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, 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 windows.

  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 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 Ambersons, 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.”
  This 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.

  (chorus)

  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 9th, 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 20th 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 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

  DoloresFinal_MOD-84197_MOD-84382

• 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, 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 windows.

  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 Ambersons, 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.”

  This 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.

  (chorus)

  Everything’s so dull

  My lucidity is gone

  And it’s all my fault

  I did everything wrong

  But I know it’s rig

  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 9th, 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 20th 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 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 5th 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, not changed that much.

  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 wrote, “for you, of course.”

  *

  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 350th 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.

  ***

• 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, 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 windows.

  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.

  (chorus)

  Everything’s so dull

  My lucidity is gone

  And it’s all my fault

  I did everything wrong

  But I know it’s rig

  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.

  *

• Where Have You Gone, Patrick Wheeler 1

  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 9th, 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 20th 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 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 5th 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, not changed that much.

  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 wrote, “for you, of course.”

  *

  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 350th 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.

  ***

• 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

• 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, 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 windows.

  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 Ambersons, 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.”

  This 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.

  (chorus)

  Everything’s so dull

  My lucidity is gone

  And it’s all my fault

  I did everything wrong

  But I know it’s rig

  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 9th, 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 20th 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 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 5th 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, not changed that much.

  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 wrote, “for you, of course.”

  *

  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 350th 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.

  ***