry and Letters, Byron, introduction by Edward E. Bostetter.  Discovering the Laws of Life, John Marks Templeton, foreword by Norman Vincent Peale.   Then, Their Mothers’ Sons, Edward A. Strecker, A.M., M.D., Sc.D. Litt.D., LL.D., copyright 1946, J.B. Lippincott Company, subtitled The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem.  On page 205, Dr. Strecker asks, “What about you?  Do you have momistic tendencies?”  The Southland Columbiad and Other Poems, Hon. William Allen, 1897, Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Barbee & Smith, Agents.   Fundamentals of Play Directing, Alexander Dean and Lawrence Carra.   Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, Jonathan Swift, edited by Louis A. Landa.   The Sufferings of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, edited by Harry Steinhauer.  Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe.  Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, introduction by Alfred Kazin.  And, end of the row, Tennyson’s Poetry, selected and edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr.

  Tennyson’s Poetry is a light in the depths of a bottom shelf.   A sketch by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, “Tennyson Reading Maud,” decorates its bright green jacket.  A future reader can read the penciled notes in the margins of the introduction to these 681 pages.  For that same unlikely reader, Tennyson’s Poetry has saved a torn ticket from the Cinematheque in the Palais de Chaillot at the corner of avenue President Wilson and Avenue Albert de Mun (metro: Trocadero), and the brown band that encircled a folded Le Monde delivered to the Demongeot apartment at 62 Rue Du Cardinal Lemoine 75005 Paris, in May, 1973.  There is an ugly postcard hidden here, too.  You don’t know BEANS ‘til you’ve been to Boston, it screams, over a photo collage of sailboats and Beacon Hill and an outsized mug of baked beans on a checked tablecloth.  With this postcard, 1971 comes back to the hallway.  The older woman who mailed it was twenty-four or twenty-five; she was worldly, when I was twenty.   Then back it goes, between pages 118 and 119, at the start of In Memoriam.

  Chapter Eleven
  TALKING TO MYSELF

  For centuries, some say until the tenth century, most of the reading that went on was done aloud.  That breach in the silence must have been annoying, but also entertaining.  It made a bond between reader and listener.   Reading silently?   Not for our ancestors.

  ii

  The plans I used to make for my son were not his plans.  Over the years, I made lists of possible employers, of openings for jobs, names of staffing agencies, and the names of career consultants.  I copied links to testimonials from smiling, attractive individuals who became healthcare technicians or aviation mechanics after signing up for some for-profit degree program.  To make a to-do list is to talk to yourself.  To make one for someone else, that is an act of self-deception.

  Very often, these to-do lists were in late-night emails I sent to myself, then printed out, and then hid in the pages of books.  They are in English but might as well have been in an invisible ink or some other secret code.   I would write down solutions, next steps, further steps.   On the page, I spoke directly to my beloved son, who lives alone in his unkempt condominium in a leafy neighborhood fifteen minutes away.  He is the man in his forties, leaning back on a broken sofa in front of the huge television downstairs in his living room, or leaning forward in front of the computer monitor on a desk in his bedroom upstairs.

  One of these lists is hiding in The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, third hallway bookcase, top shelf.   It provides four numbered options.   Number one is the status quo.  I continue to support him at the current level, adjusted for inflation, for now.   Number two, he looks for whatever work a high school graduate can get, “despite your weight and age.”  Three, a subset of number two, he goes to an employment agency.  Number four, he commits to something that requires job training and begins the training.   “Maybe something healthcare related,” I pretend to tell him, “home health care assistant, pharmacy tech.”  And I add, “or it can be something related to computers.”  I am talking to myself.   His number one option for now is option number one.  For now, I tell myself.

  Joseph Campbell casts his eyes downward in the author’s photo on the flap of the book jacket of The Masks of God:  Creative Mythology.  His head tilts soulfully to the left.  The right side of his face is bathed in shadow.  Photo by Philippe Halsman.  This is the photographer who helped mythologize Marilyn Monroe.  Einstein, too.  The front flap of the jacket still has the price sticker on it from a Students’ Store, No Exchanges or Refunds If This Label is Removed.   Next, The Iliad, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, with drawings by Hans Erni.  Its glossy orange jacket feels as fresh as a sunrise over the Aegean.  Then Critical Affairs, Ned Rorem.   Living The Mindful Life, Charles T. Tart, foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche.  Finding God, Rifat Sonsino and Daniel B. Syme.  The Teaching of Buddha.  No author is named for The Teaching of Buddha.   Its first page says any part of this book may be quoted without permission.  It only asks that Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai be credited.

  Taoism, The Parting of the Way, Holmes Welch, is the Joseph P. Walcott book that I never returned.   Inside, a printed thank you note from a friend and his daughter, a blank card aside from its pre-printed message.  It says thank you for the thoughtful expression of sympathy and kindness during this difficult time.  The note is from 1988.  It came after his wife died.  Their child was a teenager then, but the girl had already been diagnosed with the brain tumor that led to her blindness and other incapacities.  She died in 2017, in her early forties.   Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty, Henry David Thoreau, edited by Oscar Cargill, for the American Heritage Series.  Lupercal, Ted Hughes.   Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.  Poems 1950-1966, A Selection, Thom Gunn.  Desperate Pleasures, A Monograph, Dennis Carlyle Darling.  What is a monograph, exactly?   I am sliding out this slick book of photographs.  Desperate Pleasures was an entry in a graphic design competition in Austin, where I was an invited judge, in the late 1980s.  There is a letter inside on the letterhead of the Department of Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin.  “I heard you liked the book.  I think you should have one.”  It makes me laugh, this letter.  It is the only one I have ever received signed, “Darling.”

  An Age Like This, 1920-1940, is the first of four volumes in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.  Volume 2, My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943.   Volume 3, As I Please, 1943-1945.   In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, Volume 4.  In all, there are two thousand pages of essays, journalism, and letters.  They become an orderly record of Orwell’s opinions year by year, though the first seven pages of Volume 1, “Why I Write,” are out of order   They were originally published in 1946, appearing in the summer issue of Gangrel, a short-lived quarterly literary magazine based in London that only lasted four issues.   Orwell’s essay was in the final issue.  In it, Orwell says that writing is a compensation for being lonely, disagreeable, and unpopular.  As a teenager, he begins to create narrations of his own activities, “no matter how ordinary those are.”   But then, what activities – slumming in poverty, fighting in Spain — might not be ordinary for Orwell.

  Next, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, Kevin Starr.   Inventing the Dream:  California Through the Progressive Era, Kevin Starr.  Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s, Kevin Starr.   I remember Kevin Starr.  I can see him in my mind’s eye.  He is teaching the survey course in American literature in 1971, lecturing while I sit doodling in a distant seat.  If there is a mind’s ear, it still lets me listen to the novel pop and burble from the iron radiators along the back of the lecture hall.

  The book jacket of Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche, reports that Sogyal Rinpoche was raised by “one of the most revered spiritual masters of this century,” meaning last century.  Between two pages, a xeroxed newspaper column by Dr. Laura Schlessinger.  Her column on “the four R’s that make up repentance” is pressed against a lost photograph of my second wife, all smiles, sunglasses.   A souvenir postcard hides in New Selected Poems, Philip Levine; this one is “Study for a Portrait,” Francis Bacon, from The Hess Collection Winery in Napa.  It, too, is second marriage vintage.  Then, The Art of War, Sun Tzu, translated by Thomas Cleary.   Lincoln:  A Photobiography, Russell Freedman.  Grimm’s Fairy Tales, foreword by Ellen Shapiro, illustrated by Noel Pocock.  Edgar Allan Poe Reader, with essays by George Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams.  An unsourced, very used copy of The World of Pooh, A.A. Milne, rests on this first shelf, third hallway bookcase, after whatever winding road brought it here.  The only clue, which is no help, is an inscription on its flyleaf: “To Larry from Mother and Dad, Christmas 1958.”

  The Structure of Magic, Richard Bandler and John Grinder. The Structure of Magic II, John Grinder and Richard Bandler.   These books have nothing to do with card tricks or rabbits out of hats.  They “distill and formalize the patterns of therapeutic interaction common to psychotherapy.”  Prose and Poetry of America, edited by H. Ward McGraw, A.M. has a tissue on page 411, marking “When Frost is On The Pumpkin,” James Whitcomb Riley.  It belonged to wife number one   Another of her tissues has stopped for over sixty years at page 463, in front of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Therapeutic Metaphors, David Gordon, is dedicated “To Richard Bandler and John Grinder.”   Last on the shelf, Great Experiments in Psychology, Henry E. Garret.

  The psychology books on all these bookcases were left behind by my first wife, often with her underlines and margin nots, sometimes with her last names from prior marriages on a flyleaf or on an inside cover.  Her names at the time, from before my time.

  iii

  Second shelf, third bookcase down the hallway:

  The Spanish Frontier in North America, David J. Weber.  The clipping buried under its cover, from August 23, 2010:  “Distinguished professor and historian dies.”   No mention in the article of David’s generouse role as my advisor on a scriptwriting project that died in 1978.  Foreigners in their Native Land, edited by David J. Weber, a collection of source material subtitled Historical roots of the Mexican Americans.  Next, Faces of the Borderlands, Monograph Number 52, Southwestern Studies, The University of Texas at El Paso, a small book of twenty-one drawings by Jose Cisneros, text by the artist.  The handwriting on the flyleaf is like calligraphy.  For Mark Perkins, it says, with great respect and admiration.  Cordially, Jose Cisneros.  The drawings are pen and ink studies, two in color and the rest black and white, with lots of crosshatching.   He did Conquistador, Viceroy, Spanish Pioneer Woman, Spanish Frontier Officer, Mission Indian Boy, Mexican Muleteer, Desperado, Vaquero, Queen of the Fiesta, Cowhand, and Stagecoach Driver.  If I ever met Jose Cisneros, I cannot remember it, or how his signed book came cordially to be here.

  Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in California, Rose Hollenbaugh Avina.  Mexicans in California After the U.S. Conquest, with an introduction by Carlos E. Cortes.  The Little Lion of the Southwest, Marc Simmons, which is also inscribed. For Mark Perkins, after your visit to my camp in the Cerrillos Badlands, with warmest regards, Oct. 1978.  Then, Dichos – Spanish Sayings from the Southwest, Judy Peterson.  The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century, Richard E. Greenleaf.  Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West, C.L. Sonnichsen.  All these books are from the months of research and scriptwriting in 1978.  They have separated from their compadres on the shelf across from the downstairs desk.  Next,The Enlightened:  The Writings of Luis de Carvajal, El Mozo, translated, edited, and with an introduction and epilogue by Seymour B. Liebman.  This is the story of a converso, one of the secret Jews caught by the Inquisition in New Spain.   The Pueblo Indians of North America, Edward P. Dozier, has margin notes and underlines, brackets and asterisks on pages about San Felipe Pueblo and the katchina cults.  Then, On The Border:  Portraits of America’s Southwestern Frontier, Tom Miller.   The Man Who Killed The Deer, Frank Waters.  New Mexico Village Arts, Roland F. Dickey.

  In The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, introduction by J.M. Cohen, Cohen writes that “Bernal Diaz del Castillo, last survivor of the Conquerors of Mexico, died on his estates in Guatemala at the age of eight-nine, as poor as he had lived.”   Next to it, Historia de la Conquista de Nueva Espana, Bernal Diaz del Castillo.  I found this original Spanish version at a libreria in Mexico City, San Juan de Letran, No. 5.  There is a Visitante sticker from Industrial Minera Mexico, Unidad de Taxco, affixed to its back cover.   No fault of the dim light in the hallway, but I can barely see the submerged, disappearing, reappearing faces of my classmates from the Spanish language school in Cuernavaca, who went with me in 1978 to visit a silver mine in Taxco. Their laughter is like ripples on water.  I catch a glimpse of the highway through a windshield on the car trip into Taxco.  Also, the tolerant Mexican who escorts us into a defunct mine.  It all seems unlikely now.  I am trying to fish an image of the rental car from the same watery pool, but it must be far deeper down.

  iv

  Books on the rest of this shelf are all over the map.  Lytton Strachey The Unknown Years 1880-1910, Michael Holroyd, is Volume I of the two volume set.  It shares its dusty, discolored slipcase with Lytton Strachey The Years of Achievement 1910-1932.  Quest for Reality has a faded yellow jacket.  From Swallow Press, it is a hardbound anthology of short poems selected by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields.  My notes are penciled in the margins of Charles Churchill’s The Dedication to the Sermon.  Two index cards under the back cover are filled with further comments on this same poem.  In the hallway, these notes read like mutterings.  They are detached from reality and far from any quest for it.  Next, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright 1964, Ernest Hemingway Ltd.  Its pretty jacket reproduces an oil painting of Pont Neuf by Hildegard Rath.  The $1 purchase price is stamped on its olive gray flysheet.  Gimpel the Fool, Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Saul Bellow and others. Philosophic Classics, Thales to Ockham, texts selected and edited with prefaces by Walter Kaufmann.

  The WPA Guide to New York City, with a new introduction by William H. Whyte, holds a business card from New York Bound Bookshop, 43 West 54^th Street.  Pages of the guide are blotched, as though its age were a rash.  Inside the front cover of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, I wrote “p. 226” and circled it.   There was something on page 226, some passage of interest, but whatever it was is no longer there.

  A Cab at The Door, V.S. Pritchett, was a gift from a college roommate.  “I am not inscribing the book itself in case you want to exchange it …” begins his letter from 1972 folded up in the middle of this $1.95 paperback.  Next, Reading Poems, Wright Thomas and Stuart Gerry Brown.  Then, Carmina, C. Valerii Catulli, R.A.B. Mynors.   Other than the word “Appendix,” every word in this slim blue book is in Latin.  The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats has the ex-libris sticker from John Winthrop House and a row of due dates stamped on a Winthrop House sticker.  The twelve due dates begin on May 3, 1965.   February 3, 1969 was the last time this book and its blue library binding have ever been due.  Outerbridge Reach, Robert Stone.  The Force of Reason, Oriana Fallaci.  Damascus Gate, Robert Stone.  An article from London Review of Books under its cover describes Robert Stone as “the feral child of American literature.”   Bear and His Daughter, Robert Stone, hides a different article.  This one, from Men’s Health, March 1998, touts “27 fun fitness goals that’ll get you in shape.”

  Zen Gardens:  Kyoto’s Nature Enclosed, Tom Wright and Mizuno Katsuhiko.  My second wife wrote on the flysheet:  “July 27, 2003, Kyoto, Japan.  We walked all over and rode the subway and bus.”  By that summer 2003, she was only three years from walking out.   I do not remember ever taking the subway in Kyoto, if there even is one.   It is possible we were on a bus.  Modes of transportation are very rarely memorable.  There is the Orient Express, the Titanic, the dog sled in a Jack London tale, elephants in the Carthaginian wars.  But my memory cannot catch a bus in Kyoto.   Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Tahir Shah.  Learning Theory and Behavior, O. Hobart Mowrer.   My first wife wrote on the inside cover: “If lost, please return at once to…”  She underlined “at once” and provided an address from sixty years ago.  The margins are crowded with notes and “read!” commands.  So, a school book.

  One potential new category for a reorganization of these shelves:  Books that no one will ever be tested on again.

  A green ticket inside The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, the book borrowed from the wood-paneled library at John Winthrop House, allows Admittance to Dodger Stadium, August 1, 1971, Sunday afternoon, 1:00 P.M.   In smaller print, the ticket elaborates.   Admittance is to The Los Angeles Times – Dodgers Straight “A” Student game, seating at the Green Level, 1^st Base Side.  It is bookmarking  On Being Asked for a War Poem.  The lines are as timeless as a baseball diamond’s:

  I think it better in times like these
  A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
  We have no gift to set a statesman right;
  He has had enough of meddling who can please
  A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
  Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

  The war in 1971 was in Vietnam.   By that August, I no longer needed a student deferment to avoid it.  My draft lottery number was in the high two hundreds.

  v

  Another potential category for a reorganization of the shelves:   Books I pretended to understand when I did not.  Too many will fit uncomfortably into that category.  A student when I first read them, or not yet married, or not yet widowed, or not yet befuddled by motherless children.   Books I went through the motions with.  Turning their pages, silently reading, but never breathing life into them.  Then the shelving and forgetting.  If I open them now, the same misunderstood words emerge.  But they are vibrating at last, some of them even singing, like the cicadas that appear once every thirteen or seventeen years, risen in the trees, singing and mating.

  Third hallway bookcase, third shelf down:

  Arguably:  Essays by Christopher Hitchens.  New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, with an introduction by Nathan Englander.  Structural Integrity, Loren Mozley, an exhibit catalog.  Jim Thompson The House on the Klong, text by William Warren, photography by Luca Tettoni.  The Meadows Museum, William B. Jordan.   Visions:  James Surls, 1974-1984, Sue Graze, foreword Harry S. Parker, Jr.

  The art books on this third shelf are mostly exhibit catalogs from museums.  El Greco of Toledo, December 1982- February 1983.  The Shogun Age Exhibition, March 1984.  Gerald Murphy, An American Painter in Paris, February – April 1986.  Visions of the West, September – November 1986.   Pompeii A.D. 79, Volume I and Pompeii A.D. 79, Volume II, are perfect-bound from a single forgotten exhibition.  Like children on a father’s shoulders, this horizontal stack of shiny catalogs sits on the supine shoulders of H. W. Janson’s History of Art.   When Aunt Bertha hungered for culture, she ordered literature.  She brought The World’s Greatest Books into a two-bedroom apartment in East L.A.   These days, the visual arts are the ticket to higher culture, and a good investment, too.  We are part of an icon-driven culture.  If not as peasantry, then as patrons.

  One Day’s Perfect Weather, Daniel Stern, has a correspondence on its flysheet.  It goes back and forth between me and my mother.   I go first: “August 2007.  Dear Mom, I hope you enjoy reading this book. It is yours for your 87^th birthday.  How about giving it back to me in November for my 56^th?  Let’s do that,” I suggested, “back and forth for the next ten years!”   In response, it could have been that November as requested, this message appears below mine:  “I not 87 on August 13, 2007.  I was 86.  Also, I want this book back.”   Cynthia Ozick, Frank Kermode, and Harold Bloom all praise One Day’s Perfect Weather on its jacket.   I never read it, never mind the bookmark on page 67.  Then, Body Work, Melissa Febos.  Cheryl Strayed calls it “an instant classic” on its paperback cover, though it is anything but that.

  Whitman, selected by Robert Creeley, a Penguin “Poet to Poet” paperback.  On its black cover there are fourteen oval stickers with the word Maroc in bright orange.  Whitman is a book of bright memories.  I can see the moment it came into my hand.  An American, same age I was, straight brown hair falling past his shoulders, or so I am reporting to the memory police, passes this book to me as he is leaving the Metro.  No reason for it, he just does.  Unremembered, which stop, or whether I am leaving, too,  or boarding.   Over the next weeks, I applied the Maroc stickers to the black cover, like a prisoner keeping count on the wall of his cell.  I peeled stickers off the oranges that I buy day by day from a cart on Rue Mouffetard.   On the back cover, and written upside down as though Whitman had been offered to her across a café table, Jocelyne, whoever she was, wrote her name and address:  Jocelyne, 80 Boulevard de Menilmontant, 75020 – Paris.  And, in a section of Song of Myself, a greeting card, its front a whimsical illustration of a slot machine, three birds in a nest, caterpillars, a spider’s web, spiraling vegetation, and 1 Mai 73 in the windows of the slot machine.  A Marc, it says inside the card, bien amicalement. G. Schreiber.

  Gerard Schreiber is the cartoonist.  I met him, when I was hitchhiking out of Paris.   Gerard and a friend of his, Philippe, stopped to pick me up.  I am trying to get to Chartres to see the cathedral.   I am by myself in the back seat listening to them.  Philippe is telling Gerard about the girl he slept with the night before, une noire Americaine, tres jolie…

  These memories are not stories.   They have no beginning or end, only middles.

  Next, The Land of Mild Light, Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas, edited by Nidia Hernandez.  Four copies of Southwest Review, Winter 1978.   An MLA Style Sheet, compiled by William Riley Parker.  Five issues of Poetry magazine, from 1970 and 1971.   Two issues of The Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 1987 and Spring 1988.  Invisible Storytellers, Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film, Sarah Kozloff.  The author dedicates her book “To my brother, Daniel Kozloff, who used to take me to the movies.”  Between pages 82 and 83, another appreciation from Sarah, on a postcard she sent my parents: “Once again,” she writes, “we wish to thank you for your hospitality….”   Sarah is Dan’s younger sister.  The two of them visited Los Angeles the last summer I was still living at home.  They came down from Berkeley, where Dan was dropping out.  That summer, I was one of the lesser knights in the Kentwood Players community theater production of Camelot.  I had no lines and do not sing, but I did meet Inez, similarly cast.  One of the older cast members described her as “cute as a button,” which she was.  Even in the front seat of a compact car, she could fit herself on top of me.   That is the memory floating above the pages of Invisible Storytellers, though it has nothing to do with Kozloffs, other than summertime.

  On the rest of this shelf:  Frank Lloyd Wright Mid-Century Modern, photographs by Alan Weintraub, text by Alan Hess.   A discolored Air The Trees, Larry Eigner, illustrated by Bobbie Creeley, Black Sparrow Press, 1968.  The Arts of the French Book – 1900 – 1965, Eleanor M. Garvey and Peter A. Wick.  Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 Twentieth Anniversary Report.  Next, 956 crisp, unread pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, Modern Library, Volume I, 180 A.D. – 395 A.D.  Then, 923 more pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, Volume II, 395 A.D – 1185 A.D.  A bright blue Gates of Prayer, For Weekdays, Sabbaths, and Festivals.  The dull red cover of Gates of Repentance For The Days of Awe.  The title page of The Days of Awe is covered with crayon scribbles and drawings of flowers.  Each word in “To Mom from Ben Eden Daddy, Mother’s Day 1990” is a different color, the “o” in “Mom” shaped like a heart.

  Old Love, Isaac Bashevis Singer.  Him With His Foot In His Mouth, Saul Bellow.  See Jane Win, Dr. Sylvia Rimm.   Psychology of Learning and Behavior, Barry Schwartz, with notes penciled all over its margins.  The handwriting looks like mine, but the book looks unreadable, with equations and confusing diagrams and 400 pages of peak shift, stimulus control, and competence versus performance.

  Last, Wild Fruits, Henry David Thoreau, edited and introduced by Bradley P. Dean, “Thoreau’s rediscovered last manuscript” according to the book jacket.  A printout from a commentary on Leviticus falls out of its pages.  Leviticus 7:15 instructs that the “flesh of the thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being” must be eaten on the day that it is offered.  No leftovers allowed.   This passage that has been stored inside Thoreau’s last manuscript offers the reasoning of a fifteenth century rabbi, who argues that the thanksgiving sacrifice is a miracle.  You leave none of it for tomorrow precisely because of your faith in a new miracle tomorrow.  Each day is its own miracle.

  vi

  A printout left in Louise Gluck’s Poems 1962 – 2012 tells of a library in the Egypt of the Pharaohs that had the inscription “House of Healing” carved into its stone façade.  This is an allusion in part to the health benefits of reading.  There have been such claims.  “Studies have shown,” as they say, that reading has medicinal properties.  It will keep you sharp, it keeps the mind alive, it can lower blood pressure.  It may even prolong life.  This could be especially true for the compulsive readers, who must finish whatever they start.   It will take more years than I have left to finish the two volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time.  Not to mention The Letters of John Addington Symonds, all three of those thick volumes in their forest green jackets.  Or this one stuffed volume of Gluck.

  Fourth shelf, third bookcase down the hallway:

  Exit Ghost, Philip Roth, another gift from Bill Gilliland.  The small bookstore Bill and Larry McMurtry co-owned in the ‘80s was at 2611 Worthington in Dallas.  Lavish Organic Nail Spa has the space these days.   Funeral Rites, Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman.  For marketing reasons, the title of this novel is only on the back of the book jacket.  Its cover is all Brassai’s photo of a small man who is losing his hair.  Genet’s sleeves are rolled to his biceps, his shirt open at the neck.  Next, Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet.  Then, English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Howard Mumford Jones, with this inscription on the flyleaf:  “To John Joseph, for the wonderful hours of reading I had in 1968 as the result of your suggestions and books – Merry Christmas – Patricia.”

  The Lyric Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Ernest Rhys, printed in 1885, is dainty little book, only three inches by five inches.  A kind of pocketbook.  It may have been pocketed in 1972 from the Harvard College Library, or borrowed and not returned.  Either way, this would not have been the first time it went missing.  “Substituted for a copy lost” is written in pen on page 4, below the stamped date of Dec 20 1897.  The Social Contract and Discourses, Jean Jacques Rousseau.  English 3 Selected Readings and Exercises, Volume II, The University of Chicago Twelve Edition, November 1947.   The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, edited by Agnes Latham, from The Muses Library.   Then, the first volume of The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe: with His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by His Son, In Eight Volumes, London:  John Murray, Albemarle Street. MDCCCXXXIV.

  There was no binge watching in the 1970s, no streaming of multiple seasons.  There was only binge reading.  On this fourth shelf, Notes on Prosody and Abram Gannibal, Vladimir Nabokov, is followed by Nabokov’s Congeries, selected and with a critical introduction by Page Stegner.  Then, Glory, Vladimir Nabokov.  And King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov.  The glossy jacket of Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov, is on backwards.  When I flip it around, out falls a letter on an index card from Dan Kozloff, Sarah’s big brother.  “I saw LaVoa yesterday,” he writes, “grey-skinned as ever.”   Decades later I have no clue who LaVoa was in 1972.  Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov. The Gift, Vladimir Nabokov.  Then, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, with its glossary reminding me that Zembla is a distant northern country.   Ada, the last of these Nabokov hardbacks, has an obituary buried under its back jacket flap.  “Lolita author dies.”  The jacket is torn.  On a flysheet, short notes and phrases from the novel.  For example, “pudibund swoon, p. 443.”   On a scrap of paper left between pages 4 and 5, someone wrote Blaha, 29 Rue de Grenelle, Paris 75007, avant 21.00.  Nothing can bring Blaha back, not even Google Street View this morning, which shows the two wooden blood-red doors on the stone façade of 29 Rue de Grenelle, and the windows on the ground floor that are framed in pale green wood, crisscrossed with metal bars.

  The lock of hair between pages 261 and 262 of Ada is as fragile as a butterfly.  Light brown, tied with a pale green thread, but also loose and fluttering in memory, avoiding the net.  Stranded, these strands of hair, and impossible to remember whose.  It is a mystery.  And for some mysteries, the solution is unimportant.  It is only the clues that matter.  The solution is unavailable.  Surely this is true for the greatest mysteries.

  Ada is like Proust’s magic lantern, projecting images.  I had doodled half a dozen names on the blank page opposite its back cover.   Lew Porter, Bill Stixrude, May Stein, Rise Goren, Joe Walcott, Laura.  Memories of them tumble into the hallway, as if Ada were a TIME’s Year In Review for 1973:

  February 1973.  My father visits me on Ward Street in Berkeley.   My girlfriend of one month, May Stein, comes over while he is there.  “Your taste is in your mouth,” he says, after she leaves.

  With Joe Walcott and Lew Porter in Le Bateau Ivre, a coffee house on Telegraph Avenue.  Joe lends me his marked-up Tao Te Ching.

  Bill Stixrude teaching me to play Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.  His beard is a red as an apple.

  Laura, last name unremembered, rides with me from San Rafael on a drive cross country.  She sings in the car:
  Dites moi, pourquoi
  La vie est belle
  Dites moi, pourquoi
  La vie est gai.

  Sleeping in the car.  Ice on the windshield when we wake up on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

  Stopping at a house in Boulder where Rise Goren lives.  Rise, with a Louise Gluck-like umlaut over the “e.”  Danny Kozloff told me I will fall in love with her, and I do, for two days.

  The sweet smell in the stairway of the house in Boulder turns out to be the odor of English Leather cologne.

  Laura’s sister Marci has a place to leave the car in Maryland, before I take an Air Icelandic flight to Paris.  The car, a 1966 wine-colored Mustang, stays in the weeds on a farm property owned by the Shrivers.  When I return for it months later, it starts right up as though I had never been gone.

  A bee stings Laura’s eye at her sister’s in Maryland.  Her fat face swells up like a gourd. When Laura does sit-ups that afternoon, sweating and cheerful, I hold her ankles down.

  April, May, in Paris.

  Summer, 1973, back in Los Angeles.  Stucco houses, arroyos descending to the Pacific, peeling eucalyptus, dry sunsets.  Freeways at the end of night, a coastal dew of salt and oleander, beaches at dawn, the water rising under the early surfers, who wait as though this will always go on.

  On a hill behind Chavez Ravine, after a Dodger game, my father is having his first heart attack.  The first I know about anyway.

  I am reading meters all summer for the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles.  In the backyard of a clapboard house in Watts, the hair bristles on a bad dog’s back.  This dog is chained to the electric meter, and tugging at the chain, its jaws snapping.

  I walk into the office of Ray and Charles Eames on Washington Boulevard to look for the electric meter on an interior wall.  I tell Ray I am a student, and she hires me to come back that afternoon, when my shift ends, to write a speech for Charles.  One of the staff tells me she lives in Venice, Italy, half the year.  We are in Venice, California.   She says the speech is for the National Academy of Sciences.  Charles is not there.  Ray keeps the television on in the office all the time.  The Watergate hearings are droning, Sam Ervin and the rest of the them.

  September, 1973, back at Harvard, after my “leave of absence,” and limping to the finish line.   Hitchhiking to New York City on weekends.  One night, dropped off way downtown at the two in the morning, I am unsure where I am.  A cab pulls alongside me.   The cab driver rolls the passenger window down.  He leans toward me.
  “You can’t be here!” he screams.
  He tells me I should go to the YMCA for the night.   He says it’s no problem, “other than the fags.”
  I spend that night in a room at the Y.

  Hitching back from New York to Cambridge.  A white Cadillac convertible, the top down at night, pulls off to the shoulder of I-90 West.   The driver is in suit and tie.  He says he is an attorney representing the Mark Rothko estate, or maybe the children who are suing it.

  Returning from New York, earliest Sunday morning, I am climbing the stairs in the dark to my apartment.  I can smell ashes but am too tired to understand it.  At the top of the stairs, the door is charred.  There has been a fire.  The smell never comes out of the forest green sweater that had been left in the closet.

  Winter, 1973.   My spring graduation ceremony is months away, so I move to New York, into rooms at 111 West 92^nd Street.  Five floor up, the water from the bathroom faucet runs orange with rust.  Four of us are sleeping on mattresses:  Lew Porter, from Berkeley, and his pianist friend from the San Fernando Valley who plays rehearsals at the Joffrey, and Jacqueline Coral, a ballet dancer I fumblingly make a pass at and am shyly refused.   We are not far from the Natural History Museum.  There is a police station across the street.  Fidel Castro had lived in the building, as a young man in New York City, preparing for his future.

  These memories are not stories.  They have no beginning or end, only middles.

  This, too, is the nature of memory. The things that stick are no more important than what has been forgotten. To ask why these images or sounds are there, lodged, freeloading in a way, is no different than to ask why anything is here.

  vii

  In 1973, Catherine Demongeot’s apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine had a single wooden bookcase.  I stole the paperback Oeuvres Poetiques D’Arthur Rimbaud from it and brought it back home that summer.   Where Le Bateau Ivre begins, page 88, I find a book review of a biography of Rimbaud.   The reviewer writes that Rimbaud was only 16 when he created “the single greatest French lyric poem of the 19^th century.”   I was twenty-one when I wrote a cringeworthy confession of loneliness on the blank page facing the inside back cover of Oeuvres Poetiques D’Arthur Rimbaud, fourth shelf, third bookcase down the hallway.

  Oeuvres Poetiques holds other keepsakes:  a street map of Paris, two metro tickets, the receipt from Credit Commercial de France, and a folded sheet of waxy pink paper from Yves Thomas Boulanger Patissier Glacier 4 Rue St. Maurice Chartres.  In 1973, it wrapped a flan.  When I google the same address this morning, 4 Rue St. Maurice is still what it was, almost.  Not Yves Thomas any longer, but Boulangerie St. Maurice, in Chartres.  I might concede that the present moment is the priority.  Or even that only the moment is real.  But whatever the past is, or memory, some of these books are wet with it.  Instead of turning their pages, I can twist them like a washrag.  The content is no longer between the soaked covers.  Droplets of 1973 are falling and then flowing out of Oeuvres Poetiques:

  At 10 or 11, Catherine Demongeot was Zazie in the Louis Malle film of the Raymond Queneau novel Zazie dans le Metro.  She is away now, studying political science at university.  Her mother shows me her picture on the cover of a Paris Match in her apartment on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine.

  In the Luxembourg Gardens, an Arab pesters a nun.  A small ticket entitles me to a folding chair nearby.  When the Arab finally gives up, the nun rolls her eyes.

  One evening in Paris, I see a panther in a nightclub near La Place de L’Opera.  Later that evening, Michelle Elizabeth Strelin and her friend walk home in the dark with me.  The three of us see under a streetlamp a bum with white hair and white moustache, perfectly groomed.
  “Ah, regard le clochard, come il est digne!” her friend says.
  I cannot remember her friend’s name or forget the phrase.  In Michelle’s apartment a small sign over the sink said tout va bien.

  Another night out.  I pass a fat Frenchman on the street.  He asks where I am from.

  “Oof, John Wayne!” he says in response, and in admiration of America.

  I go to see Straw Dogs at the cinematheque.  It is called Chiens de Paille.  Dustin Hoffman speaks remarkably good English, as I try to keep up with French subtitles.

  A flic stops to question me.  I am reading the slogans on the sides of stone buildings.  A bas la loi Debre!  And on newsstands, the headline L’Affaire Watergate!

  On a train out of Paris to Charleville, where there is green grass everywhere – at the race track, and then at the chateau open to the public. where an Ingres painting hangs over a marble mantel.  Rimbaud had gone the other way, into Paris on the train from Charleville.  He was a rube from the country, a strange boy, as odd as the mauves of Puvis de Chauvanne that are staring back from the walls in another room of the chateau.

  The editor’s note in The World’s Greatest Books says of Edmond About, 1828-1885, that he is “the most entertaining anti-clerical writer of his period,” and his Le Roi de Montagnes “the most delightful of satirical novels.”  Even with twenty volumes to fill, I would not have seen the greatness of Le Roi des Montagnes.   After Edmond Francois Valentin About died in Paris, he was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery.   On a rainy May afternoon, I walk over to Pere Lachaise, wanting to see where Jim Morrison is buried.  If I am passing the grave of Edmond About, I am unaware of it.

  Chapter Twelve
  BACK ON THE SHELF

  One Hundred Poems From The Chinese, Kenneth Rexroth, has Joseph Walcott’s address on Grove St. in Berkeley on its inside cover, and two bookmarks.  One is a lime green ad for Eric Rohmer’s “Chloe in the Afternoon” at the Los Feliz in Los Angeles, June 20 to July 3.  The other is a blue Welcome To Wells, Nevada, broadsheet, compliments of The Wagon Wheel on U.S. Highway 40, which urges Try Our Dining Room.  A Good Place To Eat.  It is something picked up on the drive back to Los Angeles from Maryland in the 1966 wine-colored Mustang at the beginning of June, 1973.  So, ephemera, and evidence.  The Exclusions of a Rhyme, J.V. Cunningham. Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht, the unabridged English version by Eric Bentley.  Collected Poems, Patrick Kavanagh.  In the uncredited photo on its green cover, the woman in a shawl turns her back to the photographer.  She is walking on a dirt road.  Her skirt descends to her shoes.  She has a basket in her hand.   Blue Nights, Joan Didion.  A Time to Heal, Mendel Kalmenson.  Commodore Hornblower, C.S. Forester.  This is a used book, with the original  owner’s name in it.  Caroline E. Jones signed on the flyleaf, October, 1945.

  Stacks of publications fill the rest of the shelf.  Most are perfect bound Communication Arts magazines.  On top of them, a brochure of Russian paintings from a museum visited in Moscow in 2018.   I can decipher the Cyrillic for Moscow on its spine, but nothing else, despite the phrasebooks and the Russian dictionary nearby.

  ii

  Nabokov writes of “the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal.”  This quote is on a sheet of paper rescued from Pale Fire, a tattered Berkley paperback on the fourth shelf of the third bookcase in the hallway.  Rescued is just another way of saying found.  There are only so many ways to describe book after book and what is inside them, or written on a flyleaf or hidden under a jacket flap.   Still, each of these books has its story, as does a day in a lifetime of days; not a general day, but one with details.  A day with a diamond to sell, or with birdsong.   Some say there is no free will because everything is determined, or that the next moment follows inevitably from the one before.  But that cannot be true.  Anything can happen next.  This Nabokov quote might or might not be here.  It might or might not be read in the hallway this morning.   It bookmarks a page, as if during all these passive years it has always been active.   It came to me in an email, part of a Brain Pickings newsletter, on the twelfth of December 2018.  According to the header, it was printed out that day, at twelve minutes after noon.  So, at twelve twelve on twelve twelve.

  iii

  On another inserted scrap: “This and similar passages remind one of something that Mann wrote during the First World War, after reading an essay on Theodor Storm by Georg Lukacs, in which the Hungarian critic spoke of the combination of Aesthetismus and Burgerlichkeit in Storm’s writing and its high ethical content.  Mann seized upon this comment and wrote that it applied equally to himself.  For him, he wrote, what he was writing was not as important as the effect of the process of writing upon his life.  ‘Life is not the means for the achievement of an aesthetic ideal of perfection, but work is an ethical symbol of life. The goal is not some kind of objective perfection, but the subjective awareness that I couldn’t have done it any better than I have.’”

  This torn bit was tucked between pages of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

  Fifth shelf down, third bookcase in the hallway:

  The Essays, Or, Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Bacon.  Including also his Apophthegms, Elegant Sentences, and Wisdom of the Ancients, A. L. Burt Company.  This book has a soft, skin-like covering.  Written by hand on its inside cover, “Paul H. Buck 24 April 1927.”  Next, What A Young Man Ought to Know, Sylvanus Stall.  It is the “new, up-to-date” edition, from 1925.  Its 170 pages, bound in blue, are part of the Self and Sex Series, dedicated to The Young Man Whose Aim Is To Be Clean And Strong.  The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, introduction by Katherine Lee Bates, Professor of English Literature in Wellesley College, copyright 1902, Thomas Y. Crowell and Company.  Then, Sexual Signatures, John Money and Patricia Tucker.  Descartes Selections, edited by Ralph M. Eaton.  Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes.  The Aristos, John Fowles.  Red Ribbon on a White Horse, Anzia Yezierska, introduction by W. H. Auden.   Journeys, Jan Morris.  Selections, a selection of essays from issues of The New York Review of Books.   Inside, symphony ticket stubs from 1995.  Writings On The East is a book of essays on Eastern Europe, from The New York Review of Books.  Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume, edited and with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith, is next to An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume, edited and with an introduction by Charles W. Hendel.  The dust on The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke, edited and with an introduction by Thomas P. Peardon, is as bulky as lint.

  I found a photograph on page 15 of Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing, Soren Kierkegaard, translated from the Danish and with an introductory essay by Douglas V. Steere.   It shows the patio of our house from my first marriage, on a summer day.  I am sitting on a Woodard chair and reading the Sunday paper at the wrought iron Woodard table.   My son is in my lap, his bare legs extending to the tabletop, where the soles of his feet meet his sister’s; she is sitting on top of the table.    So, the two of them are touching and also keeping each other apart.  They might be five and four.  I think this photo from Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, with its daunting subtitle Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, has slept between the pages of Kierkegaard long enough.  For thirty, nearly forty years.  I want it on the desk downstairs.  It can make its confession there.

  Next, Lectures on Ethics, Immanuel Kant, translated by Louis Infield.  The Crucible, Arthur Miller.  Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein.  Stories by Frank O’Connor is A Vintage Book paperback, cover photograph by Elliott Erwitt and design by Harry Ford.  In 1974, I met Harry Ford in his office in Manhattan.  When I was despairing about earning a living, one of my professors, the novelist Monroe Engel, arranged a job interview for me in New York.  My meeting with Harry Ford leaves behind a mental snapshot of Harry Ford and his desk.  I am willing to testify that that desk was at Viking, although Stories is a Vintage Book, a division of Random House, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.   In fairness, there is no history less accurate than personal history.

  Tales from the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, edited and with an introduction by Herbert Alexander, illustrations by Mac Harshberger, copyright 1948.   A grey insert from a cosmetics package left at page 182 begins, “Richard Hudnut presents with pride a distinguished new line of Men’s Toiletries.”   Richard Alexander Hudnut, American businessman, deserves his own Boccaccio.  Born in 1855, Hudnut turned a family drugstore into an international showroom for fragrances, bought a chateau in the south of France, and became the fourth husband of a woman whose daughter married Rudolph Valentino.  And after all that, he was buried in the Bronx.

  Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, translated by D. C. Lau, is Joe Walcott’s Tao Te Ching.  Next, Basic Judaism, Milton Steinberg.  Then, The Sense of Beauty, George Santayana.  The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton.  Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, Donald Kagan.  Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, S. H. Butcher.   The Verbal Icon, W. K. Wimsatt.  The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, R. S. Crane.

  A purple mimeographed handout between pages 34 and 35 of Dictionary of World Literature, edited by Joseph T. Shipley, retains the feintest odor of 1969.  There are blue checks on every line of a purple list of sixty-five words and phrases -– objective correlative, trope, caesura, truth in art, acatalectic, etc.   Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is a fragrant second marriage souvenir, with hints of Ivy on the Beach and The Getty.  The blank pages facing the inside front and back covers of Surprised by Sin, Stanley E. Fish, are inky with quotes and comments.  Same with the insides of The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis.  One of the quotes: “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.”  Then, Myths of the Greeks and Romans, Michael Grant.

  The last books on this shelf are a three-volume series of fake, four-page newspapers.  Volume One of News of the Past Volume One, In the Days of the Bible, Dr. Israel Eldad and Moshe Aumanns, covers Abraham to Ezra, 1726 – 444 BCE.  “The story of the Bible,” it screams, “in the form of a daily newspaper.”   Sample headline:   We Quit Egypt Today.  News of the Past Volume Two goes from the Maccabees to the Golden Age in Spain, 165 BCE – 1038 CE.  The third volume, The Dawn of Redemption, ends on Sunday, September 3, 1897, at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

  No one has ever unfolded these clever tabloid-sized pages before.  It is unlikely they will ever be opened again.  Why would I read Sight of Golden Calf Stuns Leader?  This is for children, there are no children here.

  iv

  Emerson wrote that he could not remember the books he had read any more than the meals he had eaten, but that both his food and his books formed him.  I wonder about the prior owners of the used Riverside Editions paperbacks, third bookcase, sixth shelf down, who wrote the margin notes and used rulers to do their underlining.  College seniors then, they are real seniors now, collecting Social Security checks, revising estate plans, and second-guessing their lives.  The covers of these Riverside Editions paperbacks have the repeating pattern of Arion riding a dolphin.  It seems unlikely, beside a river.

  Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold is edited by A. Dwight Culler.  Next, Selected Poems and Letters John Keats, edited by Douglas Bush.  Then Poems of Robert Browning, edited by Donald Smalley.  The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Harry Levin.  Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Stephen E. Whicher.   The postcard from Mexico that falls out of the Keats book is from my parents.  The front is a velvety-textured bright serape and black sombrero.   “Hello Amigo,” it begins.

  I also found a forgotten letter in Selected Poems and Letters John Keats.   It is between pages of “Endymion” and still in its envelope.  From Jan Bedell, House Secretary, John Winthrop House, August 21, 1972, it begins.  “I am sorry not to have answered your letter sooner.”  Then Jan Bedell types, “You should write to Tom Connolly, now our Senior Tutor, in D-11.  He will put your name before the Board, which will formally approve your Leave of Absence.”  She also informs me “Donald Misch is already rooming with Zach Taylor in G-21, so I will find another roommate for Roger.”   This solves the mystery of the unknown Roger who sent me the card with the passage from Joyce on it.  Jan Bedell concludes:  “For readmission, you should notify Tom Connolly of your intention to return.  Also, you should write to me so that I can assign you to a room.  If you write to me by February 1^st, you can be included in the lottery for the next year.  This would be a wise move to insure a decent suite.”  Jan Bedell is all business.

  I do not know if I ever wrote back and, if I did, no letter of mine would be stuck inside any book on Jan Bedell’s shelf.  However, I did copy a passage from a religious text on the back of Jan Bedell’s grey personal stationery.  “Among the questions to ask,” it says, “did you fulfil your duty with respect to establishing a family?  Did you search for wisdom?  Did you try to deduce one thing from another in study?  Did you hope for the salvation of the Messiah?   Even should all these questions be answered affirmatively, only if ‘the fear of the Lord is my treasure’ (Is xxx.iii 6) will it avail; otherwise, it will not (Shab. 31a).”   Why I copied this passage down, I can only guess.   It may have sounded exotic, a curiosity, something to collect, like a shard of broken pottery.   Reading it in the hallway, it sounds like the heart of wisdom, and something I should have taken to heart in 1972.

  Next, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, selected and edited by Hugh Maclean, from Norton.  Contemporary American Poetry, selected and introduced by Donald Hall.  The Practice of Criticism, D.H. Rawlinson.  Selected Works of John Dryden, introduction by William Frost.  The Best Times, John Dos Passos.   The Inferno, Dante Alighieri, “a new translation by John Ciardi.”  The Purgatorio, which has a broken, separated spine, the halves of the book held together by a rubber band.  When I ease The Purgatorio forward, even the rubber band is rotted, and it breaks.   The Paradiso, Dante Alighieri, another “new translation by John Ciardi”, is in better condition.

  This shelf is a congested roadway.  L’Homme Revolte, Albert Camus, bumper to bumper with Essays on Elizabethan Drama, T.S. Eliot.  The Age of Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre.  L’Exil et le Royaume, Albert Camus, Le Livre de Poche.  Then The Comedy of Dante Alighieri The Florentine, Cantica I, Hell, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers.  Like so many of these books, the Sayers has a feathery discoloration on its pages.  Light gets in, even though a book has been closed for decades.  Age happens is not a bumper sticker, but it should be.  Amazing, too, the talents of Dorothy Sayers, English crime novelist who also translates Dante.  She is the most famous Sayers, after Gale.

  Cheri and The Last of Cheri, Colette.  Madame Colette wrote 80 books, according to her brief bio on the opening page.  This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  This is “The famous novel of flaming youth.”   That is what its pulpy cover proclaims.   The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, with a preface by Ernest Hemingway.   Its bookmark is a postcard souvenir from Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois.  The Art Book, “an A to Z guide of 500 great painters,” starts with “The Nubian Giraffe,” Jacques-Laurent Agasse.  Then, The Aeneid of Virgil, a verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum.  Think on These Things, J. Krishnamurti, edited by D. Rajagopal.  Tender is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  The Cure for All Cancers, Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D.  In 1997, while Dolores was dying of colon cancer, I ordered this 500-page book that asserts cancer is caused by parasites and can be “zapped” by electricity.   Hulda Clark also insists that every cancer of any type can be cured by herbs. In her index, she mentions wormwood in twenty separate entries.   Surviving Schizophrenia, E. Fuller Torrey, M.D.  Next, The English Language, Robert Burchfield.  Another copy of Identity Youth and Crisis, Erik H. Erikson.  We Must March My Darlings, Diana Trilling.  Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion.  100 Great Operas And Their Stories, Henry W. Simon.  Opera Once Over Lightly, Reuben A. Bradford.  The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand.  Cannery Row, John Steinbeck.  The Pearl & The Red Pony, John Steinbeck, a Penguin paperback, “Two Books in One,” with drawings by Jose Clemente Orozco in The Pearl.   East of Eden, John Steinbeck, “Now an ABC Motion Picture for Television.”

  The Bell in the Fog, Gertrude Atherton, copyright 1905, Harper Brothers, is the one hardbound book on this shelf of paperbacks.  As if she were veiled, a piece of tissue protects the frontispiece photo of Gertrude Atherton in profil.   Her hair is up, and there are flowers pinned in the tresses.  She dedicates her book “To The Master Henry James.”   What is even more dated is the perfect penmanship of the signature on the flysheet, and the signed name, Moulton Baker.   Moulton Baker, the reader or at least the first owner of The Bell in the Fog.  When I googled “Moulton Baker” this morning, a shop called The Pickled Baker, in Moulton, Texas, came up first, the top o the search results.   Further down, though, there was an Instagram page for Pebbles Moulton Baker (@pebbles718).  Pebbles must surely be a relative.  Her page describes her as a “Mental Health Advocate.”

  Three books to the end of this shelf:  Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver.  The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley.  Russia under the Old Regime, Richard Pipes.   This very last book carries a very distant memory in the first line on its first page, from the author’s brief bio.  “Richard Pipes is Professor Emeritus of Russian History at Harvard University,” it begins.   I know that already, because after my rented room in Cambridge burned, I rented in a room in the basement of Professor Pipes’s house in Cambridge.   This was in 1974, when I had returned to the college after the year that Jan Bedell called my “Leave of Absence.”  I managed to last all the way to the graduation ceremony in May.  It must have been near the end, when the weather was already warm, when I shared the dim basement with a mentally disturbed adult who never bathed.  We had our own rooms, and we never actually met, but I would see him around Cambridge, wearing a heavy winter coat no matter how hot it was becoming as summer came closer.   The entire basement smelled of his odor.   One afternoon, near the very end, a stranger who turned out to be Dr. Pipes’ son Daniel — he is in his seventies today and President of the Middle East Forum, writing mostly about “radical Islam” — came down to the basement as I was leaving my room.
  “It isn’t me,” I said, as I passed by him.

  v

  Seventh shelf, third bookcase down the hallway:

  20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne.  It was assigned to my son in middle school.  So was Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater.  He printed his name on the inside covers of both books.  Under the front cover of Stones for Ibarra, Harriet Doerr, a birthday card from my parents, November 1985.  Also in this gift, an IOU from Laverne, “300 less 85 payment made last week, 215 owed.”   Laverne, our nanny and housekeeper, was a sweet, heavy woman from the piney woods in East Texas who died of breast cancer in 2001, age fifty-one.  Her IOU is dated August 22, 1985.  Ben is fourteen months old on that sweltering summer day.   Eden is three weeks from being born.  Whatever money Laverne has, I am paying her.  That salary is market wage, which leaves her a minor car repair away from debt and borrowing from us.   At the time, it does not seem inappropriate or wrong.

  The Big Bounce, Elmore Leonard.  A Flag on the Island, V.S. Naipaul.  Random Acts of Kindness, the editors of Conari Press, foreword by Daphne Rose Kingma.  Outwitting Our Nerves, Josephine A. Jackson, M.D. and Helen M. Salisbury, copyright 1921.   The Big Knockover, Dashiell Hammett, edited with an introduction by Lillian Hellman.  As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner.  The Reivers, William Faulkner.   The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner.  My copy of The Sound and the Fury is used; “pre-owned,” as car dealers say.  Inside, a penned inscription from “Louanne” on the empty page facing the inside front cover.  She writes, “Remember me in 30 or 40 or 50 years, however far away you may be!”   So, I have the plea of a stranger on a shelf in my hallway.

  All the Little Live Things, Wallace Stegner.  Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger.   Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger.  When Nietzsche Wept, Irwin D. Yalom.  Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, with the business card of the Texas Chrysanthemum Society planted between two pages.  The Iliad of Homer, translated and with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore.  Moby-Dick or, The Whale, Herman Melville.  Fragile Glory, Richard Bernstein, holds onto an April 21, 1994 ticket stub from Southwest Airlines.   Elizabethan Prose Fiction, edited by Merritt Lawlis, uses the metal foil of a chewing gum wrapper as a bookmark on page 278, at Rosalind – Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra, by Thomas Lodge.  Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway.  In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway.  The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway.   A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway.  A Farewell To Arms was someone else’s schoolbook; the student has bracketed patches of curt dialogue.

  The “infographic” tucked behind the back cover of The Sun Also Rises came from The New York Times, Sunday, March 14, 1971 and is titled “U.S. Bombing Tonnage in Three Wars.”   It compares the 2,057,244 tons of U.S. bombs dropped between 1941 and 1945 to the 635,000 tons of the Korean War and the 5,693,382 tons dropped, so far, 1965 to 1971, in what it calls the Indochina War.   A Hall of Mirrors, Robert Stone, “Now the major Paramount picture WUSA,” hides a photo of my son in a Jayhawks knitted cap and a blue and red Jayhawks t-shirt.

  In the hallway, looking at an IOU, a torn ticket, a birthday card, a photograph, I am thinking about the grave robber, or the archeologist, who finds a coin layers down in the dirt, or bits of parchment three thousand years old.  The guesses that a stranger makes about the past are always wild guesses.

  Better that, though, than to be the seer, who has already seen the future.

  Fat City, Leonard Gardner.  According to “About The Author” at the end of this short novel, Gardner is a Guggenheim Fellow.  His work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Southwest Review.  His screen adaptation of Fat City was made into a film directed by John Huston.  Next, Look Back In Anger, John Osborne.  Then, The Professor’s House, Willa Cather.  Burmese Days, George Orwell.  An Introduction to Sigmund Freud, M.D., and Psychoanalysis, Paul Freeman.  The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud, translated by Joan Riviere.  Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey.  And The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud, a small paperback, with cover illustration by Leonard Baskin and its typography by Edward Gorey.

  What Is Hypnosis, Andrew Salter.  Then, The Fixer, Bernard Malamud.  Foundation And Empire, Isaac Asimov.  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver.  The Transitive Vampire, Karen Elizabeth Gordon.  The Honorary Consul, Graham Greene.  The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with a bright cover illustration by Seymour Chwast on its paper cover.  Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin.  The Ultimate Good Luck, Richard Ford.  Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem.  Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell.  An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, the James Strachey translation.  Sigmund Freud Early Psychoanalytic Writings, edited by Philip Rieff.

  All the Freud books are my first wife’s.  Most have her underlining of sentences, sometimes of whole paragraphs, and her comments, too.   On page 100 of The Future of an Illusion, she writes sideways up the margin, “Let’s stick to what we can do and quit worrying about whether there are angels, etc.!!!”  And, underneath this, she adds, “Amen.”   It has been nearly thirty years since the last time I heard her voice.   Her comments would suggest that I should not expect to hear it again.

  vi

  The Marquis de Sade, compiled and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, includes three complete novels on its 752 pages   What is not included is any explanation for the name “Austryn.”  According to the article appearing in the glow of the MacBook on my desk downstairs this evening, “Austryn Wainhouse:  The Anonymous translator of ‘O’; dead, September 2014.”  Austryn attended Exeter and Harvard, worked for Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press in Paris, and sometimes used the pseudonym Pieralessandro Casavini.   It all sounds very upper end, but there is no mention in this article of his parents or why they named him Austryn.   There is, however, a Wikipedia entry for Harry Austryn Wolfson, American scholar, who was the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center in the United States.  He was born to Sarah Savitsky and Max Mendel Wolfson in Astryna, Vilna Governate, present day Belarus, a few kilometers from the birthplace of one of my own grandfathers.

  A xeroxed excerpt from Lawrence Kushner’s Honey From The Rock is hiding inside the Gershom Scholem Kabbalah.  “Each lifetime has the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” Kushner writes.  “For some there are more pieces.  For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.”   This analogy is a puzzle itself.    Which is more difficult, or more frustrating, the life that has fallen into 500 pieces, or the jigsaw life with one crucial missing piece?

  vii

  This classic question is asked in online forums:

  “What would you take with you to a deserted island?”

  An ax, a spoon, fishing gear.   People say toilet paper.  Somebody says their pet Pomeranian.  Someone else asks about music.   What song, if you had to choose?

  It is a way of asking not only what is most useful, but what do you value, what can you learn from, and what makes you happiest.

  To the deserted island of old age, since that is my situation, which of these books should I take?  The one I need to read, whether for the first time, or over and over.

  Maybe one of these on the eighth shelf, closest to the floor:

  Leadership at the Top, a collection of Harvard Business Review essays on management, sits alongside The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.  Then, The Source, James A. Michener.  Page 310 is the source of a Bazooka Joe comic that was packaged in 1998 with a pink chunk of bubble gum.  “Joe is a space cop,” one of its waxy panels declares.  In The Source, the narrative unspools through levels of a fictional archeological excavation in western Galilee.  Its story goes from, Level XV, the deepest down, where flints were deposited “during the summer of 9811 B.C.E.”   This book’s 1,076 pages have the depth to store plenty of deposits of my own.  Between pages 434 and 435, at Level IX, circa 4 B.C.E., I dug up the ticket stub from David Copperfield, Music Hall at Fair Park, Thu, April 16, 1998, 8:00PM.   Unearthed between other pages, the tear-off from a branded notepad, Sheraton Marrakesh Avenue de la Menara, and a review from The New Yorker of the film Shakespeare in Love, screenplay by Tom Stoppard.  “Like Shakespeare himself,” the reviewer sniffs, “Stoppard is not very good at creating original plots.”

  The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy, has suffered a torn spine.  In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl, bits of paper no bigger than fingernails mark specific pages.  Next, The Chosen, Chaim Potok.  Then, The Bhagavad-Gita, translated and with an introduction and afterword by Barbara Stoler Miller.  The Aeneid, Virgil, edited by Wendell Clausen.  Catch-22, Joseph Heller.  Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder, translated by Paulette Moller.  The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien.  Beowulf, translated and with an introduction by Burton Raffel, has my daughter’s name on an inside page, alongside a stamp from her middle school.  In those middle school years, she declared herself to be a Wiccan, and may still be one.  The Three Theban Plays, Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, could be another of her schoolbooks.  If it is hers, then she is the one writing in large print on a blank page at the very end, “For life to have any meaning there must be torment.”   “Meaning” and “torment” are both underlined.   Or this could be my son’s book.  After all, he attended a Jesuit high school.  He could have been required to read Oedipus the King.  He might then be the one who underlined “the dark wings beating around him shrieking doom,” and “It’s all chance, chance rules our lives,” and “Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark.”   The shepherd’s “I wish to god I’d died that day” is also underlined.   As is “The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all,” which is spoken by the Messenger.   And then, by Oedipus himself, “Oblivion – what a blessing…for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.”  Underline, underline.

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, is definitely my son’s.  There is an NBA trading card marking his place in the story of Huck and Jim.  This card for Hakeem Olajuwon, 1992 College Basketball Greats, University of Houston, came out of a Kellogg’s-branded box of Raisin Bran.  Stories, T.C. Boyle, has a photo of my daughter when she was a teenager.  She is on her bed, wearing jeans and a black shirt that says “Good Witch” across her chest.  I can also make out, tacked and taped on the walls behind her, the feathery dream catcher and the Ansel Adamsy poster of the moon rising over mountains.  The room in the photograph is no longer available.  It is a ghost in the house, her room behind the hallway before the remodeling replaced it with built-in hallway bookcases and a master bedroom and bath.  She cannot return to it, not that she would want to.

  The Most Important Thing I Know is a small book of “life lessons” from Colin Powell, Maya Angelou, and “Other Eminent Individuals,” compiled by Lorne A. Adrain.  Every other page is a reproduction of a handwritten, signed note from the eminent individual.   A note on the flysheet is a “from Dad” in 2001 to my seventeen-year-old son.   This note is as original and maybe more authentic than the handwritten message from Florence Griffith Joyner, Olympic Gold Medalist, Fastest Woman in the World, who claims on her page, “I cried every day for a new pair of shoes, until I saw the man with no feet.”  Next, Fences, August Wilson.  Poetics, Aristotle, unabridged.   The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck, M.D.

  Another Beowulf.  This one is translated by Ruth P.M. Lehmann and has my son’s name on the inside front cover.  It also holds a printed list of assignments, folded up on a sheet of green paper.  The first assignment: “Look for examples in the test for the following terms and ideas:  Kleos, Aresteia, Commitatus, Kairos, Chronos.”  Then another Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle, English versions of Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus At Colonus, Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.  Since it has my son’s name on its inside front cover, the “torment” and the underlined sufferings in the other Sophocles paperback must have been my daughter’s.  In my son’s version, Antigone that has the most underlines.  Also, the lines getting underlined are more about virtue than despair.  “There is no guilt in reverence for the dead,” for example.  And, “You have no right to trample on God’s right.”   Next, More Than Houses, Millard Fuller.  Mythology, Edith Hamilton.  Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare.  A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens.  What Is A Jew?  Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer.  Lord of the Flies, William Golding.

  My son never reads anymore, but on this bottom shelf his name is on inside covers, on flysheets, and across the tops of pages.  These books are the old required reading, the expected To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, next to My Brother Sam Is Dead, James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, A Newberry Honor Book.  He printed his name on the title page of The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart, introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt.  Below his name, he drew a picture of himself.  The drawing is in the style of The Simpson’s.  It faces the black and white photograph of Otto Frank from 1939, captioned “Daddy’s nicest photo.”

  Then, Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder.  The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, based on Beatrix Potter, adapted by David Hately.  Poetry, A Longman Pocket Anthology, R.S. Gwynn.  The Odyssey, Homer, translated by W.H.D. Rouse.  Great Expectations, Charles Dickens has a pink, hole-punched sheet of paper inside.  Unfolded, it is  titled Spring Semester Final Exam English III, May 29, 2002.  It has great expectations, too.  “Directions:  You will write an essay with an introduction, multiple body paragraphs, and a conclusion that illustrates…”   The essay’s outline is expected in advance.   A sentence warns the student not to drop off the outline on the teacher’s desk. “The teacher must be present.”  That warning is in ALL CAPS.

  Dusty paperbacks after skinny paperbacks squeeze into the space remaining on the shelf.   The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton.  The Pearl, John Steinbeck.  Hoops, Walter Dean Myers.  Richard the Third, William Shakespeare.  Tex, S.E. Hinton.  Hamlet, edited and rendered into modern English by Alan Durband.  The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende.  Then, much thicker, The 120 Days of Sodom, Marquis de Sade, Introduction by Hilary E. Hold, Ph.D.  This is not a school book.  Six Centuries of Great Poetry, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine.  Finally, The Crucible, Arthur Miller.  It was school reading at Jesuit Prep.   Under his name, my son writes, “The Elect” and “1. lives Godly life 2. prospers materially.”

  viii

  When it is time to stop looking through the pages of books for memories?  Even if I know when, I may not know how.  Knowing how to stop is one of the projects I am undertaking.

  In The Bhagavad-Gita on this eighth shelf, on the page before its sacred text begins, Barbara Stoler Miller provides a quote from T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets:

  This is the use of memory:
  For liberation –not less of love but expanding,
  Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
  From the future as well as the past.

  It sounds grand.  And it seems to makes sense, even if just barely.  This can also be the project underway, using memory for liberation.

  Chapter Thirteen
  ALL WORK AND NO PLAY

  In the different translations of Homer turning up on this odyssey through the shelves, the sea is “wine-dark” in all of them. It is formulaic, a translation of the Greek that works as filler in the dactylic hexameter of the original.

  It is difficult to notice the variability of the world.  Easier, to flatten it out, to make things that are different the same and fit them into a formula, where they lose distinction and no small part of their miraculous beauty.

  Until this morning, I never noticed that all the top shelves of these hallway bookcases are not the same height.   The top shelves of the first four bookcases are eleven inches tall.   On the last three bookcases, the top shelves are fifteen inches.  The second shelves on the first three bookcases are eleven inches, the second shelf of the fourth bookcase is thirteen inches, and, on bookcases five through seven, second shelves are only nine inches.  The third shelves down vary, too.   First three bookcases, eleven inches.  Bookcases four through seven, only nine inches.  Shelves four through eight on all seven of the hallway bookcases are also nine inches, top to bottom.

  ii

  Sixty years ago, I got no further in In Search of the Miraculous than the “all our love always” note on its flysheet from my parents.  This evening, I reached page 20, where the narrator has one of his tedious talks with the spiritual master:

  “In the course of one of our talks, I asked G., ‘Is it useful to read what is called mystical literature?’

  ‘Yes,’ said G. ‘A great deal can be found by reading.  You might already know a great deal, if you knew how to read.  I mean, if you understood everything you have read in your life.’”

  Exactly.  If only everything I have read had also been understood.  On this trek through the books on my shelves, I am several switchbacks down the mountain from understanding.  Mostly, at the scenic turnouts and the rest stop of naming and listing.  Without question, I am reading In Search of the Miraculous without understanding.   As sentences tumble down the page, I am stumbling over my mother giving me this book for my sixteenth birthday.   I do not understand why she did that.  What I can understand is that I can no longer ask her.

  Fourth bookcase, first shelf.

  First in line, three book-sized boxes—part of a psychologist’s tools of trade.   One is labeled Rorschach Psychodiagnostic Plates, published by Western Psychological Services.  The other two labels are in German:   Psychodiagnostik Taflen, published by Hans Huber in Bern.  Each box contains the same ten thick cardboard cards with blots on them.  Some of these blots are black and white, others are in color, and most of them look like smashed bats.  Not for baseball, but mammals with wings outspread.   Next, a spiral-bound Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale booklet.  It has a page of simple line drawings — bird, rooster, duck — and another page of geometric shapes – triangle, square, circle, ellipse, rectangle, and one that may be a trapezoid.  Or a parallelogram.   Then another page, this one with a line drawing of a story.   In the drawing, a man from the days when men wore fedoras is walking toward a sun that is either rising or setting on a horizon that is inches away.  Even though the sun is ahead of him, so is his shadow, which does not seem intelligent.  Maybe that is the point.

  A blue spiral-bound WISC Manual has tables of Scaled Score Equivalents for Raw Scores of those taking the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children.  A green spiral-bound manual for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale gives the directions for administering its tests of Similarities, Digits Backward, Vocabulary, Picture Completion, Block Design, and Object Assembly.  For Object Assembly, the tester is instructed to “present the Manikin, Profile, Hand, and Elephant in that order.”  I am guessing these are puzzle pieces.   For the Manikin and the Profile, the time limit is 120 seconds.  For the Hand and Elephant, allow 180 seconds, and “Bonuses are given for rapid performances.”  Just as Professor Montague said in 1969 in a classroom in Los Angeles, other things being equal, speed is a virtue.

  The rest of this top shelf:

  Sweat Your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice, Gabrielle Roth.  Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and introduced by Rhoda A. Hendriks.  Greek Myths, Illustrated Edition, Robert Graves.  Let Me Tell You A Story, Red Auerbach & John Feinstein, is a gift my daughter gave her brother in 2004.  It has been left behind by both of them.  Then, The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho.  Bali, Knopf Guides.  Empire of the Soul, Paul William Roberts.  A New Introduction To Greek, Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips, Jr.  Though I took a semester of Greek, I no longer understand even the English in the heading on page 141, which announces the new section on Irregular Second Aorists.

  Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, Jenny Randles and Peter Hough, lists crop circles, ball lightning, alien abductions, unidentified flying objects, time slips, psychic detectives, spontaneous human combustion, , thoughtography, the Men in Black, and the Loch Ness monster on its cover.   The Complete Rhyming Dictionary Revised, edited by Clement Wood.  A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein.   As the Future Catches You, Juan Enriquez, hides an article from Parade Magazine, March 2008, on “The Lessons I’m Leaving Behind,” and a printout from the March 2008 article in O, The Oprah Magazine about “Five Things Happy People Do”, and a March 2008 email from my sister.  Subject:  David wrote this poem.  David is her older son.  In his twenties, he was diagnosed with tongue cancer.   Three-fourths of his tongue was removed at M.D. Anderson.   David is in his fifties now and runs a one-man music publishing and promotions business for death metal bands.  My sister’s email includes two dozen short lines of the poem he wrote.  Its title, “Inside the Oral Graveyard.”

  The Rake’s Progress, libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman.  Collected Poems, Yvor Winters.  Becoming a Person, Carl R. Rogers.  Tales of the Alhambra, Washington Irving.  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Tarzan and The Ant Men, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, Copyright, 1924, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.   I am sliding this hardback Tarzan from the shelf.  Chapter 1 begins, “In the filth of a dark hut, in the village of Obebe the cannibal, upon the banks of the Ugogo, Esteban Miranda squatted upon his haunches and gnawed upon the remnants of a half-cooked fish.”   Then, back it goes, into its crevice between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward FitzGerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with illustrations by Edmond J. Sullivan.

  Selected Poems, Robert Lowell, hides an index card with a quote from Henry Miller, “We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the company at all costs.”   Next, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams.  Then, New Stories from The South, edited by Shannon Ravenel.  Collected Longer Poems, W.H. Auden.   Prater Violet, Christopher Isherwood.   Tradition and Poetic Structure, J.V. Cunningham.   And then, the plain red binding of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon, published by Coward-McCann, Inc., 1929.  This unread book is a “happy, happy birthday” gift from Peter Whaley in 1978.  Peter was back in Somerville by `1978, or already in the foreign service.  His folded letter left inside is dated 9/28/78 and explains that he is sending a birthday book now, months before my birthday, because he is moving and worries that he might misplace it.  He wishes me “the best year yet.”   And then, “P.S.  The book isn’t valuable or anything, but it is hard to find when you need one.”  This is piquant, midway between a smile and ridicule, Peter imagining a time will come when I would need one, or that there ever was such a time.

  New Collected Poems, Robert Graves, uses a Milton Glaser illustration on a postcard from the Russian Tea Room as its bookmark.  The business card bookmarking the page in Selected Poems, Robert Lowell, is less storied, from Leonard’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, 3524 Inwood Road.  Its local address on Inwood is a block north of Lemmon Avenue.  This is an intersection passed a thousand times.  Still, no memory of Leonard’s; zero, not of the name, not of a single cocktail.  This evening, though, Google Street View takes me to 3524 Inwood Road.   I can roll to the left and then to the right over the bumpy signage of Discount Tire, the place that has replaced Leonard’s Restaurant.

  The reproduction of an illustrated page from the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales on a souvenir postcard left in Moly and My Sad Captains, Thom Gunn, came from the counter of the gift shop in the Huntington Library in San Marino.  No idea where the telephone number penciled on its back comes from.  It has no area code.  The 213?  The 415?  Like so much in memory, all I know is that I knew this number.   Then, Collected Poems 1909-1962, T.S. Eliot.  The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, introduction by W.H. Auden.  To The Air, Thom Gunn, David R. Godine Publisher, copyright 1974 Thom Gunn.  Jack Straw’s Castle and Other Poems, Thom Gunn.  Selected Writings, Charles Olson, edited, with an introduction by Robert Creeley.  Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, a New Directions “paperbook.”  Turtle Island, Gary Snyder.  The Back Country, Gary Snyder.  This book offers comments from one of its unknown prior owners.  “He is in the city,” she writes in one margin, in pillowy handwriting.  A passage in another poem “describes working as a cook.”  Elsewhere, she points out that a certain object is “sacred in Japan.”  After the two Gary Snyder books, a copy of Evergreen Review, No. 22.  Jan-Feb 1962.   It, too, pushes me to wonder how it got here.  I was ten years old in 1962, and not an Evergreen Review reader when “new work” from Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs appeared on its pages.  Also, Evgeny Evtushenko’s poem Babii Yar.   On the “Contributors” page, the Review announces that “Pablo Neruda is fast becoming known,” and Evtushenko is a “a young Soviet poet going to Cuba shortly to work on a film.”  On its back pages, there is a small ad for a book by Delmore Schwartz and a larger one for The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz’s new book.

  At the end of this top shelf, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller, preface by Anais Nin.  Its paper cover doubles as a book jacket, with flaps.  The price on a flap, 60 Frs.  On its title page, The Obelisk Press, 16 Place Vendome.  I might have found this book in a Paris bookstall.  The cover says Fourth Printing, June 1938.  Also on the cover, two quotes, a dull one from T.S. Eliot, and then something spicier from Ezra Pound:  “At last an unprintable book that is fit to read.”   Even blurbing, Pound is il miglior fabbro.

  iii

  If the brain is a recording device, then everything is in there – whatever has been seen, maybe even what was felt.  But there is no proof of life for most of what is lost in those internal tunnels.  I can find shards, however.  I can speculate.  In Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, there is a note from Maeve Kincaid in 1974, with her list of the Williams Carlos Williams poems she is recommending.  A memory pressed between two pages begins to rise.  It is a flickering image of a street in Cambridge, night time, Maeve Kincaid.  And it is sticky, this memory.  Even if the darkness, the street, the streetlamp, the winter coats we are wearing, all that detail, what Maeve said — none of that exists.  Tradition and Poetic Structure, J.V. Cunningham, brings back the day I rode a bicycle from Cambridge to Waltham, using I-90 part of the way.  It seems unlikely that this ever happened, the bike ride on the interstate part.  It was not a long ride, but too long ago to recall anything further.   If I sat in on a class with J.V. Cunningham at Brandeis, the other students, our desks, if there were desks – all that has evaporated.   To The Air, Thom Gunn, works the same way.  It summons up a sunny morning in Berkeley.   I am in a small classroom where Thom Gunn is teaching.  He asks the students to introduce ourselves and is annoyed when I admit I am not a registered student.  Nothing else remains from that, other than his comment later that no criticism is worth reading.

  The second shelf of the fourth hallway bookcase holds the tallest books.  Usually, the taller the book, the more likely it is full of pictures.  This general rule does not apply to two towering volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Or to Family Interaction Research – A Methodological Study Utilizing the Family Interaction Q-Sort, one of the hardbound copies of my first wife’s dissertation.  Its tall white spine is next to the thicker blue Physicians Desk Reference, 47^th Edition.   Next, How To Write and Sell Your First Novel, Oscar Collier with Frances Spatz Leighton.   Frances Spatz Leighton “earned the nickname Queen of Female Ghosts,” because she ghostwrote over thirty books, including My Life with Jackie Kennedy.   Take Care of Yourself – The Consumer’s Guide to Medical Care, Donald M. Vickery, M.D. and James F. Fries, M.D., is “The 3-Million-Copy Bestseller” and an “All New, Completely Revised, Updated Version,” from 1986.

  Most of these taller books are mine only under a law of abandoned property.   The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy 1931-1951, Chester Gould, conforms to the tall-equals-pictures rule.  So does Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits, G.B. Trudeau, with its “overture” by William F. Buckley, Jr.  So does Tolkien’s Ring, David Ray, illustrations by Alan Lee, who is also one of the illustrators in Tolkien’s World, Paintings of Middle-earth.

  The LIFE Millennium – The 100 Most Important Events and People of the Past 1,000 Years, edited by Robert Friedman and marketed to capitalize on the Y2K ballyhoo, lists three books among the most important events of the past thousand years.   Only one of them is on my shelves.  Don Quixote, from 1605, ranks as LIFE’s number 96.    LIFE names the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 as the most important event of the past thousand years. It is number one.   I do not own the Gutenberg Bible.  I do have several of the 2,500,000,000 Bibles that the editors of LIFE say have been sold or distributed worldwide.  The Tale of Genji is the third book listed, from 1008.  It is number 83 on LIFE’s list.  I have not yet come across it, but there could be excerpts hiding in Aunt Bertha’s World’s Greatest Books or in Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf. 

  Alaska, Images of the Country, photographs by Galen Rowell, text by John McPhee.  The message I wrote to my son on the first page of this gift is the typical parent-to-child rhetoric of encouragement and lies. “Summer 1999 – It’s a wide and beautiful world out there, and it belongs to you.”   He was fifteen.  We had just gone to Alaska, or had just returned – my two, Pam, and her son.   So, three teenagers and the woman I married two years later.  Of those four, only Ben is still in my wide world.

  Then, Dream Gardens, Tania Compton and Andrew Lawson.  Between its pages, a lined yellow sheet with twelve names of water lilies written down, five of them circled — Joey Tomocik, Barbara Dobbins, Colorado, Texas Dawn, Pickerel Rush.  Below that, names of goldfish — Shubunken, Calico, Fantail.  There is something primal about naming.  No wonder it was a privilege given to Adam when the world was new.  Next, Wisdom of the West, Bertrand Russell, begins with Thales and finishes at Wittgenstein.  The jacket this oversized book wore on the particleboard shelf in my bedroom when I was a teenager still fits.  Its glossy cover is still dominated by a marble bust of Epicurus.   Epicurus may have preached that pleasure is the highest good, but he looks grim in marble.  The two bookmarks, one blue, one yellow, left in this book are the paper bookmarks given away at the Loyola Village Branch of the Westchester Public Library, Los Angeles County, circa 1964.   Each still has the same slogan:  Read More, Achieve More.

  The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume I, A-O.   The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume II, P-Z.   Under the dark blue wave of those two volumes, The Art of Drowning, Billy Collins.  Then, Neo Glassism, Taikoh Momoyamano-Hana, 1^st Exhibition 2003, is a slim catalog of elegant, silvery glass bamboo shapes, handsome bowls, and swirls of color.  All its writing is in Japanese, except for a “…Love always, 2006” note at the beginning.  It did not help.   Pam left the marriage later that same year.  Then, Picasso:  A Retrospective, edited by William Rubin. 

  Tracy Kidder wrote “Hobo Convention,” one of the articles in a hardbound Audience magazine from 1971 on this same shelf.  Even further back in time, the hardbound Horizon from November 1962 has a review by Saul Bellow of a Bunuel film, and color reproductions brighten a section on “The Passion According to Rouault.”  H.R. Trevor Roper, J. H. Plumb, and other highbrows are also in Horizon.  Treasures of Tutankhamen is an exhibit catalog.  I might or might not have gone to see it.  I am nearly certain I saw it, or its blockbuster sequel, though certainty and memory are points on two different axes, and sometimes there is only a broken line between them, if they connect at all.

  Indoor Gardening Made Easy, Gay Hellyer.  Birds of the World, David Stephen, illustrations by Takio Ishida.  Graphic Design America is a vanity publication, as is AIGA Graphic Design USA 5.  Then, Chin Chang and the Dragon’s Dance, Ian Wallace.  Eloise, Kay Thompson.  Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes, Marguerite Angeli.  The Aesop for Children, with pictures by Milo Winter.  Of the Just Shaping of Letters, Albrecht Durer, another book of unknown provenance, and the last on this shelf of tall towers.

  iv

  The plan was to write something impersonal, using these books on my shelves as part of an abstract argument.  To compare the unread to the tree that falls in the forest.  To name, list, and count, and then just see where it leads.  It has led to side stories being the story.  And to rambling and recounting.  Memories could have been a minor part of this.  Instead, books as stiff as headstones turned into touchstones, evoking school days, marriages, parenthood, travels, work life, aspirations, and pretense.

  People have asked, “What do you do?”
  If I mumble, “I’m writing” the next question is always the same.
  “What are you writing?”
  This is often followed by, “Novel?”
  I do not want to answer that I am writing about books on shelves.  So I come up with a clarification that is truthful, replying that I do not know what I am writing yet, but I am working on it.
  The response to this is not curiosity.  It is not admiration either.  So sometimes I embellish.
  “I have written hundreds of pages of it so far though.”
  This is also true, and it seems to help.
  Subsequent responses vary.   Some will tell me how they also want to write, most often memoir or “the story” of their lives.  They say it is for their children.   And once, I got a response to “I have written hundreds of pages” that veered in a different direction.
  “Ever see The Shining?”
  A stranger at a party asked me that, after we exchanged the “what do you do” and “I am writing, I do not know what I am writing yet, and I have written hundreds of pages of it” sequence.
  “Yes,” I nodded.  “Stanley Kubrick movie.  Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall.”
  There have been no Stephen King books so far on these hallway shelves, and I have never seen The Shining.   I am aware of it though.
  He tells me how the Jack Nicholson character, who is crazy, is also a writer and apparently hard at work at it.  Moreover, what this writer is writing is also unknown, at least to his wife, the Shelley Duvall character.  Then, he tells me what happens next.  In The Shining, Shelley Duvall finds herself in the room where Jack Nicholson does his writing – on a typewriter – when Nicholson is not there.   So she discovers what he has been writing.  It is a single sentence, the same sentence, over and over and over.
  I tell him that I use a laptop. password protected; so, that will not happen to me.   Also, I am not married, and my dog shows no interest in what I am writing.  Then I agree that all work and no play is unhealthy.

  On the third shelf down, fourth hallway bookcase:

  The Way of Zen, Alan W. Watts.  Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Insects, Dr. Ross H. Arnett, Jr. and Dr. Richard L. Jacques, Jr.   Unstuck, Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro, is a book I bought for my son in 2004, after he flunked out of college.  “As you move forward, one step at a time,” I wrote on the page across from the inside cover.   How To Be Happy, Dammit, Karen Salmansohn, offers one wisdom per page, in large type.  There is a yellow Post-it flagging the bromide on page 27.  Wooden, Coach John Wooden with Steve Jamison, another gift to my son in 2004.  If I had a do-it-yourself Dewey system of categories, “gifts left behind” would be one of those categories.

  Next, The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles.  Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean.  Warrior of the Light, Paulo Coelho.  The Ramayana, A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic, Ramesh Menon.   Inside, a folded-up printout of “The Getting Things Done Method.”  Seven paragraphs, dated 2/13/2007 — the day before Valentine’s and, coincidentally, the date my divorce was finalized.  An Eric Hoffer quote at the end of paragraph seven: “Our greatest pretenses are built not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”   Who Knew? Things You Didn’t Know About Things You Know Well, David Hoffman, provides 196 pages of revelations, one per page.  It claims there are 1,750 O’s in every can of SpaghettiOs.

  Then, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare.  The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, edited by Irving Riber.  The Stones of Venice, Mary McCarthy.  Reunions:  Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones, Raymond Moody, M.D. with Paul Perry.  The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen.  A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe.   Japan, Patrick Smith, has six colorful tickets stored between its pages.   One of them admits to the garden remains from a palace built by Emperor Kameyama in 1264 and converted into a Zen Buddhist temple in 1291.  “This garden should be appreciated with a calm mind,” it advises on the back of the ticket.  Another ticket is from Kiyomizu Temple, also in Kyoto.  “When Kamnnon-sama arises in your mind,” it says, “then you are in Oneness with Kamnnon-sama.”   Kamnnon, the goddess of compassion and mercy, is slender, androgynous and thought to be good at answering prayers.  The four other tickets have only Japanese on them and lead to unremembered places.

  The Tels, Paul Black, holds onto a one free non-new release movie rental coupon from Blockbuster Video, valid from June 1, 2008 to June 30, 2008.   Next, Emily Dickinson’s Poems, selected and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson.  The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry, edited by Perry Miller.  The Discovery of the Great West:  La Salle, Francis Parkman. Birds of Texas, Keith A. Arnold and Gregory Kennedy.  Despite so many books on my shelves about plants, animals, mountains, and stars on my shelves, my hours are spent indoors.  Hindoo Holiday, J.R. Ackerley.  Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.

  Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung is a souvenir from the China trip in 1999 or 2000.  So, part of the journey into a second marriage.  Five of us went together.  The not yet blended family that never did blend.   Do those three teenagers who are now in middle aged remember Beijing and Shanghai?  They insisted we eat at the largest KFC restaurant in Beijing, probably the largest on earth, and then in Shanghai at a Subway sandwich franchise.   The newspaper clipping in “the little red book” is from a later time. “Mao Anquing, the only known surviving son of Mao Zedong, has died, a government news agency reported Saturday.”  Dated March 24, 2007, the month after my second marriage officially ended.  It is possible to pretend at the beginning, but endings are real.

  Al Carrell, “the Super Handyman” writes “Super Best Wishes & Much Love” on the inside cover of Super Handyman’s Do-It-Quick-But-Do-It-Right Home Repair Hints.  Life’s Little Instruction Book, H. Jackson Brown, Jr., has 1,560 one-line wisdoms.  The first four:  Compliment three people every day.  Have a dog.  Watch a sunrise at least once a year.  Remember other people’s birthdays.  At least I have a dog.   Next, Golgo13 Perfect Machine of Snipe, Volume 19, a pocket book of manga cartooning.  Bagumbo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut.   Discovery of the Yosemite in 1851, Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, M.D., Mariposa Battalion.  Ninety-Two In The Shade, Thomas McGuane.  1,000 Places To See Before You Die, Patricia Schultz.   The 10 Best of Everything, Nathaniel Lande and Andrew Lande, “An Ultimate Guide for Travelers” from National Geographic.   London, The Ultimate Key to the City, Louise Nicholson, is a “Citypack” guide, one of the Fodor brands.  It and Fodor’s Essential Israel and Cadogan Guides Spain at the very end of the shelf belong with the travel books behind the downstairs desk, with their “Five Perfect Days” and their pictures of jamon iberico, but there is no room.

  v

  Chronology is no part of bookshelf hygiene.  Unlike the archeological digs, where the further down, the further back in time, the past is uncovered on these hallway shelves with no relation to depth.  Memories of the 1970s might be on a high shelf, and those of the 1980s a shelf below.  A book from my own childhood in Los Angeles is alongside one of Aunt Bertha’s from the same city but decades before.   A John Gunther hardback from my parents’ last house in Oceanside comes from further in their past but nearer in mine.

  That house in Oceanside where my mother and father lived their last thirty years is part of a “gated community.”   Homeowners are required to be over 55.  To the eye, their average age Is closer to 75.  That number would be even higher were it not for the occasional sighting of a younger second or third wife.  In the 1980s, when my parents bought in, the development was called Leisure Village.  In a marketing move some years after, it was renamed Ocean Hills, though the main street that weaves around its 2500 homes is still Leisure Village Way.   My sister and I own the Ocean Hills house now.   Since she lives in Pittsburgh, she and her husband take the winters.  They stay most of the six months, from New Year’s Day through the end of June.  I get summers, beginning July 1, though I seldom go.

  The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, drawings by Hans Erni, the first book on the fourth shelf of the fourth bookcase in the hallway, was my sister’s book.  It has her underlines and curvy handwriting throughout.  Murphy, Samuel Beckett, Jupiter Books, has a black and white portrait of the haunted-looking author on its cover, under a cloudy plastic wrapper that was clear when this book was new.  Next, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, S.J. Perelman.  Then New Arabian Nights, Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the Registered Editions Guild books, Art-Type Edition, rescued from the Ocean Hills house.    Its top edge is very dusty.  The “Editorial Note” on page vi describes New Arabian Nights as a collection of stories that first appeared in English periodicals Cornhill Magazine, London, and Temple Bar.  Fantasia of the Unconscious, D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1922 Thomas Seltzer Co., published 1930 by Albert & Charles Boni.  A picture postcard from Yosemite National Park is wedged between pages 13 and 14, at the start of Chapter 2, where Lawrence writes, “We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe.  The universe isn’t a spinning wheel.   It is a cloud of bees…”   A friend of my first wife’s sent the postcard.  “Greetings from a high place,” he writes to her, though the card is addressed to us both.

  Next, The Rinehart Book of Verse, edited by Alan Swallow.  Yellowing scotch tape holds its paper cover together.  Then, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, selected and with an essay by T.S. Eliot.  Baudelaire, Selected Verse, with an introduction and prose translations by Francis Scarfe.  W. H. Auden, selected by the author.  This Penguin Poets Auden saves an obituary inside.  “W. H. Auden Dies in Vienna.”  Cause of death unknown, but it happened on a Friday night and in a hotel.   Inside this slim paperback there are also three sophomoric rhyming tributes to Auden. One of them was written on a napkin:  “The last poet’s dead. Auden, Wystan Hugh/Let’s record the loss and give the man his due….”  Another is on an index card, and each is signed by a someone I knew in September, 1973.  We were college seniors then.   The third, Rick Millington’s, rhymes its way down an entire sheet of lined paper faded enough to have the patina of a manuscript.   If I knew Rick, I no longer know that I knew him.  I have no salvageable memory of him.  So I google him.  Without a doubt, he is Richard Milligan, Helen and Laura Shedd Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Smith College.   Bald, grey beard, bright blue eyes.  No surprise, I do not recognize him.

  Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg, introduction by William Carlos Williams.  This small, square book is The Pocket Poet Series Number Four, City Lights Books, twenty-fourth printing, May 1971.  Cost, $1.  A gift from Leena Shaw, it casts a mind-wandering net, catching Leena, Lou Porter’s black girlfriend, the apartment five floors up near the Natural History Museum in New York, Jacqueline Corl trying out for the Joffrey, and the rust brown water spilling from the spigot into the sink in the bathroom. Leena Shaw, two “e’s” in her first name, gave me this Howl in 1973.  She signed her name on the blank page following page 44, which is the page with the last poem on it.  This poem wanders, too, from its title, In back of the real, to a railway yard in San Jose, to a tank factory.  It goes on for another twenty lines.  In 1973, I thought these Allen Ginsburg poems were crap.   These days I am less firm in judgment.

  Randy Oppenheim also spelled out his name in Howl and Other Poems, on the title page.  The name rings a bell.  It is a tinkling receding from 1973.   He wrote his address, too, 3971 Royal Oak Place, Encino, California, and fifty years later I can look it up on Zillow and swipe across images of a house that was sold the year before for three million dollars.  The real estate company that made that sale is The Oppenheim Group, offices in Los Angeles, Newport Beach, San Diego, and Cabo.  This is coincidence.   In the “About Us” on the firm’s website, the fPresident and Founder is Jason, not Randy.  Moreover, this Oppenheim was featured in the reality-TV series Selling Sunset.  At this point, “never mind” is the best way forward, as is often the case with wanderings that begin in the mind.

  vi

  Coincidence is such a seductive notion.  It has explanatory power, as do accident, chance, and unpredictability.

  So often, the effort to recover a memory leads nowhere.  Just as often, the place it leads is in ruins.  The city of memory has been bombed, and what was concrete is now rubble, the twisty arms of its rebar sticking out.  In the end, the moment of recaptured time and wasting time are the same moment.

  Then again, if I think that everything that happens follows in an unbreakable chain from what preceded it, then to follow from is the same as being controlled by.  So the past not only matters, it is the future as well.

  After Howl, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, Beatrix Potter.  Then The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne.  The economy boarding pass for Seat 4C on a Western Airlines flight in Cathedral, Raymond Carver, has the instruction “Pressent to Stewardess on Boarding Your Flight.”   I find a stained napkin from The Egg Shop & Apple Press surviving in Thoughts of Kierkegaard, presented by W.H. Auden.  Also in this Kierkegaard paperback, handwritten notes on the blank endpapers, with page references.  These notes are not my further thoughts.  They were copied from the text.   From page 146: “I cannot acquire an immediate certainty as to whether I have faith – for to believe means precisely that dialectical hovering which, although in fear and trembling, never despairs.”    This is not a thought I would have had on my own at age twenty-two.

  The cover of McLuhan: Hot & Cool promotes its collection of essays by Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, Howard Gossage, Howard Rosenberg, Tom Wolfe, and George Steiner.  On the cover of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, the New York Herald Tribune annoints McLuhan as “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.”  Next, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett, with a foreword by Albert Einstein.  Then, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse.  And Demian, Hermann Hesse.  Two brochures no bigger than a breast pocket are sandwiched between Einstein and Hesse.  One is about The Blue Boy, the other about Pinkie, and both are souvenirs from the Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery.   Young Torless, Robert Musil.   Group Portrait With Lady, Heinrich Boll.  When Christians Were Jews, Paula Fredriksen.   Candida, A Pleasant Play, Bernard Shaw, copyright 1905, has a bruised green cover that holds on by a rusted paper clip.  Wildflowers of Catalina, John Frick, is a shiny little book overrun with color photos of the Sticky Monkey Flower, Tree Poppy, Giant Sea-Dahlia, California Bindweed, and other bewitching beings.

  Our friend Guy signed By Her Own Admission, Gifford Guy Gibson.  So did Mary Jo Risher and Ann Foreman, the lesbians who were at the center of the trial he wrote the book about.  When Mary Jo’s ex- husband sued her for custody of their children, my first wife testified as an expert on her behalf.  Mary Jo was her patient in counseling.   It was 1977, and custody was awarded to the husband.  By Her Own Admission is stuffed with newspaper clippings, legal documents, and a press release for the ABC Sunday Night Movie made about the case in 1978.  A Question of Love starred Gena Rowlands as Mary Jo and Clu Gulager as ex-husband Doug.  Gwen Arner, who went on to direct episodes of The Waltons, Dallas, Falcon Crest and Dynasty, played the role of The Psychologist.

  Next, When God Talks Back, T.M. Luhrmann.  Be Fierce, Gretchen Carlson.  Simpsons Strike Back Matt Groening.   Crow and Weasel, Barry Lopez.  The Great LIFE Photographers, the Editors of LIFE, a 608-page book of photographs.  The Great Waldo Search, Martin Handford.  Find Waldo Now, Martin Handford.  The Quran, translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, printed in India by Goodword Books.  Another The Qur’an, translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, published by ASIR MEDIA.  This second The Qur’an has a bright green cover and the apostrophe after the r in Quran.

  Abdullah Yusef Ali, translator of The Quran and The Qur’an, was an Indian-British barrister who spoke English and Arabic fluently and, according to Wikipedia, could recite the entire Qur’an from memory.   Born in Mumbai in 1872, he won a scholarship to St. John’s College in Cambridge, married Teresa Mary Shalders at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth in 1900, and fathered three sons and a daughter.   Teresa also had an illegitimate child in 1910.  He divorced her in 1912.  His Wikipedia entry continues.  He supports the British during World War I, receives the CBE in 1917, and marries for a second time in 1920.  That marriage also fails.  Then the story jumps to 1953, when he is seen wandering the streets of London.  He is a pauper.  That November, 1953, while I am turning two in sunny Southern California, Abdullah Yusef Ali is found bewildered in a doorway in Westminster by the London police.  He dies alone in a hospital.  No one claims his body.

  The Baudelaire paperback on this same shelf is one of The Penguin Poets.  I worked over this ragged book sixty years ago, when I was using high school French to translate L’aube spirituelle and Je suis le pipe d’un auteur.  I might still be able to recite some verses, but I am failing to recognize the postcard from Taos Pueblo stuck between its pages.  The card is from James, postmarked Sep. 15, 1972. “Many thanks for forwarding the letter to Galveston,” James writes. “I’m now staying in Taos.”  Despite his claim that I forwarded a letter to Galveston, I have no idea who this is.  I am thinking back, but the past where James stays in Taos is a terra incognita.   And not the past only.  There is forgetfulness.  There is also paying no attention and never noticing.  Browsing through memories is like using a map from the Age of Exploration, where large land masses are simply marked Unknown.  This area of my inner world has the emptiness of an outer space.

  vii

  Fourth bookcase, fifth shelf:

  Dating, Mating, and Manhandling, Lauren Frances.  Gaelic Self-Taught, James McClaren, comes from Thistles & Bluebonnets, a bookstore in Salado off I-35 on the way to Austin.  The bookstore was doors down from an art gallery managed by the painter Ancel Nunn’s former wife.   Both bookstore and gallery were on a narrow street behind the spreading live oak trees of The Stagecoach Inn, where tomato aspic was served for lunch.   Hints of all those flavors float above the unpronounceable Gaelic on these pages.  For those memories, this little book deserves a thank you, a go raibh maith agat.  Next, Dictionary of 501 Spanish Verbs, Christopher Kendris.  German In Three Months, Hugo’s Simplified System.  201 French Verbs, Christopher Kendris again. Then, Vietnamese Phrase Book, V.A. Berlitz.  In Chapter 8, Basic Food, Berlitz teaches how to say Kye nye ‘khong sak, “This is not clean.”   Second Year Latin, Jared W. Scudder, with its olive-green illustrations of Roman soldiers on the flysheet.   Italian in Three Months, another Hugo’s Simplified System.

  Crescent Carnival, Frances Parkinson Keyes, is an 807-page novel published in 1942.  Frances Keyes wrote more than fifty novels.  She was married to a United States Senator.  According to Google, the last name rhymes with “eyes,” not “keys”.  The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem.  “To Dad on your 51^st birthday” appears on its first page.  No signature, but probably from my son.   My daughter might not have been speaking to me by November 2002.  Two months earlier, her birth mother, Barbara, had met her for the first time Technically, for the second time.  The Booklover’s Birthday Book, edited by Barbara Anderman, counts off the days of the year, one per page, and lists the notable birthdays on each.  I share my birthday with Saint Augustine of Hippo.  Also, with Robert Louis Stevenson. 

  201 Little Buddhist Reminders, Barbara Ann Kipfer.  Lillian Hellman, Doris V. Falk.   Jerusalem Walks, Nitza Rosovsky.  Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman.  Jerusalem: Footsteps Through Time, Ahron Horovitz.  The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, paperback school book, with my son’s name on its inside front cover.   Same with The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, Rumble Fish, S.E. Hinton, The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells, and The Man Without A Face, Isabelle Holland, which is Now A Major Motion Picture.

  Courage to Change has no named author.  This is the book I picked up at an Al-Anon meeting, from the meeting room down a corridor in a shopping center.   After my son dropped out of college, he returned home and spent his days either sleeping or playing video games.  Months went by, four months, five months.  My second wife said I needed to put him out “under a bridge” beneath I-35, where the homeless spend their days, because that would “straighten him out.”   That suggestion darkened into a cloud of disagreement that did not brighten our marriage and soon enough ended it.  The details are slipping away, but I went to an Al Anon meeting, to learn “to accept what I cannot change.”  Though it did not work, it was not unhelpful, and the relatives of drunks were kind and understanding.

  The Art of Leadership, George W. Bush, a soft, perfect bound book of portraits of world leaders, lies on top of a horizontal stack at the end of this row.  Just under it, Portraits of Courage, “A Commander- in-Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors,” George W. Bush.  I own both because The Bush Center was a client.  The former President had taken up painting as a pastime.  Also in this stack, A Century of Commitment, author unnamed.  This is another vanity publication, a jacketed coffee table book “Celebrating Commercial Metals Company’s First 100 Years.”  CMC was a client, too.  At the bottom of the stack, two more of my son’s books.   The Book of Rock, Philip Dodd, a bloated history.  And, rock bottom, Eric Clapton, a book of scores, music and words from Clapton Unplugged.  On a loose sheet left inside it, he wrote the guitar tablature for Led Zeppelin’s Over The Hills & Far Away.

  viii

  Books on shelf six of the fourth bookcase are piled in horizontal stacks.  In the first pile, Latin & English Dictionary, John C. Traupman, Ph.D. and 501 Latin Verbs, Richard E. Prior and Joseph Wohlberg.  They are sitting on top of two National Geographic magazines, one from August 1939 and one from that December, and both from who knows where.  Melville Chater writes the lead article in the December 1939 issue, “The Highway of Races,” about his carefree journey along the Danube.   Under the National Geographic issues, a thin book of photographs of Navajo blankets.  In Beauty It Is Finished is edited by Pam Lange.   Then, thirteen TIME magazines from 1969, two Newsweeks from 1969, and one LIFE magazine.   “Nixon Rides The Waves” in one of the TIMEs, and there is “Deadlock in the Middle East” in another.   Someone asks, “Is Prince Charles Necessary?”   Someone else explains “The Kennedy Debacle:  A Girl Dead, A Career In Jeopardy.”  Less hysterical, more mundane, Newsweek has “Moonwalk in Color.”   The LIFE magazine is from Spring 2000.  On its cover, the subscription mailing sticker is addressed to Dr. Melody A. Fortenberry.  Dr. Fortenberry was the psychologist my fifteen-year-old daughter saw in therapy.   Her high school suggested she go, and Dr. Fortenberry was the school’s recommendation.  Eden hated it of course.  She declared that she got nothing out of it, but got a LIFE magazine from Dr. Fortenberry’s waiting room.

  At the time, she was cutting herself.  Or, possibly that began a year after.  I am not sure.  I tell myself that every life is a secret life, that the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes, and nobody is who we think they are.   Probably truer to say that nobody is who we hope they are, and we cannot see what we choose not to.

  A blue Hammond International World Atlas is at the bottom of the pile.

  Another stack on this sixth shelf:

  New York in the Thirties, photographed by Berenice Abbot, lies on top of The New Woman’s Survival Catalog.  The survival catalog is copyright 1973, A Woman-Made Book, $5.  It belonged to Dolores.  It is as oversized as a phone directory.  On its lists of resources, the Chicago Woman’s Liberation Union, Pregnancy Testing done for $1.50.   Much of the rest of this sixth shelf stack is sheet music from my teens in suburban Los Angeles.  Circa 1965, the garage band years– three guitars – lead, rhythm, and base – and drums.  Tired of Waiting for You, Wooly Bully, Little Boxes.  Another LIFE magazine, this one from 1971, sleeps at the bottom of the stack, waiting for some future reader of “Bobby Fischer – The Deadly Gamesman.”

  ix

  On to the seventh shelf.  Leif Enger’s Peace Like A River begins a stream of paperbacks that were assigned to my children by their schools.   It flows through The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, then Death and The Kings Horseman, Wole Soyinka, before emptying at Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, edited by Roma Gill, OBE, M.A., Cantab. B. Litt, Oxon.   “I am Kaha Huna, Goddess of Surfing,” my daughter writes on the title page of Death and The King’s Horseman, drawing a wavy line and a stick figure.   Under the front cover, an admission slip from 11/14/02; the Attendance Officer has signed an excuse for lateness.  George Karl’s basketball memoir This Game’s the Best is my son’s.  Between two of its pages, a business card for Harvey’s Paint and Body, Collision Repair Specialists, 4310 Maple Avenue.   We were on a first-name basis with John Harvey.

  Also on this shelf, The Alhambra, Washington Irving.  Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot. Contemporary Hebrew 1, Menahem Mansoor.  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to The Talmud, Rabbi Aaron Parry.  After that, a stack of children’s books that serve as a bookend.  There is Spot Looks at Colors, Eric Hill, and Spot Looks at Opposites, Eric Hill.  Ma Maison, textes de Nina Filipek, dessins de Louise Barrel.  Little Boy Blue’s Nursery Rhymes, a Brimax Rhyme Time Board Book.   And The Emperor and the Nightingale, Hans Christian Andersen.

  From this hill of children’s books, I can see all the way to a different house, and into its upstairs bedrooms, where there is a striped sofa, lamplight, moths beating against the black windowpanes.  When exactly those brief years of reading to two children began needs more illumination than the lamplight provides.   It might begin in 1987, in a reading out loud to a two-year-old and her three-year-old brother   It is fuzzy, that beginning.  Even cloudier though is when it all ended.   Age six and age seven?   When he could read on his own, when she preferred to read on her own.   Maybe one or two years after that.

  A second stack of children’s books on the seventh shelf, fourth hallway bookcase, begins with Baby’s First Words, which are chair, rug, blocks, and ball.  In the cover illustration, Baby seems to be around three years old.  Next book down, Mother Goose Picture Riddles, Lisl Weil.  Under that, Szekeres’ A B C, with pages as thick as sheets of balsawood.  Next, Find the Canary, Neil and Ting Morris.   Origami 1, Mrs. Atsuko Nakata.  Only the Cat Saw, Ashley Wolff.   James Marshall’s Mother Goose.  Colors, Sarah Lynn.  My First Word Book, Richard Scarry.  The Tiny Seed, Eric Carle.  The Mixed-up Chameleon, Eric Carle.  Oh, What a Mess, Hans Wilhelm.  The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System, Joanna Cole.  Richard Scarry’s Mother Goose.  A sticker decorates the title page of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, Dr. Seuss.  “Kindergarten Graduation, May 1992,” it says.  Next, Goodnight My Friend Aleph, Tova Mordechai.  Then, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories, Beatrix Potter, illustrated by Lulu Delacre.  Then, Amazing World of Ants, Francene Sabin, illustrated by Eulala Conner.  And then, Hanukkah Cat, Chaya Burstein.   Daisy, Percy’s Predicament, and Woolly Bear are three stories in one of The Rev. W. Awdry’s Thomas The Tank Engine and Friends books.   Underneath it, My First Picture Book of Numbers, Brian Miles, illustrated by Anne and Ken McKie.  These children’s books on an old man’s shelves are sweet and sour.   Tell me, children, does the past spoil, can it turn bad, like cream?  Everywhere You Look, stories and poems by different authors, looks like a primary school textbook.  On its first page, this poem by Arnold Lobel:

  Books to the ceiling, books to the sky.
  My piles of books are a mile high.
  How I love them!
  How I need them!
  I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

  So true.  So is the illustration that goes alongside the poem.   A house made of books towers above an old man, who looks, as some of us do, like a bearded gnome.  He is squatting on two of the lumpy books and holds a third book open in his hands.  His glasses sit on the very edge of his nose.

  If only memories had their own Dewey numbers, so they could be easily retrieved.  But they do not.  We need to rely on others to remind and confirm, to gently correct or corroborate.  My estranged daughter is one of those whom I expected to be a borrower from the library of our shared memories, checking them out, then returning them to me and slowing my forgetfulness.   She might also have discovered that the book of her life as a teenager is not the same book at forty, if only she would pick it up and read it again.

  No use lamenting though.   Of necessity, memories disappear.  Others corrode.  And some memories oxidize, developing a patina of verdigris far lovelier than how they began.

  Two bigger, thicker paperbacks anchor the second stack of children’s books.  Prescription for Dietary Wellness, Phyllis A. Balch, C.N.C. and James F. Balch, M.D., and Prescription for Nutritional Healing, Balch and Balch.  The two Balch books are bloated with loose paper.   Articles and notes, most of them in the “foods that fend off cancer” category, were collected in 1997.  “Potentially Protective Foods” include beans and peas, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli.  “Broccoli haters may find the research to their liking,” according to the article from the Associated Press, which reports that Brussel sprouts are fifty times more protective than broccoli.  There are even “Fats That Heal.”   Silent for the past thirty years, “The Healthiest Diet on the Planet” speaks up in the hallway. “It’s not complicated,” it advises.  “You just need to eat 8 different foods every day.”  Date it a month before my first wife’s death.   In a xeroxed ten pages on Flax LNA, “lipid researcher Johanna Budwig recommends flax oil for enemas in colon cancer and bowel obstruction.”   I am throwing out a 50-page booklet from Dr. David Williams.  “After you read this bulletin, you won’t die of cancer,” it promises in boldface on its cover.   Dr. Julian Whitaker mailed his Health & Healing newsletter, with Forward Plus Daily Regimen supplements promotions.  He pitches The Whitaker Program.  A Fall/Winter 1997 tabloid-sized Healthy Cell News, from ALV Publishers, Inc, goes into the trash as well.  First, though, I take a last look at the low-res black and white photograph of its expert, Dr. Johanna Budwig, renowned for her flaxseed findings.  Dr. Budwig looks like death warmed over.

  x

  The bottom shelf in the fourth bookcase down the hall also has books for children, but these are from high school.  Another copy of Catch-22, Joseph Heller, lands here.  It is assigned high school reading.  Same with two Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. paperbacks, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.  , The Orphan Train Adventures, Joan Lowery Nixon.  The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas, Paul Zindel.  Then, The Barracks Thief, Tobias Wolff.   The bookmark in Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther, is a Terry Steinbach baseball card, catcher, Minnesota Twins, voted the American League’s starting catcher and named MVP of the All-Star game in 1988.   So, my son’s book.  His name is written in The Short Guide to Writing About Literature, Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain.  Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello, has the yellow Voertman’s Used sticker on its thin spine.  Voertman’s is a bookstore in Denton, near the University of North Texas.  So, my daughter left that one behind, from her college years.  The Merchant of Venice has my son’s name on its inside front cover.   At the Jesuit high school, Father Leininger taught first-year English.  Grey-haired Father Leininger assigned only one Shakespeare play to read and discuss that year.   Not Macbeth, not The Tempest.   Not Hamlet, either, that story of a young man in confusion, which all his students might have related to.   Father Leininger preferred The Merchant of Venice.

  A newspaper clipping, two ticket stubs, a credit card receipt and a postcard are preserved between pages of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.   The postcard announces a reception at a gallery in New York for an artist who had been a patient of my first wife’s.  He gave her one of his paintings.  It is a large canvas.  It looks like a brown tunnel, and it stays outside, in the garage behind rakes and brooms.   One of the newspaper clippings is a book review, headlined “No dearth of near-death tales.”   It reviews Saved by the Light, Life After Life, Embraced by the Light, and other popular books that belong to the vogue of “I died but not really” stories.

  Alaska Stories, edited by John and Kirsten Miller.   John McPhee, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Jack London, and Robert Coles are among its multiple authors.   I wrote the gift note on its title page, to my daughter, “who will live and write many stories of her own – Summer 1999.”  Nice to think a gift would be kept, but children do not always want what parents have to give, and she wanted none of it.  Winnie-The-Pooh, A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepard.  The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare.  Dubliners, James Joyce.   Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.  Another Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse.  How many Siddharthas does it take for the American teenager to get through high school?  The World’s Religions, Huston Smith.  Another Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, on this same shelf.  Since I have never read anything by Vonnegut, each child must have had the same assignment.  God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut yet again.

  Total Orgasm, Jack Lee Rosenberg, illustrations by Joseph Jaqua.  It will always be 1972 under its covers.  10,000 Ways to Say I Love You, Gregory J.P. Godek.  Way number 1 is “Honor your partner’s individuality.”  Way number 5,180 is “Never say never.”   This is one of those books of unknown origin; they might make a subcategory in a reorganization of these shelves.  The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia, Steven Jay Rubin, is my son’s book.  So is The Canary Prince, Eric Jon Nones.  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bridge, H. Anthony Medley with Michael Lawrence.  Black Earth:  The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder.

  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling, is in front of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Squeezed between them, three MAD magazines from 1966.  Also, an Official Souvenir Program from the 1965 World Series, Dodgers and Twins.  And the comic book Venom Attacks the Amazing Spider-Man, each word of its title a feat of typographic art.  Last book on this bottom shelf of the fourth hallway bookcase:   Arms & Armor, Eyewitness Books.  The handwriting of “For your 8^th Birthday with lots of love – June 10, 1992” on the title page is a perfect match for the writing on the flyleaf of In Search of the Miraculous.   The “Mom and Dad” there became “Grandma and Grandpa” here.

  Chapter Fourteen
  JOY

  In The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave writes of a joy that is retroactive.  This is a joy that is released by a memory or a sudden recollection and, he writes, as likely to find expression in tears, rather than in smiles.

  There are no books on the two bottom shelves of the fifth hallway bookcase.  And the two top shelves are cookbooks already named.  So, that leaves only four shelves to account for.  The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, is first on shelf three.  Then, Modern English Usage, H. W. Fowler, in front of Along the Ganges, Ilija Trojanow.  The name Trojanow is too strange to pass over, but there is not much to learn in the author’s bio under his photo on the flap bending around the corner of the glossy jacket.  Ilija is male and born in Bulgaria.

  Everyman, Philip Roth.  A paragraph about authenticity, from W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, has been left on an index card.  “No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be,” Auden writes, “but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a short while, whether something he has written is authentic.”   Also on this third shelf down: When She Woke, Hillary Jordan.  Kim, Rudyard Kipling.  Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson.  Wittgenstein’s Poker, David Edmonds and John Eidenow.  The Worse Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht.  Among the worst-case scenarios teased on the cover:  How to Escape from Quicksand, How to Break Down a Door, How to Land a Plane, and How to Wrestle an Alligator.  Then, Kisses, Hulton Getty.  Incompleteness, Rebecca Goldstein.  Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith.  And The Tree Where Man Was Born, Peter Matthiessen.

  In the shade of two pages of The Tree Where Man Was Born, I discover a printout from The Standard Interactive, Wednesday, October 5, 2005.   I have never have heard of The Standard Interactive, but it has Your Views, Your TV Guide, Your Stars, and Your Top Puzzles.  In the “Ask Anything” column, someone asks, “Is it true that HIV/AIDS was created by Americans to depopulate the black race?”   The Standard Interactive cities Dr. Leonard Horowitz of Harvard University and goes on about a biological warfare “programme,” and the “Federally-funded Special Cancer Virus Programme,” and Richard Nixon, John D. Rockefeller,, III, and the “database of the mycoplasma computers.”  The column even offer several flowcharts.   One from 1971 is “the irrefutable missing link.”   With all its programmes, The Standard Interactive must be British.

  After that, A Happy Death, Albert Camus.  Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore.  Common Sense, Thomas Paine, a numbered copy from the “This Heritage Remembered” series, with illustrations by Jack Unruh.  The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Mark Twain, is also from “This Heritage Remembered.”   So is A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, another numbered copy, designed by Paula Scher at Pentagram.

  A woman is clinging to a man’s leg on the pulp-fiction cover of An Outcast of the Islands, Joseph Conrad.  A newspaper article saved between pages 8 and 9 is headlined “Russian missiles believed armed with gas warheads.”  Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, is falling apart.  Its pages are spotted.   According to the AI Overview, brown spots on paper are often referred to as “foxing.”  I doubt they are referred to that way very often.  The AI Overview also says they may be caused by impurities in the paper, like iron or lignin, or by damp storage, or mold spores.  Inside Heart of Darkness, a ticket to Bishop’s Palace in Galveston, Texas, a business card from L’Art de Chine, and a boldfaced warning typed on a grey strip of paper:  “Your 4.00 PM sailing to the Statue of Liberty and American Museum of Immigration will allow you only 50 minutes for your visit.  You MUST be on last boat departing Liberty Island for Manhattan at 5:15.“   Evidence of travel, from a trip too remote in time to bring anything else back.

  Walden and Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau.  The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck, with a bookmark from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Gift and Book Store.  Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont.  The other books on this shelf are vanity publications from the business of graphic design.   Absolut Book, Richard W. Lewis, valorizes print ads for a vodka.   Graphic Design America is one of the show books from graphic design competitions.  The handsome, hardbound AR 100 is nothing but spreads from corporate annual reports.

  ii

  The grey spines of three perfect bound magazines from January, April, and July 1970 run together like the blind mice.  They are issues of MIND, A Quarterly Review of Pyschology and Philosophy, edited by Professor Gilbert Ryle, Magdalen College, Oxford, and published by Basil Blackwell, 49 Broad Street, Oxford.  Price Seven Shillings and Sixpence.  I was nineteen and not a subscriber, but never mind, here they are nearly sixty years later.  I must have wanted the articles, discussion notes, and critical notices named on their covers.  The January 1970 essay by R. Rekha Verma covers “Vagueness & The Principle of Excluded Middle.”   In April, Ronald Jager handles “Truth and Assertion,” and the phrase modus ponens appears.  Modus ponens is also in the R. Rekha Verma essay.  It appears once again in July, when Aaron Sloman’s “Ought and Better” explains that modus ponens is a valid principle of inference.  The Sloman essay begins, “It is often said that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, yet it is clear that….”   Crouched on the floor in the hallway, I spend a few minutes more looking for modus ponens.  In the July 1970 issue, J. P. Day of Keele University contributes “The Anatomy of Hope and Fear.”   He does it without modus ponens, but his pages are full of symbols, lines with arrows, and sentences that define the difference between despair and desperation, and the use of “quasi-vector.”  Against the hardwood floor, my knees aching, that nineteen-year-old who wanted to be a MIND reader was someone I once knew, but we are no longer friends.

  Gerard de Nerval, Choix des Textes & Preface par Albert Beguin has a soft paper cover.  Its thin clear wrapper is like a jacket, but glued.  Published in 1939 in Paris by GLM, 6 Rue Huyghens, the poems and short prose date mostly from the 1850s.  Its preface makes the point that the charm of Nerval, his sweetness and purity and innocence, “son intensite douce et pure, sa totale innocence,” are enhanced by the fact that his poetry is unknown.  He is one of “ces hereux meconnus,” those happy unrecognized ones.  True, I have no idea who Nerval was and need to go look him up online, but it is false that Nerval was happy being unrecognized.   And he did not go unrecognized in his own day.   Nerval had a reputation for nuttiness.  He was seen taking his pet lobster for a walk on a leash through the gardens of the Palais-Royal.   How did this slender book get on my shelf?  That memory has a wrapper glued to it as well, and it is opaque.  I probably found this book in a stall, during the months of 1973 when I was posing along the Seine, not far from the gardens of the Palais-Royal, or at the apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine, around the corner from the Pantheon.

  Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray.  A blurb on the back cover claims that Spalding Gray “zigzags through his far-flung adventures with the speed and agility of an Indy 500 driver on the San Diego Freeway.”   This is praise written by somebody who has never been on the 405, or stuck in traffic.   Next, Chatiments, Tome 1, Victor Hugo.  Then Anthologie de la Poesie Grecque, choix, traduction, notices par Robert Brasillach.   The Greek in Anthologie de la Poesie Grecque is on the left page, the translation on the right is in French.  Page 228, Theocrite’s “L’Epithalame d’Helene, page 229, is pimpled with pencil marks.  I was copying Greek words, writing English translations, marking the meter as short short, short and long, with vertical lines that separate the feet, the anapests and spondees.   Who did you think you were, I could ask myself this morning in the hallway.  The twenty-one-year-old who made the pencil marks cannot answer.  Who do you think you are?   That may the most important question we ask ourselves.  When asked by someone else, it is usually not a question.  It is a sneer.   This morning, the only language I understand in Anthologie de la Poesie Grecque appears on a discount card left inside its pages.  It is a Mann Theaters Student Discount card that expires in 1973.

  Buddhist Scriptures, selected and translated by Edward Conze.  Games People Play, Eric Berne, M.D.   Seven French Short Novel Masterpieces, with an introduction by Henry Peyre.  Romans de Voltaire, presente par Roger Peyrefitte.  Poems of Ben Jonson, edited with an introduction by George Burke Johnston, has a Be Nice To Me I Gave Blood Today sticker still adhering to its back cover.  Odes, Horace, edited with introduction and notes by T.E. Page.  The Aeneid of Virgil, a “new verse translation” by C. Day Lewis.  Englands Helicon, edited by Hugh MacDonald.  Like most of the books on this shelf, Englands Helicon  has not been opened in fifty years.  Everything inside it still rhymes, all the shepherds, the nymphs, deceived Philistus and false Clorinda.  The Problem of Anxiety, Sigmund Freud.  The Booklover’s Book List was either a gift or a souvenir.  It comes from the gift shop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Its lined pages are empty.  They divide in sections.   Each section is decorated by a detail from a painting in the Museum’s collection.  Sections are labeled Books to Buy, Books to Borrow, Books by Topic, Books for Children, Books to Give as Gifts, Books Lent.  So, it is a book for lists, though no one has listed anything.

  iii

  Portrait of My Body, Phillip Lopate.  A handwritten note left inside says, “There is only one great adventure, and that is inward toward the self.  Henry Miller.”  Fifty pages later, some pieces of paper the size of dollar bills.  These are my nine-year-old daughter’s handmade money.  There is a one, a five, a ten.  She wrote on all of them, “This Note Legal Tender for all Members of the Perkins Family.”  She drew a circle on the bills.  Instead of Washington or Lincoln or Hamilton inside the circle, she drew a stick figure that she labeled “Crazy Guy.”  She signed her first name above “Treasury Secretary.”  Next, Krsna The Supreme Personality of Godhead, His Divine Grade A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.  The color illustrations are lurid.  Their captions are otherworldly, too; or, just foreign: “Seeing Krsna enjoying with His cowherd friends, Lord Brahma decided to play a trick (p.88).”   This book was handed to me at an airport.  Security then was not what it is now.

  Refresh, compiled by Kobe Yomada, is a pocket-sized compilation of quotes, one per page.  Someone using a thin red marker made smiley faces, underlined words, and drew arrows on the pages.   “For fast-acting relief, try slowing down” is attributed to Lily Tomlin.   One of the smiley faces is on that page.  “Always leave enough room in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, and even joyous,” Paul Hawken.  On that page, a red arrow is pointing to the word “you,” and “happy,” “satisfied,” and “joyous” are underlined.  The same someone wrote “each day!” out to the side.  But who?   The thin red marker was also used for “2007,” on the inside front cover.   So, someone right after my divorce gave me Refresh and was offering encouragement.   It takes long minutes to remember Jocelyn, a girlfriend I have not seen since 2008.   “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them,” says Sylvia Plath.     “Use the spa more,” Jocelyn added in red marker on the Sylvia Plath page, and she drew s a red flower.    This little book is self-help.  I broke it off with Jocelyn, but would love to be in a bath with her one more time.

  All books can be self-help books, in a way.  So much so, there are bibliotherapists.  They help their patients use the relationship to a chosen book’s content for healing.  Maybe that is reason enough to keep books around.  Some say, why own any book, when there are free public libraries.  They say reading is the point.  Reading is the spirit that departs from the bodies of books after they are read.  Others find comfort in possessing.  Karl Lagerfeld, leaving instructions for the future of his 33,000 books, spoke of them as if they were his personal friends.  “They ask for nothing,” he said. “They are silently patient, and they are always there for you.”

  George Perec’s essay Brief Notes On The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books was published in L’Humidite in 1978.  After mentioning the problem of finding space, which must be solved before tackling the problem of order, he points out an odd and obvious truth.  We do not keep books in closets or, unlike pots of jam, in the pantry.   We want our books to be visible.  His listing of ways to arrange books is hilarious.  His point is that none of the ways is satisfying.   Those who try to arrange their books, Perec says, “oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable.”  In the end, he concludes that when it comes to books, order and disorder are the same word, “denoting pure chance.”

  Brief Notes On The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books is the title essay in a slight book of Perec’s essays on my third shelf, fourth hallway bookcase.  It was next to 1000 Places To See Before You Die.  Coincidentally, it includes his essay Some of The Things I Really Must Do Before I Die, which is the written version of a radio broadcast Perec made in 1981.   Of the things that he must do, number three is “Arrange my bookshelves once and for all.”  His number two was “Make up my mind to throw out a certain number of things that I keep without knowing why I keep them.”  These two must-do’s are surely related.

  Next on this fourth shelf, a run of paperbacks.  If they belong together, it is because all of them are short in height.   Word & Object, Willard Van Orman Quine.  Pork City, Howard Browne.  The Arabs In History, Bernard Lewis.  The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer.  The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus.  The Stranger, Albert Camus.  Cien Anos de Solidad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Fish, Monroe Engle.  Story of the Eye,a George Bataille.  The House of Breath, William Goyen.  The Collected Stories of William Goyen.   And then a few hardbacks, old books I might have found in a used book bin or at a sale of public library discards.  Young Lonigan, James T. Farrell.  Winter’s Tales, Isak Dinesen.  Count Bruga, Ben Hecht.  This Ben Hecht hardback, copyright 1926 by Boni & Liveright, has a mustard yellow cover with arty typography from the Jazz Age above and below a debossed illustration.  Count Bruga, clown-like, stylized and geometric, wears a top hat and carries a walking stick or baton.  The same edition is for sale on eBay, “binding moderately soiled.”

  Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station holds baby pictures of my son and daughter between pages 252 and 253.  Tolstoi’s Essays on Life is one of the Carlton House World’s Greatest Thinkers books.   It belongs with its cousins, the five other Greatest Thinkers on a shelf behind the downstairs desk.  Page 18 of Lenin in Zurich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dogeared, may have been as far as I got.  Two of my passport-sized headshots are also marking that page.  Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier, has a newspaper article from the Chicago Tribune folded between pages 92 and 93 of its 581 pages.  This article from Tuesday, November 6, 2007, tells you how you can be younger than your “real age.“   Reduce stress, it advises.  Also, take your vitamins, quit smoking, be active, wear a seat belt, fill up on fiber, monitor your health, laugh, and, very important, become a lifelong learner.  I can answer that I always wear a seat belt.   Last on this shelf, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie, unread.

  iv

  The magnolias are blooming, the large white flowers too monochromatic to be called gawdy, however showy they are.  My next-door neighbor told me that she dislikes these trees in my yard because of debris that drops from them, the brown leaves and the dead petals.  That is in a different season.  That season comes for all of us.  I tell her there is no reason not to enjoy the show while it lasts.  I have read that Europeans first encountered the flowering magnolia tree on an island in the West Indies.  How astonishing that must have been.  Later, they named the tree soberly after Pierre Magnol, a French botanist.  My magnolias are native enough to do well in the heat of a Texas summer.  In winter I value the privacy they provide from the house next door, where my neighbor might have some debris to rake up, since these trees are along the solid fence that also divides us.  The ones in my yard must be the American evergreen, Magnolia grandiflora.  It is a good name for them.  Their flora are very grand.

  Fifth shelf, fifth bookcase down the hallway:

  Managing for Results, Peter F. Drucker.  Modern Poems, edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair.  Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt.  “If you care about poetry,” declares the Boston Book Review blurb on the cover of these 973 pages, “you must read this book.”  A loose sheet of paper folded up inside Lives of the Poets is titled “Signs of Possible Childhood Depression.”  There are 25 listed.   Sadness is the first sign.   Between two other pages, a torn-out ad for Salomon Smith Barney.  “See How The Pros Are Investing This Year,” it urges.  The year, 2001, is 25 years past.

  Next, Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene.  The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher.  Shakespeare Soliloquies is a Peter Pauper Press Book, with a grey dustcover.  La Divina Commedia, Vol. III, Paradiso, Dante Alighieri, is a book I took with me to Paris in 1973.  It is a softcover dreamcatcher, and a reminder of ambitions that were inseparable from pretentions.  Its pages are covered with handwritten repetitions of terza rima.  Most of its pages are taken up by footnotes.  Since the footnotes are in Italian, they are scribbled over, too, with attempts at translation.  I was twenty-two in Paris, and bothering with Italian.  Judging from the scribbles, I did not make it beyond the beginning of Canto Terzo on page 33, before jumping to Canto Trentesimoterzo on page 402.  I must have realized that I was never going to get to the end of Paradise otherwise.

  There are two postcards stuck in Paradiso.  One is a photo of Garrya elliptica, the “Silk Tassel Bush,” a native California evergreen shrub.  I covered the back of the card with quotes from The Anatomy of Melancholy.  “A good thing is no worse for repetition.”   This could be Robert Burton’s motto.  Also this, from his verses:

  Do not, O do not, trouble me
  So sweet content I feel and see
  All my joys to this are folly
  None so divine as melancholy.

  The other card is from City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco.  On the front, a black and white photograph of the storefront.  On the back, a silhouette of gondoliers bearing a flower-covered casket.  The date, time, and place are printed under the image.   Friday, December 8, 1972, 8:30 pm, Tel Hi Gym, 555 Chestnut, S.F.  Admittance, $1.  Ezra Pound had died in Venice that past November.  The December event was a poetry reading and commemorative.
  I went to hear Thom Gunn read, and because I was a poet, too.

  v

  I slid The Mystery Guest, Gregoire Bouillier, off this fifth shelf.   What it is, and how it got here in the hallway – those are mysteries, too.   It is a short book.   After I took it down, I liked the typography on its cover, so I am taking it over to the downstairs desk.  The Mystery Guest has an “intending to read” status now.  Nothing wrong with that.  Like a Paul Masson wine in the old Orson Welles commercials, circa 1979, a book should be read only when the time is right.  The best of them may need to age.   The reader may need to age.

  Next in the hallway, The Wayward Bus, John Steinbeck.  Then Norfleet, J. Frank Norfleet, “The actual experiences of a Texas Rancher’s 30,000-mile transcontinental chase after five confidence men.” The Best-Known Works of Emile Zola is another “The Book League of America” hardback, came from my parents’ house in Oceanside.  Then, the spines of Twelfth Night or What You Will, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello and The Tempest.  These are the six New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare paperbacks, all of them edited by Horace Howard Furness.  Then, Prefaces to Renaissance Literature, Douglas Bush.  Bad Hair, James Innes-Smith and Henrietta Webb.  Technique in Fiction, Robie Macauley and George Lanning.  On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner, foreword by Raymond Carver.  The Art of Fiction, David Lodge.  The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

  In The Gentleman from Indiana, Booth Tarkington, there is a handwritten claim of ownership opposite the inside front cover: Property of Velma Whitman, August 8, 1910, Kan City, Kan.

  First Spanish Course, E.C. Hills and J.D.M. Ford, copyright 1917, is stamped Springfield Public Schools, State of Vermont.  A letter from April 13, 1998, is inside The Grim Reader, Writings on Death, Dying, and Living On, edited by Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman.  It acknowledges the receipt of my check in the amount of $500, “intended as payment for the memorial plaque.” It says I can call if I have any questions.   How I Became A Holy Mother, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  Heat & Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  Strike the Father Dead, John Wain.   Poetry 180, selected and with an introduction by Billy Collins, presses a drug-store developed photograph of my daughter between its pages.  She seems happy enough and looks beautiful.  The snapshot is at page 126, next to Judith Kerman’s poem “In Tornado Weather.”   A photo inserted into Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen, shows my son, teen-aged, with one of his former best friends.   Then, Everyman’s Talmud, Abraham Cohen.   Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux.  Plain and Simple, A Woman’s Journey to the Amish, Sue Bender.  Last, North of South, Shiva Naipaul.  Of the books on this fifth shelf of the fifth bookcase in the hallway, six have been read.

  The Mystery Guest will make seven.

  vi

  The excerpt on its jacket flap is intriguing.    “Just when you think you’ve thought of everything,” Gregoire Bouillier writes, “you forget the book sitting right there on the bedside table.”  This is one good reason to give The Mystery Guest a try.   Also, it is thin, only 120 pages.  So if reading it turns out to be a mistake, it will not be a big one.

  I just finished it.  And, as it turns out, The Mystery Guest, Gregoire Bouillier’s account, or memoir, or total fiction, is a guilty pleasure.

  It is like an object found in the middle of the street.  Something ownerless, but also valuable, like a money clip, or a wallet with no identification in it and so empty of any possibility of returning to whoever dropped it.

  vii

  Dustcovers and book jackets are different names for the same thing.   Jacket is the better name.  Especially on these bottom hallway shelves, where a layer of dust lies on the covered and uncovered alike.  Their top edges, which are never covered, are a topsoil of dust and dog hair and the carapaces of insects.   Clearly, dustcovers – book jackets – cannot be judged for the job of keeping books clean.  Instead, their role is to let the reader judge a book by its cover.  It is impossible not to, when so much trouble has been taken with design, illustration, and typography.   Hardbound books wear their jackets as decoration.  Paperbacks have illustrations directly on their skins, like tattoos.

  There have in fact been books bound with human skin.   A French physician named Bourland took the skin from the back of one of his patients, after her death, and used her skin to bind Des Destinees de L’Ame, Destinies of the Soul, a work written by Arsene Houssaye in 1879.   Bouland decided that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” according to the note he left inside his copy.  He did not write anything on the binding, not a title, not the author’s name, in order “to preserve its elegance,” in the words of the note.  And Bourland’s method of bookbinding is not simply a one-off.  The method has its own name:  anthropodermic bibliopegy.  The practice dates to the 16^th century, according to sources in the American Bookbinders Museum.  It was especially popular in the 1800s.   Doctors would use human skin to bind books in their own collections.  Sometimes, state officials would provide them with the skin of executed criminals.  This is all reported in an article I am reading this morning in Smithsonian Magazine about the decision by Harvard University to remove Des Destinees de L’Ame from its Houghton Library collection.  That peculiar book was a gift from an alum in 1934.  It was-a loan at first and then, after his own death in 1954, donated by his widow.  Students new to working at the library were hazed by being asked to fetch this book and only after told about its human skin binding.  The fun is over now.   The problem has been removed.  Not the book, but its human skin binding.  The article reports that “the disbound book is still available to researchers in person and digitally,” while the skin is in temporary storage.  Librarians at Harvard are allegedly researching the identity of the unknown woman and any living relatives, and consulting with French officials.

  viii

  Today, Tuesday, April 23, is World Book Day.  That is news to me, but it is nothing new.  The first World Book Day was celebrated in the 1920s, when the Spanish publisher of Miguel de Cervantes decided to announce it as a way to honor Cervantes and boost sales of Don Quixote.  At first, It was celebrated on October 7, Cervantes’ birthday.  It eventually moved to April 23, the date of his death.  These days, Cervantes has nothing to do with World Book Day.  Now it is all about encouraging children to read, as if books were vitamins.   There is also a World Book Night, an additional promotional celebration of reading and books.  It takes place on April 23 as well.  So, no difference between day and night.

  The Loss That is Forever, Maxine Harris, Ph.D.  It is subtitled The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father.  Inside, the xerox of Dr. T. Berry Brazelton’s “Family Today” column from September 13, 1989, “Parents teach kids to deal with grief.”  My daughter’s birthday is September 13.  She was four in 1989.  This article was at its most relevant in 1999, her fourteenth birthday, when she was still in the wake of her mother’s death.   Also saved in this first book on the sixth shelf of the fifth hallway bookcase, a drawing she did on a sheet of craft paper.  There is a sun, a cloud and two stick figures, their stick feet and stick arms sprouting from oval heads.  No torsos.  One figure is labeled “Dad” and the other “Me.”  Our mouths are shaped like V’s.  We might be smiling.  We are horizonal, though, as if we float under the scalloped line she drew above us.  This scalloped line could be mountains on a horizon.  They might be waves, with the two of us under them   Next on the shelf, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis.  Then, A Time To Grieve, Carol Staudacher.  This is a book I read cover to cover.   Sentences are circled, lines are starred, bits of paper are saved between pages.   One bit is the grey business card of Greg Reed Brown, an employee at Stone Tablets, “Inscriptions In Natural Stone.”   Browsing through the underlines, I find this Spanish proverb: “Life is short, but it is wide.”  And further on: “I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept it without wishing I had given it away.”  This testimony of confusion is attributed to Louise Brooks.   It was left on a page about sorting and discarding the possessions of the dead.

  Este Libro No Sera Vendido is stamped in gold on the cover of Nuevo Testamento, Espanol e Ingles.   Did I steal this book from a drawer beside a bed in a motel?  Next, The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy.   Then, Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, with an introduction by Leo W. Schwarz.   Saint Joseph Daily Missal is a small, stout book.  Its cover is nearly detached.  The red edges of its pages are touched by gold.  I may have pilfered this book as well.   A Union Prayer Book has a narrow silk ribbon bound into it, for use as a placeholder.   Torah, Hebrew Publishing Company, opens from right to left.  My sister’s name and the phone number from our childhood appear on the page facing what the Palmers, our Catholic neighbors on Belton Drive in Los Angeles, would have called the inside back cover.  Next, The Holy Scriptures, “according to the Masoretic Text,” all English, from the Jewish Publication Society of America.  My name is on its title page in block print.  Also, 8001 Georgetown, our address before moving a few blocks west to Belton Drive in 1962.  And our OR1-7928 phone number.  No area code needed.

  The obituary for Rabbi Mordecai Soloff, 91, Author of Jewish Texts, is on a yellowed newspaper clipping inside The Holy Scriptures.  His works include “When the Jewish People Was Young,” one of the books on my desk upstairs.  According to his obituary, Rabbi Soloff immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1910 and earned degrees from City College of New York and Columbia University.  Rabbi Soloff told me once, in 1963, when I met with him in his dark study, under a fog of smoke from his pipe, that he had intended to become an engineer but was prevented by the quotas on Jews.  Minyan:  Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity, Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, holds a ticket for a cable car ride in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Then, Ruggles of Red Gap, Harry Leon Wilson.   Evelina, Fanny Burney.  Field Book of Seashore Life, Roy Waldo Miner.  Pragmatism and Other Essays, William James.  The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener.  Second Skin, John Hawkes.  And Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone.

  After I read Dog Soldiers in 1977, I tried to use it as a model for a novel of my own.   My technique was to mechanically duplicate it.  Meaning, where Robert Stone had a paragraph with eight sentences, I wrote a paragraph with eight sentences.  Where he had three lines of dialogue, I wrote three lines of dialogue.  I treated Dog Soldiers as though it were an instruction manual in an IKEA box for assembling a piece of wooden furniture–a baby crib or a folding TV tray.  The method did not work.  For one thing, parts were missing.  And the instructions to assemble had been written by someone whose first language was Chinese.

  I am looking for a model for what I am doing now, this mix of memory and the naming of books on my shelves.   The Anatomy of Melancholy might work, with its obsessiveness and its larding on of details.   Its genius cannot be separated from the nuttiness of the labor that Robert Burton put into it.  My model could also be the blather of In Search of the Miraculous, a book as tedious and unreadable now as it was when I was sixteen.  Both of these books have a shapelessness that masquerades as order.   The act of reading them, of turning their pages, will raise teleological questions.  Is there any plan here, or is it all nothing but one moment after another?

  Next in line, Writing a Novel, John Braine.  It has invitation to attend “Ground Rounds,” from the Department of Psychiatry, Southwestern Medical School.  Salomon Grimberg, M.D., will be speaking about “Frida Kahlo, Loneliness And The Artist,” September 4, 1987, at 10:30 a.m. Then, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom.  Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom.  Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata.  Soul Mates, Thomas Moore.  I left a photo of my daughter between pages 36 and 37 of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby.  She is around seventeen and smiling.  She is standing beside me, the two of us lined up against a brick wall.  Also saved, a rectangle of one-cent stamps that honor Margaret Mitchell.  Then, Capricorn Rhyming Dictionary, Bessie Redfield, “The poet’s indispensable handbook.” 

  Eugene Atget, Photographs, is from The J. Paul Getty Museum.  Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, Richard Carlson, Ph.D.  has a folded-up paper, “Helping Children Cope With Anger.”   It was a handout from a lunch meeting; it still has the small mustard stain.  Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman, is also littered with disconnected scraps:  a book review of Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist, an obituary for “Owen Barfield, 99, Word Lover and C.S. Lewis Associate,” an index card with a note from my daughter, age 12.   “Dad – gone for now, be back whenever,” she wrote.  Next, The Materials, George Oppen.  Nearing the end of the shelf, Emerson’s Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is a serious-looking, shabby volume.  It is another of The World’s Popular Classics, Art-Type Edition, Registered Editions Guild.

  The sides of pages in Emerson’s Essays are spotted, as if they had spent time in storage or damp weather.   I try brushing them off, but the spots are discolorations.  The final essay begins on page 236.  It opens with this verse:  Go, speed the stars of Thought.   The brown legs of the spider that is flattened between pages 236 and 237 are going nowhere.   A promotion for Registered Editions Guild Classics on the very last page claims that this “popular library offers for the first time the world’s best books.”  This is not true.  The world’s best books have been pushed to the public time and time again.   The list of Registered Editions Guild Classics on this page includes Kipling, Stevenson, Dickens, Melville, Poe, Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, Austen. Also, Hudson, Haggard, Butler and Anna Sewell.

  There should be a special word for coming to the end of things.  A word that Jon Koenig might have come up with for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.   Perhaps different words for the different realities, depending on what is ending.  The end of the day, childhood’s end, the end of love, the end of life.  I never got to the end of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.  Or of The Flaneur, Edmund White, which has a handwritten list of holiday presents for my two children stuck between its pages.  Also, a ticket to “Proof” at the Walter Kerr Theatre for November 14, 2002, and a creepy souvenir postcard from an exhibit of “Plasticine Heads” at Rivington Arms, October 24 – November 27, 2002, artist, Jonah Koppel.  A souvenir is a reminder, but this exhibit, if it was ever seen, left nothing in mind.  The four thick paperbacks of the Viking Portable Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, are a color-coordinated series, with gold, green, red, and pale blue covers.  Each cover declares the number of pages, and the price:  Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets, Marlowe to Marvell, 608 pages, $1.85.  Restoration and Augustan Poets, Milton to Goldsmith, 672 pages, $1.85.  Romantic Poets, Blake to Poe, 576 pages, $2.25.  Victorian and Edwardian Poets, Tennyson to Yeats, 672 pages, $1.85.  Dust rises from their fanned pages.  There are no penciled comments in the margins in any of these four books, with one exception.   There are 43 notes in the margins of Jonathan Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” pages 312 to 326 in Restoration and Augustan Poets.  Swift died in 1745.  Noted.

  The Works of Theophile Gautier, One Volume Edition, Walter J. Black, Inc, and The Works of Alphonse Daudet, One Volume Edition, Walter J. Black, Inc., are both copyright 1928.  Other than when they were moved from my parents’ house, they have not been touched in seventy or eighty years.  Hard to know who bought them.  Harder to imagine anyone reading them.  Alphonse Daudet, French novelist, antisemite, writer of In the Land of Pain after his treatments for syphilis.   Theophile Gautier, French poet and dramatist, friend of Gerard de Nerval.  The smooth brown paper of the Daudet cover was meant to look like cowhide.  The darker Gautier has a rougher, patterned skin, more lizard or crocodile.  Both the front and back Gautier covers are crumbling.   Any touch at all and pieces of them turn into flakes.

  If there were an old age home for books, the Gautier and the Daudet could share a room.  They need assisted living, with specialists in cover conditions or broken spines, and physical therapists for their damage.   Hospitals of a sort for books do in fact exist.  At the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation, inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, six conservationists treat books from the museum’s departments.  They repair what has fallen apart, or has been mistreated, the bindings of the old and the carelessly stained pages of the youngsters.

  ix

  Travel souvenirs are packed into the two bottom shelves of the fifth bookcase.  There are cloth dolls from a Caribbean island.  The mother dolls are wearing bright blue skirts.  Cloth babies are sewn with green and gold thread into the crooks of their mother’s arms.  There is a mate cup made from a gourd, and the silver straw called bombilla, and a bag of Yerba Mate, all of that from Buenos Aires.  The hand painted ceramic from Budapest was sold outside the Great Synagogue on Dohany Street  in the old quarter of Pest.  The cork coaster from Belmont Sanctuary Lodge in Machu Picchu.  The marble coaster with inlaid stone flowers from a shop in Agra that trapped tourists after the Taj Mahal.   Two souvenirs on these shelves are for time traveling.  An empty box of Barnum Animal Crackers is on display.   A misshapen pink teapot was a craft project, from a child’s ceramics class.

  The Peter Rabbit-themed bowls, cups and plates on the very bottom shelf come from parts unknown.  The Wedgwood of Etruria & Barlaston on their bottoms could be a location, but it is not in memory.  The bowls and cups and plates are decorated with drawings and quotations from the Beatrix Potter tale.   Maybe a baby shower gift, in celebration of our soon-to-be adopted boy or girl in 1984 or 1985?  Like the tiny handle on the teacup, that information does not fit in the grasp.  The bowls are holding a dead insect and more dust.

  What else, on this bottom shelf?   A beaded fork, a beaded spoon and two beaded knives.  These useless utensils come from a shop across from Café Pascual’s in Santa Fe.   Also second-marriage vintage, the small plate from Thailand.   Its rim encircles a portrait of King Chulalongakorn.  Ornate and enameled, the King is bedecked in military medals.  Next to the plate, a raja and his consorts are cavorting on the outsides of a painted wooden box.  This box comes from India but not from travels.  It was a gift.  Inside the box, dozens of matchbooks from the hostess stands in restaurants, from unremembered meals.

  Chapter Fifteen
  SORROWS, OBSCURE AND OTHERWISE

  The bear named Bear sits on the top shelf of the sixth hallway bookcase.  Bear was my son’s first companion.  He is alongside a teddy bear made from a mink stole my first wife owned before I knew her.   I commissioned the mink bear after her death.  A large, orange, laminated menu from Lucas B&B is propped on this same shelf.   In 1977, after we were married by a Justice of the Peace, we stopped at the B&B for lunch.   I took the menu.  It is as stiff as the beehive hairdos of the waitresses who worked there.   Next to it, the wooden box that holds the ashes of the dog I found as a puppy in a Wal-Mart parking lot in East Texas, the year before my second marriage.  Wally outlasted that marriage by another twelve years.  These tributes share the shelf with stacks of children’s books.

  The Reason for the Pelican, John Ciardi, is a book of poems for children.  The translator of Dante writes, The reason for the Pelican/Is difficult to see/His beak is clearly larger/Than there’s any need to be.  Underneath it, A Fire In My Hands, Gary Soto.  Then Thomas Goes to Breakfast and Boco the Diseasel, The Rev. W. Awdry.  Curious George Goes Fishing, Margaret and H.A. Rey, is on top of a bright yellow Curious George and the Pizza, Curious George Visits the Zoo, Curious George Plays Baseball and Curious George Walks the Pet.  Next, Mrs. Rumphrius, Barbara Cooney.  The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, a folk tale retold by Arthur Ransome.  Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak.  The Boy Who Looked for Spring, Susan Fleishman, illustrated by Donna Diamond.  Who Hides in the Park, Warabe Aska.  Something From Nothing, Phoebe Gilman.  Where’s Waldo, Martin Handford.

  The cover of Where’s Waldo has come loose from its oversized pages.  Still, there’s Waldo, with his red and white striped knitted hat, and his red and white striped long-sleeved shirt, his blue pants, the goofy glasses.  On page after page, Waldo never finds a crowd he does not want to blend into.  The beaches he goes to are impossibly crowded.  So are the parks.  Even the ordinary city streets are mob scenes.   What is the meaning of this?   Maybe each of us is in need of learning how to find someone.   It makes no difference if the Waldo we are looking for is ridiculous.

  After Waldo, there is Plato on the next shelf down, in one of the fifty volumes of The Five-Foot Shelf of Books.  These Harvard Classics fill shelves two and three of the sixth bookcase.  There is the crimson-bound Continental Drama and the volume for Epic and Saga.  There is Harvey, Jenner, Lister and Pasteur.   Sainte Beuve and Renan.  Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin and Newcomb.  Essays.  Historical Documents.  Sacred Writings.   Donne, Herbert, Bunyan and Walton.  All 574 pages of Volume 6 are dedicated to the Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.   In Volume 7, the Confessions of St. Augustine, my assigned reading for next November 13 and whatever birthdays I have left.  In the meantime, I can wonder who Newcomb was, and why Dr. Eliot included him.

  ii

  Fourth shelf, sixth bookcase:

  The Favorite Game, Leonard Cohen, first American edition, Viking Press, 1963.  It is one of Bill Gilliland’s gifts, handed over in a health club locker room.  English Literature 1789-1815, W. L. Renwick.  Then, English Literature 1815-1832, Ian Jack.   Proceso A Una Madre Lesbiana, Gifford Guy Gibson, was found on a bookrack in Mexico City.   Scoop, Evelyn Waugh.  Scoop holds a letter from Uncle Harold.  Harold, Aunt Bertha’s big brother, had heard that my wife had cancer.  That was breast cancer, in 1988, before the color cancer nine years later, and it was serious enough to require a mastectomy.  “With the little time that God doles out to man,” he writes, “you would think that a God of love and mercy would at least make it a time of health, if nothing more.”   The rest of the letter is about Harold.  He has been in the hospital himself.  He still does not know whether it will mean angioplasty or surgery.

  The “Precios de Habitaciones” for Hotel Colon, Calle 62, No. 483, Merida, are wedged between two other pages of Scoop.  Dolores and I stayed at Hotel Colon in 1975 when we traveled through Yucatan.  That was our first year together.   It rained in Merida, every afternoon, more or less at the same time.   This lovely rain became part of the embroidery of the day. Its drops were the thinnest threads.   When we went out into it, to the outdoor market, there is an elderly man wearing a white guayabera who sells me a straw hat.  He is old, since I am twenty-three, but he has not aged a day in my memory of him.  I also still see the blue tiles in the common steam room at Hotel Colon.  On the rate sheet, prices for a “Doble” start at 220.00, which must mean pesos.

  A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh.  Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, a used hardback from 1945.  The inscription on the flyleaf of Marriage Poems, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, awakens ghosts of 2001.  My daughter was fifteen when she writes, “Love always and happiness in your new marriage for many years.”   Though neither wish came true, the book is a gift, and she may have meant it at the time.   Next, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and The Complete Poetry of William Blake, with an introduction by Robert Silliman Hillyer.  This ancient Modern Library book has 1,041 pages at rest beneath a cover the color of mown green grass. Montolive, Lawrence Durrell.  Closing Time, Lacey Fosburgh. Hollywood Now, William Fadiman.  Paris, Julian Green.

  A Rage to Live, John O’Hara, is autographed on its title page, but the black “John O’Hara” looks machine made.   A past owner’s name handwritten on the inside front cover is more obviously real:  Mrs. Ray Bennett, 4207 Woodlawn Ave, Rossmoyne, Ohio.   Although Rossmoyne has long since been swallowed up by Cincinnati, Mrs. Bennett’s former house on Woodlawn can still be seen.  On Google Street View, the next-door neighbors have parked a Salem Cruise Lite RV and a Spectrum ProAvenger fishing boat on a trailer in their front yard.  Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes, is the last book on this fourth shelf.  Its bookmark is a tinted postcard, all retro, of the Community Circus in Gainesville, Texas.  The tuxedoed ringleader, the clown in a striped jacket, two black horses, and four white women with bare midriffs are the mystery guests in Ted Hughes’s book.

  iii

  On an index card that fell out of Montolive, two more mystery guests:

  How small of all that human hearts endure that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

  and

  But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in the sunshine.

  In 1727, Benjamin Franklin started a “discussion group” in Philadelphia.   He named it the Junto, as if it were a secret clubhouse for pre-teen boys.  The Junto was a forum for mutual improvement, whose members engaged in debates on moral and scientific matters.  Franklin thought this group needed a library, so he started the Library Company of Philadelphia and charged Junto members a subscription fee.  With the fee as collateral, members could borrow a book.  That was something new.  There were already libraries in England, but the books in those were donated by the wealthy and either held “in the stacks” or chained to the shelves to prevent theft.  Franklin’s library became a model for lending libraries in America.  By 1800, there were forty lending libraries in a newly independent country.

  Paperbacks fill the fifth shelf.  Did I ever read Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, V.S. Naipaul?  I try running my forefinger over the spines of An Area of Darkness, V.S. Naipaul, and Miguel Street, V.S. Naipaul, and The King Must Die, Mary Renault, as if the memory of reading might be stimulated by touching.   According to Scientific American, January 8, 2019, the sense of touch can generate “surprisingly powerful and long-lasting memories.”  In this case, nothing.  Next, The Raw and The Cooked, Claude Levi-Strauss.  Le Pere Goriot, Honore de Balzac, a Livre de Poche.  Selected Prose and Poetry, Stephen Crane, and Selected Tales and Sketches, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Selected Poetry and Prose, Percy Bysshe Shelley.  These are Rinehart Editions with scholarly introductions.  The dust from their fanned pages rises and floats, as if the hallway were a snow globe, though one without water or glycerol.

  Who Rules America, G. William Domhoff, asks the question that college professors were challenging undergraduates to ask in 1969.  Secretly, we answered that we hoped it would be us.  Behind The Lines – Hanoi, Harrison E. Salisbury, came from my parents’ house.   Then, The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler.  Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, Harvey Gross.  Poetry Handbook, Babette Deutsch.  Genesis: A Living Conversation, Bill Moyers.  Genesis was used in a discussion group of Jewish couples that met once a month.  My second wife, a former debutant and Methodist, hated this group, as might anyone who did not see the other participants as a kind of kin.  Some of  the wives were converts and overly opinionated. They were, to be fair, difficult relatives.

  Then, A Prosody Handbook, Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum.  The Founding of English Metre, John Thompson.  Recapitulation, Wallace Stegner.  The Good Terrorist, Doris Lessing.  The Fire Engine That Disappeared, Sjowall and Wahloo.  The jacket flap of this unread little book says it was issued by the Crime Fiction Book Club, “solely for members of book clubs in the Readers Union Group.”   Nowhere – not on the jacket flap, not on the title page — do the first names of the two authors appear.   Google can solve that crime.  “Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo are a husband-and-wife team….“   These two are said to have invented Scandinavian noir.   Next, Life After Life, Raymond A, Moody, Jr., M.D.  The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton.  In The Land of Israel, Amos Oz.

  A Flag for Sunrise, Robert Stone, hides a prediction for the near future on a strip of paper from a fortune cookie. “An affectionate message,” it says, “good tidings will come shortly.”   The two phrases combine in a pleasing ambiguity, probably from a writer who only had space for eight words and English as a second language. Also in this Stone, a fragment of the “Mailbag” column from the Dallas Times Herald, Monday, November 3, 1981.   D.W. in Dallas asks, “What happened to the actresses who played Vanessa on Guiding Light and Viki on One Life to Live?  New faces are currently playing those parts!”  “ANSWER:  Both Maeve Kincaid (Vanessa) and Erika Slezak (Viki) are on maternity leave.”   What Maeve Kincaid was doing in November 1981 is question I never asked.   That said, I wanted the answer.   Maeve had been my tutor for a semester at Harvard ten years earlier, when she was a graduate student and assigned to me by the English Department.  Maeve was also the most beautiful woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, if not in the entire world.   I would meet with her once a week in a carrel no bigger than a closet and hugely intoxicating.   She was teaching me Wallace Stevens, but that is unclear.

  The rest of the shelf is all Isaac Bashevis Singer, hardback and paperback.   The Manor, A Day of Pleasure, Satan in Goray, A Crown of Feathers, The Séance, Short Friday, A Friend of Kafka, and An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader.  Calling a book a Reader is confusing.  A reader does the reading.  It is not the book, though it might be a device, a scanner, for example, like the credit card reader at checkout in the grocery store.   These books have all been read, but I would fail the simplest quiz on any of them, their plot lines or the names of characters.  I recall Krochmalna Street, but only the name.

  A letter from Frances, my former mother-in-law is inserted between pages 92 and 93 in An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader, at the start of the story “The Black Wedding.” Its two sheets of stationery are covered front and back with handwriting from the era when penmanship was taught to young ladies.   In a book of short stories, it tells a story of its own, mostly about light bills, doctor bills, the need to co-sign on a loan at Oak Cliff Bank, and the hopes that a new medication will help, so she will not have to take so much nitro.  It is story with a plot, but without resolution.   Frances was a character, though.  She was a hoarder.  So much so, it was impossible to move through rooms of her house on Elsbeth in Oak Cliff.   My first wife also swore that her mother had been legally married at least seventeen times.  I only knew the last husband, Blufird.  Frances kept him in a crowded room.  In his final illness, she fretted about taking him to the hospital.  She said his death there meant the loss of a monthly government check.  After Blufird died, I had his cremains in the back seat of my car, in a pink plastic box, and drove them to the cemetery.  Blufird had one prior marriage, and a burial space had been reserved for him alongside that wife. Their double headstone said Together Forever.  Frances decided otherwise.   She chose a different spot to have the plastic box buried.

  And there are other stories.   Frances’s address on Elsbeth was only a few doors down from the house where the Oswalds rented, Lee and his wife Marina, once upon a time.  This was on Elsbeth Street in Oak Cliff, not Krochmalna Street in Warsaw.  And Oak Cliff is across the Trinity from downtown Dallas, not along the banks of the Vistula.

  iv

  April begins.  The azaleas are blooming in the yard.   The reddish ones nearer the back door, the white on the way to the pond.  They bloom perennially.   So do the yellow water irises rising above the dark of the pond.  It is cruel to be inside these hallway hours.   I need a hint from Heloise:   Does Spring cleaning include bookshelves?   Should already-read and never-to-be-read books be discarded?   Or should I sell them to Half-Price Books for a handful of change?

  Tradition says how to treat sacred writings that are damaged or past their useful lives.  Bury them.  Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Proverbs 9:10.  What is God-infused is held in awe.  Any book, scroll or parchment with the name of God on it should not be rolled to the curb with trash.  But what about all these paperbacks on the bottom shelf of a hallway bookcase.  There is nothing awesome about a pocket-sized Pan-American Spanish Self-Taught, edited by Francisco Ibarra.   Nonetheless, it is a struggle to be rid of it.  Even cringeworthy books are difficult to let go of.  The Phil Dusenberry book.  The McKinsey Way.   The outdated six volume Psychology:  A Study of a Science does not have a prayer of being studied again.   It is nutty, this unwillingness to be done with it.  It is fear, but different in kind than a fear of the Lord that permits wisdom to begin.  In part, it is the fear of transience.  Maybe not so different than how my crazy mother-in-law felt in her house on Elsbeth.

  Sixth shelf down, sixth bookcase:

  Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Mark Doty.  A Piece of My Heart, Richard Ford.  Picturing Will, Anne Beattie.  Hard Laughter, Anne Lamott.  The postcard that became a bookmark in Hard Laughter is an arty photo of a red tomato on a maple leaf.  On the back of the card, “Thank you for your kind note.  Your support is very special.  Beverly, Scott & Robin.”  No clue who these people are, it first.   Then I see the clue along the edge of the card, in the credit for the photo:  Autumn Harvest, Rockville MD 1986 Marshall Kragen.  Marshall Kragen is a name I remember.   He was webmaster, or whatever it was called in 1997, for the colon cancer “listserve” that sent hours of emails every day between February and July that year.  The majority of them came from the wives of patients.  They got down to the details on the relative virtues of leucovorin and 5-FU, and whether M.D. Anderson was better than Johns Hopkins.  I stopped reading after July, but checked in a year later just to see what if anything had changed.  Marshall Kragen had died, too.  I sent condolences to his family.

  Seize The Day, Saul Bellow.   Henderson The Rain King, Saul Bellow.  This tattered paperback is a Fawcett Crest Book, 95 cents.  The Victim, Saul Bellow.   The postcard buried inside is a black and white photograph, “Howard Carter cleaning the second coffin.”   It is a souvenir from the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit in the 1970s.   Cleaning coffins must have been hard work.  Nonetheless, not a gelled hair on Howard Carter’s head is misplaced. 

  Teachings of Rumi, Andrew Harvey, holds a ticket to Siegfried, 1/20/01.  January 20 is my father’s birthday, if his birthday is not January 21.  I never kept straight which of the dates is correct.  When it came time to write his obituary in 2010, I had to look it up and even then needed to double check with my mother.   The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, has a note from March 5, 2000, from my second wife, who was dyslexic and could, as the saying goes, misspell cat even if you spotted her the c and the t.  It is a very sweet note.   We married the following January.   By the end of that year, this house.   Snow Falling On Cedars, David Guterson.  Illuminations, Walter Benjamin.  Feeding A Yen, Calvin Trillin.  And The Dancing Wu Li Masters:  An Overview of the New Physics, Gary Zukar.

  Page 16 of The Dancing Wu Li Masters is dog-eared.  What I find there is a description of the characteristics of a Master.  The statements have an air of authority that will answer no questions.  “This is another characteristic of a Master,” Gary Zukar writes, “whatever he does, he does with the enthusiasm of doing it for the first time.”   I wonder.   Is it not possible that a Master might tire of doing the same thing over and over?  And even if it is for the very first time, might a Master not be unenthusiastic about it?   Would a Master be sad, the first time driving his spouse to chemotherapy?

  Next, Four Wings and A Prayer:  Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly, Sue Halpern.   Then, The Book of Nightmares, Galway Kinnell.   Selected Poems 1923 -1967, Jorge Luis Borges.  This Borges is a bilingual edition, with poems translated by W.S. Merwin, Robert Fitzgerald, John Hollander, Alastair Reid and others.  In the margins on the pages with the poems in Spanish, I tried some translating of my own.  The penciled notes are like beads, strung together in Spanish-to-English pairs.   For example, lastimoso pitiful.  Between two pags In the middle of this book, a typed postcard from The New York Times is still soliciting:  “Your subscription expires February 5, 1978,” it warns.  I am to “remit $3.00 to assure uninterrupted service.”   In 1978, I may have done that; I may have remitted.

  Waverly, Sir Walter Scott, Bart, is an aging book.  John W. Lovell Company dressed Waverly in a fake leather cover, but its back cover has wandered off.  Its coated endpapers have a pattern that looks like spin art.   Their pattern may have been meant as a visual reference to Italian marble, but the blood red splatters and veinous blues seem more biological than stony.  I wonder where this book came from.  Also, about the meaning of Bart.   Unlike lost memories, it is easy to look this up online.  Bart, for “baronet,” is a rank below baron and above knight.  It is the lowest hereditary titled British order.  So, Walter Scott is a commoner, but he can use the prefix “Sir.”

  Little Rivers, A Book of Essays in Profitable Idleness, Henry Van Dyke.  “If we can only come back to nature,” Van Dyke writes, “we should die young, even though we live long.”  Profitable Idleness first appeared in 1894.   A History of the Nineteenth Century Year By Year, Edwin Emerson, Jr., was published in 1902.  Even then, this book was not topical.  The 600 pages of Volume One on my shelf go no further than 1815.  Both these books are as outdated as aperitif glasses in a storage closet.  They belong to an imagined life.

  Four last books are stacked to the right of A History of the Nineteenth Century.   At the bottom, Aleph Isn’t Enough, Linda Motzkin.  Then Mishkan Hanefesh, Rosh HaShanah edition, and Mishkan Hanefesh, Yom Kippur edition.  Then, no bigger than a breast pocket, a Prayer Book Abridged for Jews in the Arms Forces of the United States.  Its cover is a darker shade of khaki, almost olive.  Regina Reegler is stamped below a Jewish star on the cover.  Reegler is my mother’s maiden name.   “Maiden” is an archaic word; it means a girl, a young women, typically unmarried.  At the same time, the maiden aunt is no longer young, but still unmarried.   When she married in 1948, my mother was twenty-seven and a former Marine.

  vii

  In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig offers new words to describe sensibilities that are not new.   By inventing a name, Koenig makes describable what is recognizable.  Zielschmerz is one of his new words.  This is Koenig’s definition:

  “Zielschmerz n. The dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.”

  It is from the German, Ziel, goal, and Schmerz, pain.

  Seventh shelf, sixth bookcase down the hallway, The Amateur, Wendy Lesser.   Then, The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks.  A newspaper article squeezing between pages 43 and 44 tells of a tragedy that occurred in 1917.  A French cargo ship that carried high explosives collided with a Norwegian ship in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Sparks flew, setting off a fire.  The French ship exploded.  This was a cataclysm, devasting everything within a half-mile radius and releasing the energy equivalent to three tons of TNT.   Two thousand people died.  What is this faded column doing tucked inside The Sweet Hereafter?  For whatever reason, I put it there.  Maybe it was saved to preserve the quoted comments of a Halifax survivor, who is quoted at length in the last paragraph: “Whoever survived had their lives transformed,” said Dorothy Swetnam Hare, 86, of Calgary, Alberta.  “This was no ordinary tragedy.   A place that was there was gone.”   Then the quote continues.  “We went on to lead our lives, of course,” Ms. Hare said, “and the lives we had were good.  But none of us ever quite lost a sense of sorrow.”   Probably column was saved for the sake of this last sentence.

  Next, Selected Poems, Robert Bly.  Then a Union Haggadah that came from my parents’ house.  The spine of this slim book is ridged and cracked.   The hard grey cover is like a shell, as if Union Haggadah were a prehistoric egg.  It has my mother’s married name and the address of our childhood home inside.  There are two dozen other Haggadot next to it on the shelf, but those are just Maxwell House pamphlets.

  The Waterfall, Margaret Drabble, uses an Emily Dickenson poem as an epigram opposite the title page.  I know this poem by heart, or used to.  It begins Drowning is not so pitiful/As the attempt to rise.   There is a half-hearted tone to this remembering, as though it is the end of an echo or reduced to a whisper.  Next, The Works of Edgar Allen Poe in One Volume, with a “special biographical introduction by Hervey Allen, author of Anthony Adverse.”  Walter J. Black, who had his offices a 2 Park Avenue, published this Poe in 1927.  How its 760 pages came to a hallway shelf is a mystery story.  Poe’s name on its dark brown cover is gold.  The cover’s crackled faux leather, almost reptilian, flakes when I touch it.  The spine is dissolving, too.   Most likely, it came from Aunt Bertha.

  A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul.  African Silences, Peter Matthiessen.  Ticking Along with the Swiss, edited by Dianne Dicks, an unread collection of essays.   Patricia Highsmith, who contributes “Winter in Ticino” to this collection, lived the final years of her life in the Swiss village of Tegna.  Her house there is said to be like a bunker.   Her ashes are in Tegna.  Leafing through Ticking Along, I find a torn-out article saved from January 23, 2000, about Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria.  Also, a business card from Zago Papers in Santa Fe.  I google Zago, which is gone.  Then Sils Maria, which is still around three hours by road, weather depending, from Tegna.  And then Patricia Highsmith, to learn that she was born in Fort Worth, around thirty miles to the west of this paperback book.

  History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides.  The name of my daughter’s private high school is on its inside cover.  In Genevieve Jurgensen’s The Disappearance, a woman loses her two daughters in a car accident.  She writes this book to memorialize them.   Her daughters are lost, but not deliberately.  They were in a car that was struck by a drunk driver.  Next, Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Book League of America, was translated from the Polish by Jeremiah Curtin.  The translator “begs to dedicate” this work to his friend and classmate Auguste Compte of San Francisco, California.

  There is a worldliness to Jeremiah Curtin’s dedication, and a scent of adventure in his introduction as well.   At the end of the introduction, he gives a date, which is distant, and a place, far away:  1896, Ilon, Northern Guatemala.  His friend August Compte in San Francisco could not have been the French philosopher and mathematician, the founder of positivism and inventor of a religion that has no God in it.   As for Jeremiah Curtin, he was in Northern Guatemala, circa 1896, writing about Henryk Sienkiewicz.  Forgotten inside Quo Vadis, a Tax Collector’s Receipt for Texas Title Application.  It records the April 1987 purchase of a 1982 Jaguar with only 11,350 miles on it.  Sales price:  $12,500.  Seller:  J.D. Flickinger.  Flickinger told me he had tired of struggling with the Lucas electrical system in his beautiful blue car.  Lucas, Prince of Darkness, as experienced Jaguar owners used to say.

  Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews   Care of the Soul, Thomas More, carrying a postcard of a  detail from a Chagall stained glass, “Angel announcing the eternal life.  Papers on Metapsychology, Sigmund Freud, is underlined throughout.  It takes for its topics the unconscious, narcissism, mourning and melancholy, and the instincts and their vicissitudes.  Self-Hypnotism, Leslie M. Le Cron.   A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani.  The Time of Our Lives, Mortimer J. Adler.  Death in Venice, Thomas Mann.  Writing the Novel, Lawrence Block.  How to Write Plots that Sell, F.A. Rockwell.  The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter, William Froug.

  The Technique of Screenplay Writing, Eugene Vale, has the stamp of Larry Edmonds Cinema Bookshop, Hollywood, CA, on its title page.   The brown card inside is the personal stationery of John B. Cooke, 975 Vernal Avenue, Mill Valley, CA., and a keepsake from 1974.  Its typed message: “It looks very likely that I’ll be in Hollywood sometime next week.  I’ll call when I’m sure of my schedule.  If you’re no longer staying at your parents’ house, call me this weekend and give me your new number.”   John B. Cooke was one of the names I found in the card file at the Office of Career Services before graduation.  He is someone “in the business” and an alum willing to give career advice.  I have returned home after finishing college and have no next step, and do not know what to do, which has remained an issue, off and on, for fifty years.  His message concludes, “I’m trying to see about six people in two or three days, so we may have to get together on fairly short notice.”  There was no getting together, and now his note is giving fifty years’ notice.

  1984, George Orwell, A Signet Classic, preface by Walter Cronkite, afterword by Erich Fromm.   Savage Scene: The Life and Times of James Kirker, Frontier King, William Cochran McGaw. Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, is assigned reading; my son wrote his name on its paper cover.  Same with The Red Pony, John Steinbeck.  I and Thou, Martin Buber, is storing another souvenir postcard from “The Treasures of Tutankhamun.”  This time, Howard Carter in slacks and a dress shirt is photographed cleaning “the third coffin.”   A small, turbaned Egyptian crouches beside him.  A second card inside I and Thou promotes Poppy and Bonkers, the clowns who performed at my daughter’s seventh birthday party.  They are looking for repeat business.  “Hey there,” they announce, “you’ve got a birthday coming soon!”   Also inside this slender book, two drugstore-developed photos.  One shows my son and his wild teenage hair.  The other is a snapshot of my daughter.  She is in a wheelbarrow and might be five years old.  Still more:  I and Thou hides the folded-up magazine article from 2001 offering guidance on the benefits of taking statins.  And there is the courtesy card that was slipped under a door after sundown at La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla, California.  lt tells tomorrow’s forecast, when tomorrow was August 13, 2001.  Tomorrow’s Predicted High, 76 degrees.  Wave Height:  1-3 feet.  Ocean Temperature:  70 degrees.   It says my wife and I may breakfast in our room by dialing room service or dine overlooking the Ocean in the Mediterranean Room.  And, We wish you a good night.

  TIME’s Year In Review 1997 lies on its side on top of the Dallas Morning News issue from July 14, 1997.  It is the only book on the bottom shelf of this sixth hallway bookcase.  The front of its glossy, wraparound jacket is a full-cover photograph of the funeral of Princess Diana.  The unexpected death of the Princess of Wales, declare the editors of TIME, is the keystone event of that year.

  Chapter Sixteen
  APRIL IS ENDING 
  
  The seventh, last bookcase in the hallway is the one with the fewest books.  Of its eight shelves, only two are booked up.  The other six hold odds and ends, and bottles of liqueurs in wire racks, herbsaint anise, Port wine, crème de cassis.  The few books on shelves two and three are a bouquet of mismatched flowers.   Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah, Alan Verskin, is pressed next to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera, and The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam.  
  Armies of pages, paragraphs in formation, thousands of words keeping company, some of the spines upright, other books lying down in their stack:  The Road, Vasily Grossman.  The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin.  Maimonides, Moses Halbertal.  The Death of Sitting Bear, N. Scott Momaday.  Hothouse, Boris Kashka. Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin. Bellevue, David Oshinsky. Still Writing, Dani Shapiro. Wild Stories, The Best of Men’s Journal. Fodor’s Exploring India, 2^nd Edition.  Fodor’s Exploring India, 3^rd Edition. Walking Israel, Martin Fletcher.  The Accommodation, Jim Schutze. India, A Portrait, Patrick French.  India, A History, John Keay.  India Companion, Louise Nicholson. The Fallen Angel, Daniel Silva.  Marcion, Adolf von Harnack.  Come and Hear, Adam Kirsch.  The Amos Oz Reader, edited by Nitza Ben Dov.  The Great Game, The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, Peter Hopkirk. Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum.  Eve Out of Her Ruins, Ananda Devi. The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers, Fouad Laroui.  Seeing Red, Lina Mervane.  Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania, Mike Ormsby.   Berlitz, Hungarian Phrase Book & Dictionary.

  Among all these titles, it is not Dassoukine or his trousers that I am curious about.  I never looked once at what the editors of Men’s Journal consider their best.  It is Berlitz and his Method, in bold on the bright cover of Hungarian Phrase Book & Dictionary.   How did he do what he did, at a school in Providence, Rhode Island in 1878, and then across the United States, and then worldwide, so methodically?

  Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz, born Berlizheimer in Muhringen, Kingdom of Wurttemberg in 1852, immigrated to the United States in 1872.   His very first test of linguistic savvy was translating the unwieldy name given to him at birth by Jewish parents into something more sympathetic in his new country.   My own grandfather knew to do the same.  I asked Grandpa once, as he smoked one of his unfiltered Camels, what our family name had been before he came over to the States, traveling solo as a teenager from “somewhere near the Dnieper River.”   He claimed not to know.  The name is “something like Purkin,” he said.   He had so little interest in it that our conversation stopped there. 

  The spines of the books on the third shelf are just below eye level.   Looking down at them, I am seeing eye to eye with the end of the task, the last of this work of listing and remembering.

  John Koenig has no name in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows for that peculiar sadness that surfaces in the reader when a book is finished.  That feeling after passing the last period of the final sentence on the last page of a book.  Call it sadness tinged with satisfaction, but it is not exactly that.  Not relief, either, though relief is part of it.   It is a compound of the sweet and the sour that belongs to every ending.   A race has been run.  There has been no contest, so no winning or losing.
  
  Rimbaud is here again, on this last, third shelf.  This time he is in Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets.  And here is Fun with Problems, Robert Stone again, short stories this time.  Then, The Essential Kabbalah, Daniel C. Matt.  Maimonides’ Introduction To His Commentary on the Mishnah, translated and annotated by Fred Rosner.   Death in the Andes, Mario Vargas Llosa.  Prague: A Cultural History, Richard Burton.   Letters to A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.   Ballistics, Billy Collins.  Blue Horses, Mary Oliver.   Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, another Mario Vargas Llosa.  And one more hardback Tanach, The Holy Scriptures. 

  This Tanach has my son’s name imprinted in gold at the bottom of its white cover.  All the graduates in his confirmation class received one, probably at the confirmation ceremony.  Surely I was there, even if no hazy image remains.  I am not even seeing the blur from that event.  To the best of my knowledge, it was the last time that he entered a synagogue, though it is possible he will again, when the time comes.   Future arrangements have not been made yet for my own memorial service.  I do have my plot, however, next to my first wife’s, in the cemetery on Howell Street.  That arrangement was made in 1997 at her request.

  ii

  For the most part, the “self-help” books on these shelves have been no help.  Likewise, most of the books whose authors have Ph.D. after their names.  Those two categories overlap.  I am looking at the spine of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, Rich Hanson, Ph.D.  Then, How to Break Your Addiction to a Person, Howard M. Halpern, Ph.D.  Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff, Ph.D.  The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, Christopher K. Germer, Ph.D.  And Uncovering Happiness, Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.  Also on this third shelf of the seventh bookcase, The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, Susan Anderson.  Rising Strong, Brene Brown.  I Will Not Be Broken: 5 Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, Jerry White. 

  My Louise: A Memoir, David Collins, is wedged between Tevye the Dairyman, Sholem Aleichem, and Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth.   Next, Sybille Bedford, Selina Hastings.  A Truck Full of Money, Tracy Kidder.  The short, stocky Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, Michael Dahlie, has diagrams on how to tie a bow tie and instructions for making a martini. 

  The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe, Eli Valley, lies on its side, on top of The Jews of Eastern Europe, J.H. Ademy.  Under those two, Krakow, Eyewitness Travel, and Warsaw and Poland, Tadeusz Jedryslak.  I wonder, when Tadeusz Jedryslak was a schoolchild, was he asked over and over how to spell his name, or did his Polish teachers just know?   These four stacked books, mostly unread, were bought before a summer trip to Poland.  So were God’s Playground:  A History of Poland, Volume I, The Origins to 1795, Norman Davis, and God’s Playground:  A History of Poland, Volume II, 1795 to the Present.  There are over thirteen hundred pages in the two histories of Poland.  I traveled there in 2016, visiting Krakow and Warsaw, just a tourist, then on to Prague in the Czech Republic.  The trip took ten days.  Reading these two volumes would take years.

  iii

  The Wislawa Symborska paperback I have read and reread comes from Masolit, a bookstore in Krakow.  My memories are sketchy of that trip to Poland, a group tour whose primary destination from Krakow was Auschwitz.  And very little of Krakow has stuck, aside from the name of the bookstore and Symborska’s Collected and Last Poems.   Symborska is a canny trickster.   Who else would write In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself?  This is its savory end, on page 227 of Collected and Last Poems:

  On this third planet of the sun
  among the signs of bestiality
  a clear conscience is number one.

  In translation, she reminds me of Auden.  His Collected Poems, the hardback, sits nearby on a hallway shelf.  So does the thin Penguin paperback of Auden’s Selected Poems that I have owned for fifty years.  And the badly used copy of A Certain World, Auden’s commonplace book, its paperback cover missing, its spine broken, and the unbound pages held together with a rubber band.

  A friend told me he reads books by having them playing through the speakers in his car as he drives.  Tim Robbins is reading Fahrenheit 451 to him.  Dennis Quaid is reading The Right Stuff.  Jake Gyllenhaal is reading The Great Gatsby.  What they are doing is formally described as narrating rather than reading.  My friend, an attorney, is a fan of John Grisham.  The narrators of the Grisham books are not famous actors.  So Cassandra Campbell and Eduardo Ballerini are also reading to him while he drives. 

  I have never heard a book in my car.  I have never read an ebook.  A girlfriend gave me a book as a birthday gift last November.  What she gave me was not really a book.  It is a link to download The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride, from the Kindle Library.  And the Kindle Library is not a library, just as a webpage is not a page.  So I now have a spineless book on my MacBook Pro on the desk downstairs.  The world is becoming disembodied.  That is something the future of the world shares with my personal future and, I suppose, the future of all bodies.  

  iv

  So, can all this be organized?

  There are so many guides and phrase books on shelves behind the downstairs desk.   Down the hallway, all the deeper studies of Poland and other destinations.  Then there is literature in translation.  The Mario Vargas Llosa, bought before and after a trip to Peru.  Kafka and Kundera, in preparation for Prague.   Since so many of these books are about specific places, “Geography” is a possible broad category in the reorganization of these shelves.  Histories of a place could be grouped with fictions that take place there, however thin or even silly the connection.  Forster’s A Passage to India next to John Keay’s India, for example.  Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad sharing its neighborhood with Lonely Planet’s Moscow & St. Petersburg and Ian Fleming’s crumbling Signet paperback From Russia with Love. 

  And how many books does it take to turn a collection into a library?   Some say quantity has nothing to do with it, I simply need an organizing principle, not just a truckload of books.  Others say all that is required is a place set apart.   A room, a wall.  Then there are those tiny “free lending libraries” that invite strangers to take or leave books.  Such a mini-library might be no bigger than a shelf in a wooden box, set on a pole near a curb, protecting the half dozen discards from the weather.   

  Now that I have listed by name some two thousand books, what do I have?  A collection, or a library?  Probably neither.   It is a truckload, if the truck is a 15’ U-Haul.      

  I saved an article from one of the glossier travel magazines between the pages of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel.  It names the 26 “most beautiful libraries in the world” and suggests that the reader “add at least one of them to your bucket list.”  

  Of the 26 libraries it says belong “on your bucket list”, many are exalted, even royal destinations.  The Library of El Escorial in Spain, for example.  Others are more pedestrian.  The Starfield Library in South Korea is on the list, but to cross it off you will need to walk inside a shopping center in Seoul.    

  Wikipedia says the idea of a “bucket list” came initially from a bored screenwriter, who created a checklist of the things he wanted to do before he “kicks the bucket.”  But what bucket was that?  Maybe the bucket the horse thief or the rustler is standing on in a Western, while waiting to be hanged.  His neck is in the noose.   The rope is tied to the tree branch above his head.  When the posse or the boss cattleman’s hired hands kick the bucket out from under him, he is already “at the end of his rope.”   

  In volume A-O of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary down the hallway, “kick the bucket” has nothing to do with horse thieves or cattle rustlers.  It refers to the wooden yoke used to hang pigs for slaughter in England.  Hanging by their feet, the poor pigs in their death spasms would “kick the bucket.”   There is another, related meaning, dating all the way back to 1597, when the bucket was “a beam or a yoke on which anything may be hung or carried.”   And there are several other supporting quotes, but the power of magnification in the Bausch & Lomb reading glass in the sliding box below the dictionary is not enough to help me read them.   

  In 1968, when my parents gave me this two-volume Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, my eyes did not need help from Bausch & Lomb.  It was my seventeenth birthday.  I might have needed a bucket list, though.  If I had one today, only one of the 26 most beautiful libraries in the world could be crossed off.  The Little Prince and Le Petit Prince on the desk downstairs are both from the gift shop of the Morgan Library & Museum.  They were bought on birthday number seventy-three.   

  v

  Asterisks in a margin and underlines in paragraphs are calls to pay attention.  They are prompts for memory.   In schoolbooks, that is understandable.  There will be a test.  Remembering matters, at least until the end of the semester.  In life, there may be multiple choice, but there are no marked grades.  So the purpose of remembering is much less obvious, however essential it can seem.  It is also possible to see forgetting as a blessing.  The sentences in these books disappear from memory, just like house keys or the Philips screwdriver.  So do names, streetscapes, and smiles.  It presents as a serious problem.  But as a neuropsychologist has written, memory is not designed “to help you remember the name of that guy you met at that thing.”  To take this idea one thought further, the failure to remember might be far less troubling than an inability to forget.

  To remember some of what has been forgotten has been the purpose of this exercise.  One of the purposes, anyway.   I have failed to decide which books to throw away.  Which of the unread should be read in the time that is left.  Which might be worth encountering.  Still, I have completed a ritual of list-making, all the way to the last book at the end of the final hallway shelf.

  It is the end of April.  I am shuffling back to the fourth bookcase in the hallway, browsing on the fourth shelf down, and then sliding out the pinkish Penguin paperback of Baudelaire.   Les Fleurs du Mal begins with his poem “To The Reader.”  If anyone is still with me, check out the Robert Lowell translation.  You can hear to it “narrated” on YouTube.  Lowell’s version begins with the bitter litany of vices.  There is infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice.  Lowell puts it into meter.  He exhorts his readers to “pray for tears to wash our filthiness.”   The lines are so verbally inventive, they are just this side of demonic and probably semi-autobiographical.  Tom O’Bedlam is the perfectly-named narrator.

  vi

  The two-page handout discovered between pages on a shelf across from the desk downstairs is titled “An Introduction to Tomaz Salamun.”  It is dated November 17, 2009.  That does not seem so long ago.  It must have been handed out at a live event, because its last paragraph mentions “the poet it is our good fortune to hear tonight.”  Its last line is more explicit: “Ladies and gentlemen,” it says, “please join me in welcoming Tomaz Salamun.”   This hyperbolic introduction asserts that Tomaz Salamun demonstrates “a willingness to follow language to the border beyond which lies madness and suicide.”  It is the phrasing of someone without experience of madness or suicide.    

  Between other pages in the same book of Tomaz Salamun’s poetry, I find a xerox about Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms:  Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro da Silva.  Its presence is as puzzling as the Salamun introduction, though it includes this provocative idea: “This world wasn’t made for us to think about it, but to look at it and be in agreement.” 

  Also inside the Salamun, other xeroxed handouts.  Four poems from Actual Air by David Berman.  Four xeroxed pages from “The King of Time,” Velimir Khlebnikov, translated by Paul Schmidt.  An excerpt from “The Submariner’s Waltz,” a poem by Paul Fattaruso, is stapled to multiple pages of “Paul Fattaruso and Dara Wier in Conversation.”   There are more poets writing in the world than there are goose down feathers in all the pillows.  Someone made these xeroxes and passed them out.  But who and where, and why I was a recipient – all that has flown, like a feather in a breeze.

  vii

  “If you live long enough, it can all work out.”  My mother said that, when she was in her late eighties, after a discussion we had about my estranged daughter, while I was visiting in Oceanside.

  I responded that I was unlikely to live as long as she and my father would.  “All you had was the Depression and World War II.  I have had real problems.”

  My mother’s phrase continues to resonate.  I wrote a message to my daughter a month or two ago and placed it in an unsealed envelope.  I gave it to my son, because I do not have her address.  He claims he does not know it either, though he talks to her on the phone from time to time.

  W we do share a past, I began.  Then I went on, just a paragraph, suggesting that she and I meet for an hour, it could be at a sandwich shop near her, to catch up, or whatever she would tolerate.  I did not end it Love, Dad, because I have heard that she will only refer to me by my first name.

  What now?  No more shelves to pick through.  Maybe a break, when the Texas summer heat arrives.  I can make plans to leave town.

  That is not the reason for stopping this ramble, but it is reason enough.  Nothing is more life-like than the inconclusive ending.

  I could go in July to the house in Ocean Hills.  I seldom use the place but intend to take more advantage of it someday.

  Someday.  It is the perfect answer to what day is it today.  Be here now, the wisdom goes, in praise of presentism.

  This is what is enviable in the lives of animals, as I imagine them.  Looking out a window at my side yard this day in late April, I am watching a wren at a feeder, and the mourning dove dipping its beak into the trough below a fountain.  These animals are “living for today,” though that means little more than living for the next meal.  Still, they do seem vibrant and present.  Even twitchy.   Their muscularity helps them to avoid becoming a next meal themselves.  And they do not seem hopeless.  In my imagining, they have a joy that does not depend on hope.  Birds especially, in a swarm, solitary, resting on a wire, in flight, on the wing.  The Carolina wren that I am listening to this bright morning is impossible to see.  It is in the oak branches somewhere.  Not hiding, but hidden among the newest leaves.  Its call is clear enough though.  It is the males that sing the loud song.   The sound of a triple beat.  Short long, short long, short long.   And whatever the bird is singing, or saying, it does not mind repeating it over and over.   I have read that a male Carolina Wren was recorded repeating itself nearly three thousand times a day.   I read it in the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, on the fourth shelf down, left side bookcase, opposite the downstairs desk.

  ***

   

   

   

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