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

  [pdf-embedder url=”https://mperkins.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/DoloresFinal_MOD-84197_MOD-84382.pdf”]

• 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

   

  Chapter One
  TURN OF THE YEAR

  It is the last week of the year.

  I have decided to sell the loose diamond that Pam, my second wife, left behind ten years ago.

  So I go looking for it where I think I have left it, in the small safe in a room that is now a den but was our bedroom during our marriage. The combination is 80-37-72. I can remember that somehow, no matter how long since I have opened this safe, which has my passport, birth certificate, some coins, duplicate car keys, and other things that I used to keep in a safe deposit box at the bank. There is no loose diamond though. There is only a ring, with a diamond in it. Perhaps that’s the one. I also find a diamond of a different kind – my “vital information” document that an attorney had me fill in as part of redoing my Will and Trust, after the divorce.

  The list of assets on this document is no longer accurate. My old email address is no longer mine. But there is a sequence of statements that are meant to pass along my instructions to those who will deal with whatever I leave behind, starting with my dead body.

  I have a deceased spouse, Dolores, who was my first wife, and I wish to be buried “next to such person.” I do not wish to be cremated. Any special requests for the funeral? “Say a prayer of gratitude for life,” it says, though I do not remember why I wanted that. What song, music, or poetry do I want at my funeral? The form asks. I request Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Catullus’s poem on the occasion of his brother’s death and specify that it can be found in my copy of Spring Shade, a paperback on one of my bookshelves. I do not have a brother and have trouble finding the Fitzgerald book, but here it is, on a shelf in one of the seven bookcases that are built into the hallway. The translation goes like this:

  By strangers’ coasts and waters, many days at sea,
  I came here for the rites of your unworlding,
  Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living,
  I And my words – vain sounds for the man of dust.
  I Alas, my brother,
  You have been taken from me. You have been taken
  from me,
  By cold chance turned and shadow, and my pain.
  Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
  Long ago for the starvelings under earth:
  Take them: your brother’s tears have made them wet;
  and take
  Into eternity my hail and my farewell.

  No telling what the odds are of this being read at my funeral, but probably somewhere between very low and no way.

  The form then asks about the engraving on my tombstone. I reply “just birth and death dates” and “faithful husband, caring father.” In answer to where donations can be sent in lieu of flowers, I write, “I like flowers.”

  What else? I say that I admire the example of my first wife, who died thirty years ago of colon cancer. I add that I am content to follow wherever she has gone. Asked for any message to the ones who come after me, I imagine my mourners, if any, and I write, “Be comforted. If you loved me, I loved you.”

  This document that my attorney gave me years ago to fill out also has empty pages with measured spaces to insert the facts. All that David Copperfield kind of crap, as Salinger put it. Which hospital I was born in and on what day. Names of my mother and father and their mothers and fathers. How one grandfather fled conscription in the czar’s army, though that is only a story and may not be true. How he arrived in the States by himself as a teenager, which may also have been just a story. How the immigration officer at Ellis Island changed his name to the one I have now; that is certainly a myth—more likely, Grandpa changed it himself. These details hardly matter. Aren’t we all descended from the same Adam and Eve?

  The biographical questions and my answers go on and on. Parents met after the War. Neither one went to college. Father worked on a laundry truck, then sold Baldwin pianos, then furniture wholesale. The fact that I grew up walking distance from the Pacific Ocean. That I skipped 3rd grade and have put up with illegible handwriting ever since. How I never had a grade lower than an A and was valedictorian of my public high school. Graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. Ran a business for forty years. The lifetime achievement awards, the boards I was on. That I was married, adopted a son and a daughter at birth, a year apart. That I was widowed, remarried, divorced.

  This unearthed form also has a space to fill in for When I am gone, I hope my family learns this from my experiences. I write that I agree with Thoreau—your elders have nothing to teach you, though I add that it doesn’t keep us from believing otherwise, or continuing to try, whether we believe or not.

  Last, The most important thing to do in life is. In that blank space I write, “Keep moving. If only I could do that now, I would not be where I am.”

  ii

  Dante Alighieri found himself in a dark wood midway through his life’s journey. I am way past that this December morning. Not out of the woods, but long past the midway point. I am in my seventies. They say that Moses was eighty years old when he saw the Eternal in a shrub that was on fire but not consumed by the flames. I am nearly there, but the Eternal has not appeared. Not yet. The last time I read Dante, I was turning the pages of an elegant, softbound Il Paradiso in Italian, La Nuova Italia Editrice Firenze. I also had three paperbacks of John Ciardi’s translations with me. In my earliest twenties then, I am sitting in Café de Flore, or in one of the other Paris cafes I had read about in A Moveable Feast, pretending that I am a poet or at least a writer or would be one shortly. All those books are still on my shelves – Dante, Hemingway, and the Hebrew Bible as well. That last one is the only one I am still reading, despite its disputed authorship. And they have all been moveable, from dorm room to apartment and from house to house for fifty years.

  There are 2,369 books in the house I live in now. Most of them are on shelves, though some are on desks and tables, downstairs and upstairs. I can be more granular. There are 1,471 books on the 56 shelves of seven bookcases in the hallway that leads from the front door to a bedroom. There are 219 books in the room off the kitchen, which might be called a den, some of these on glass shelves, but most in a freestanding bookcase from a Wayfair catalog. There are 238 other books on ten shelves in two built-in bookcases behind the writing desk downstairs, and another 209 on the ten shelves in the two bookcases built into the wall in front of this desk. On top of the downstairs desk, 75 more books. Then, the 56 books on a desk in the room upstairs, which is a studio. In that same room, 56 more books on the small metal shelves that seem to float off the white metal stand from Design Within Reach. On three other tables in the house, one upstairs, one in the den, and one a Plattner table in my so-called living room, another 15 in total. And, last, in the kitchen, 29 cookbooks on the floating shelves of another metal stand, this one black.

  Other than cookbooks and kitchen, there is no clear correspondence to which books are where. No obvious principles have been applied. There will be six Graham Greene paperbacks together in a hallway bookcase. But a seventh Graham Greene will turn up in the den, and an eighth upstairs. Streaks occur, just like they do in an NBA game, or in baseball. But a book about Sandy Koufax will be nowhere near one with the wisdom of John Wooden. And multiple copies of the same book – Virgil’s Aeneid or Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, for example – keep to themselves on separate shelves and even separate rooms. This lack of a system, the absence of coherence, is this a symptom?

  iii

  A new house is being constructed across the street. At all hours of the workday, which starts for them before I am out of bed, the Mexicans who do the lifting and the carrying, the hammering and the sawing, have the volume raised on the tinny music that comes from their radios. Although distracting, it is not unpleasant. I barely remember the house that used to be there, on that same site. This was the home that Mrs. Linehan lived in with her slow adult son Bobby, who died first, though I never knew how or of what. Mrs. Linehan was already in her nineties herself. She died a few years after, ten or eleven years ago now. Her other two sons and their wives were eager to sell the house, which then stayed vacant for years, until it was torn down by the buyer. Then the lot stayed vacant for five years more, while the stock market fell sharply and rose slowly. Now something new and grand is under construction, someone’s dream, and I can hear the Mexicans shouting to each other over the music.

  iv

  The books in this house are also my neighbors. Not just the unread ones, the unexplored, which are the majority, but those I have read and forgotten, those I took in page by page and that have disappeared inside me. When I look at the shelves, I am uneasy. Melancholy is as good a word as any for this feeling. So many books. And too many of the author’s faces in the photos on book jackets, are frowning in disapproval. Some may only be winking. On one of the lowest shelves down the hallway, the six coated spines of A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, edited by Horace Howard Furness, stand at rigid attention. I look for Much Ado About Nothing, and the scene where Dogberry calls comparisons odorous instead of odious. These Variorums, all Dover Publications, are stale leftovers from college. As it turns out, Much Ado About Nothing is not among the six. Comparisons are odorous, but there was a time I would have remembered that, without looking.

  v

  On another shelf, the six volumes of Proust, the Moncrief translations. I have read only one volume – Swann’s Way – and it was hard going, each sentence a journey on which at some point I would lose my way. I would have to go back, retrace my steps, and even then I would rarely retain half of where I had been or what I had seen. I began the second volume, Within A Budding Grove, but only got ninety-four pages in. My bookmark is an unmailed souvenir postcard of a mural in Mexico City. In front of the mural, some tables and empty chairs. Did I pick up this colorful card at Sanborn’s in my twenties, when I was a tourist with Dolores in Mexico City? Just as likely, the card was hers, from her life before we met. My remembrance of things past is not detailed enough to be certain.

  vi

  The things my daughter Eden left behind when she left home have been boxed up for twenty years. I realize now that she is never coming back for them. It has been seven or maybe eight years since I last saw or spoke to her. Three boxes hold everything she left – clothes, CDs, drawings, high school notebooks, her diaries that begin but then stop after a few pages, the sci-fi stories she started writing but then abandoned, rolls of undeveloped film, the cards and notes, a few stuffed animals, the baggies full of beads and shells and colored threads, her collection of X-Files episodes on VHS tapes. I threw much of it away years ago. Whatever was too sour or anguished in her writing or in the cassette tapes that she recorded late at night, I did not save. What I still have on the floor of the room upstairs are only the boxfuls that I thought might suggest to her, if she came back for them, that her childhood had not been the misery she is convinced it was. And so whatever she is holding against me, perhaps she could let it go. She might even see that she has mostly made it up.

  vii

  When she was a little girl, Eden had an astounding memory. Maybe even a photographic memory, if there is such a thing. This could be why being completely forgotten by her is one of the sharper knives.

  viii

  Difficulty remembering books, despite how much of life is spent reading them, turns out to be common. Many people ask online if it is normal to forget what they read. Some even compare the experience of reading to soaking in a bathtub and, after the water goes down the drain, discovering that nothing is left from the experience, just the filmy residue in a ring around the tub. My lack of reading retention goes far beyond forgetting the sentences I spend hours soaking in. With many of the books on my shelves, I am not even clear about whether I ever opened them.

  In the case of a Vintage paperback of Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems, which I am taking down from a shelf in the hallway this morning, it is the poet’s name that enchants me. I flip to a random page and read this stanza dedicated to Alexander Blok:

  I come to him as a guest.
  Precisely at noon. Sunday.
  In the large room there was quiet,
  And beyond the window, frost.

  I do not read Russian, but I do not imagine that this is any better or any more engaging in its native language. Who knows, maybe it is. I do like her name though. And there is a charming patina of age on the January 1914 printed below the fourth and final stanza, and I have held onto the memory of finding this turquoise blue paperback in the largest and most famous bookstore in St. Petersburg on an afternoon escape from a group tour in 2018. The bookstore, in the former Singer Company building, is an Art Nouveau treasure on Nevsky Prospekt.

  Hundreds of the books on my shelves are this way. My attachment to them is a romance that has little to do with reading. That said, I am not a collector. So many of these books, probably most, are cheap paperbacks.

  ix

  For thirty years, I exercised five days a week at midday on a treadmill at the Verandah Club behind the Anatole Hotel. I would go for the exercise and for the pleasure of a shower after and to break up the workday. William Gilliland, who sometimes shared my row of lockers in the dressing room, was a retired bookseller and tried to persuade me that a book should be prized as an object. I told him it was only the sentences inside that were valuable, not the paper or the binding or the copyright or any author’s signature on a flyleaf. He disagreed. And over the years, Bill gave me several first editions from his collection as gifts. One or two of these gifts were written by nineteenth-century Englishmen nobody reads anymore; another is a first edition of Leonard Cohen’s first novel, The Favourite Game, published in 1963 by Secker and Warburg. Nobody reads that either. I certainly never have.

  x

  Carelessly, chaotically, other than how each fits into the pocket of space between its neighbors, these books have been shelved willy-nilly. My unkept New Year’s resolution this year should be to organize them. For example, by author’s last name or by genre or type. Novels, poetry, history, science, religion, self-help, classics, cookbooks. Books I have read, books I want to read, books I have started but will never finish, books that I bought but will never open. The paperbacks, the hardbacks, the coffee table art books that are lying on their sides. Books with jackets, books with broken spines.

  In my teens, I wanted to see my own name on a book spine, jacketed or not. Look how many there are, how hard could it be, to write a book? But that wish has gone nowhere, and I wonder where could it ever have gone.

  xi

  Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the books on my shelves I have never finished despite several tries. The writing is chilly enough that I doubt I will ever do more than dip a toe into it. Its six hundred pages are as overweight as its more complete title, The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is, With All The Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics and Several Cures of It. It was published in 1621, when Burton was in his forties. I am thirty years past that and baffled by its meandering. In the dead center of it, part a passage encumbered with Latin phrases, Burton writes that “whosoever then labours of this malady of melancholy, by all means let him get some trusty friend to whom freely and securely he may open himself.” In my own experience, talking to friends is not much help.

  The author of one of the introductions to The Anatomy of Melancholy claims that Burton’s book is “packed with common sense and uncommon nonsense.” This is not a phrase that would encourage most readers to keep trudging to the very distant finish.

  xii

  My first wife died when our children were eleven and thirteen. The two of us used to read aloud to them, picking the same prized books night after night. At five, Eden’s favorite was The Polka Dot Puppy. It remains on a shelf in the hallway.

  The Polka-Dot Puppy is easier reading than The Anatomy of Melancholy. It is also more subversive, especially for an adopted child for whom “where do I belong” can become a painful question. The plot is simple. After a long, unsuccessful search, the polka-dot puppy finally finds a home. Same with Are You My Mother?—another book we would read with my daughter. Similar plot, only this time a baby bird instead of a puppy. What underlies this need to search for the true parent or the right home? I don’t think I was ever confused about my parents or the house we lived in. Disappointed in them, often, but not confused. It is possible I don’t remember.

  xiii

  Maurice Sendak’s Pierre was another favorite read-it-together book; it is somewhere on the shelves as well. This one I associate with our other adopted child, Ben, the older by one year. It is about a boy who says “I don’t care” to everything. Sendak must have been inspired by Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, where the infuriatingly passive hero says “I would prefer not to” in response to every task his employer gives him. Melville also wrote Pierre: or The Ambiguities, a novel no one reads unless they have to. If they do, they can choose the edition with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. I don’t own Pierre: or The Ambiguities in any edition, though Moby Dick is under the waves of the lowest hallway shelves. Even in paperback, it is heavy enough to sink. I read it in college and remember little more than its famous first sentence. As for Sendak’s Pierre, it turned out as prophetic of my son’s future attitudes as The Polka-Dot Puppy has been for Eden and her sense of unbelonging.

  xiv

  This poem Eden wrote in third or fourth grade is in a metal frame slightly larger than an index card. It goes:

  In Big Bend
  Trees and grass
  Birds calling
  Mountain air
  Rough rocks.

  Not exactly Mary Oliver, but similar. Oliver’s Blue Horses is on one of the shelves in the hallway. Oliver’s title might have been a line in Eden’s poem, though blue javelinas would be a better fit for Big Bend. Oliver’s Why I Wake Early is on a shelf, too. I have read enough of these poems to tire of their self-regard, their recording of attentiveness to the natural world. Wislawa Symborska has more bite and is more to my taste. And for praises of nature, I prefer Thoreau’s droll, aphoristic sentences. There is more than one Walden on my shelves. When I start reorganizing, I can also find where I put his Wild Fruits.

  xv

  Do parents always harm their children? We may not mean to, but we do. That is what Philip Larkin says, in a poem between the covers of a book I am looking for down the hallway. I come across Wislawa Symborska instead and open her Collected and Last Poems to read the translation of Night, a poem from the 1950s. Symborska writes in the voice of a child about the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac. She imagines herself experiencing it. She is the child brought to a mountain in the wilderness to be sacrificed at God’s command. The knife that is raised above her breast is held by her own father. It is an imagining that is worse than any bad dream, worse than loneliness. And she writes that from that night forward, God begins to move—minute by minute, day by day—from the literal to the metaphorical.

  Symborska is Polish. By chance, Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer is leaning into the space left after I remove her Collected and Last Poems. Halfon is Guatemalan. I want to reread The Polish Boxer, which is a novel or a sequence of stories or maybe just a recounting, not a memoir exactly, but closing in on one. It is hard to tell. And it is so simple, the translated sentences, that I think anyone could write it. I tell myself I could write it.

  xvi

  Three is a magical number. The three remaining boxes upstairs that remind me of my once-upon-a-time daughter have a place in the plotting of a fairy tale. Suitors from distant kingdoms would be asked to open one of the three. Inside, they would find a challenge to overcome or a riddle that must be answered in order to win her hand. In real life, I am the only suitor, and the riddle is when exactly to throw everything away. They are her belongings. Or, former belongings, because neither boxes nor daughter belong here any longer.

  xvii

  Sometimes an object has explanatory power. The things I kept after my daughter left home tell a story, but I am at a loss to come up with a moral. The past is not once upon a time, it is a series of specific times. There is a brown paper sack with a sticker on it that says The Cat’s Out of the Bag About… with Eden’s name printed below that. Inside, a strip of paper with My Favorites Are and spaces to fill in. Favorite food, favorite color, favorite hobby. There is space for Person I Admire Most. This must have been done during her X-Files phase, since Agent Scully was her most admired person. Eden was nine or ten or eleven then. Career I Want in The Future? She wanted to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Place I Want to Visit? Inside a U.F.O. Something I Do Well? Levitate.

  If she returns soon, Eden can also retrieve her school reports. At nine years old, she has “quite a charming personality,” in the words of a lower school homeroom teacher. “She has the gift of conversation and is a caring, cooperative young lady.” Hard to know how formulaic this second-grade reporting might have been. Two other reports, one from the year before and one from the year after, from different teachers, begin with the exact same phrase. Eden is “a joy to have in class.” This phrase may be the wine dark sea of praise from primary school teachers. “She always listens,” a first-grade teacher writes, “and seems to hang on my every word.” That is not how I remember her, but I concur. Eden was a delightful child. Smart, curious, funny, imaginative. On a slip of paper that has a teacher’s semi-serious recipe for “Swimming Spaghetti,” my joy-to-have-in-class daughter adds in the blocky printing of a third grader, I wonder if it can do the backstroke?

  And then, within a few short years, the diary entries and poems turned into misery, and there is the cutting herself and putting cigarettes out on her arm to “stop the pain.”

  What happened? Her mother died, she became a teenager, her father remarried, her birth mother found her. But which of these might serve as an explanation, nothing that she left behind explains.

  xviii

  Despite or because I forget most of what I have read, I enjoy stepping into the same book twice. That is what I intended to do with The Polish Boxer. Unfortunately, what was entrancing the first time, on second reading seems like posturing. The idea of the book has become better than the book itself. So I am stalling out on The Polish Boxer, despite how slender and inviting it is. I reinsert it on its bookshelf in the hallway. I have no more patience for Eduardo Halfon and his pretentious conversations with Milan, the Serbian pianist who improvises a playlist no matter what the program says. I am tired of his Guatemalan authenticity, the meals with spoonfuls of caquic and other foods I have never heard of, the white rice covered by ladles of spicy pepian.

  xix

  As for the diamond ring that belonged to Pam, the second wife, who left it in our safe deposit box by mistake in 2006? It is mine now. The terms of our divorce decree declare that from its date forward whatever was in the physical possession of either of “the parties,” as we are called, belongs to that party. My appointment with a business that can value this ring and will either make an offer or not is today at noon. The place where I am selling it is a suite on the top floor of a twenty-story building. It takes a very deliberate journey to get there. First, finding the right driveway into the building and its underground parking. Then from the parking garage elevators to a lobby. The lobby elevators go only as far as the seventeenth floor, where a private club is open for lunch. A separate elevator then carries me up two more floors, to a Regus space with a shared reception area, for businesses that do not want responsibility for a receptionist. Not for the employee, or for the coffeemaker, the refrigerator with cold drinks, or the shared waiting area and its generic furniture.

  The business I am going to is a local office for what its website claims is “the most trusted buyers of diamonds, fine jewelry and luxury watches on the planet.” I have a noon appointment with one of the “experts in 18 locations around the globe,” who has “access to the latest market data” and will provide me “a seamless process, incomparable value, and immediate payment.”

  I am a few minutes early. The expert comes out at the exact appointed time, and she extends her hand. She reminds me of someone, but not of anyone I know. She reminds me of someone I wish I knew. Perfect skin. Short, straight auburn hair that falls in a semicircle to the level of her chin. Her name is Heather. Skirt and blouse and heels, though she comes to work at a business where she is both manager and sole employee. I follow Heather back through right turns and left turns, down corridors and beyond the closed doors of the other Regus tenants, to the small space where she has her desk, and where she ushers me into one of two armchairs on the other side of the desk.

  I am wondering whether I am her grandfather’s age, or only her father’s. Probably somewhere in between.
  The diamond ring in my pocket is wrapped in a tissue. I fish it out, as Heather is waiting for me to present it. A beat, a moment passes.
  “Let’s see what you have,” she says.
  As I pass her the ring, a witticism occurs to me, and before I think better of it, I say it.
  “You’re very beautiful,” I say. “I think I should be proposing.”
  No response, really. She smiles though, as a saleswoman might.
  Heather has a jewelry loop, a computer screen, and a booklet that she consults. There are gemologist certifications in frames on the walls. As she works, she mentions the boyfriend who wants to marry her. It does not take her long to assess my diamond and offer half of what I had hoped she might. She writes the offer on a form and says she can write the check today or transfer funds directly into my bank account. I tell her I have to see one or two other places for comparisons before making a judgment. Giving me back the ring, Heather tells me the offer is good for seven days.
  Who she reminds me of occurs to me afterwards, in the elevator down. She is a ringer for Agent Scully from The X-Files.

  Chapter Two
  WHAT IS FAILURE REALLY

  Yearend is a time to walk through the events of the year past. At life’s end, however, going back can be a complicated journey. And a stumbling, melancholic one. Be not solitary, be not idle, Robert Burton recommended in The Anatomy of Melancholy, as one of his cures, steps he thought as effective as a trip to the physician or the apothecary. I have substituted for both at different times in my life, making use of psychiatrists and pharmacists. And here I am trying to write down my thoughts about failure. So being solitary goes with the territory. Sitting in a chair, tapping on the keyboard of a laptop, looks very much like idleness, at least to the outside observer. Then again, there is no outside observer. And that is a relief. Since no one is providing a target, I have no mark to hit. There is no test, so no right answers. No prizes, and no punishments either. I have always admired the wisdom of Kohelet, available wherever Bibles are sold, or given away, or placed in a pew: whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

  ii

  Sooner or later, every man is a failure in his own eyes is another admirable aphorism. I don’t know who said it or where I read it, but I get it. I too have the conviction that I have failed. And not just failed at this or that. Failure can become the label that you attach to yourself, like a name tag on a sticky white rectangle peeled from a roll and then pressed onto your breast pocket. You have written your first name and last initial on that rectangle, using the black Sharpie pen that the host at the check-in table has provided. Or you own the nicer, metal tag, the one that has your first and last name debossed on a strip of metal. That is the manufactured one that comes with the separate button of a magnet and the warning do not use with pacemaker.

  iii

  Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy has the pull of the all-you-can-eat restaurant. The concept is tempting, but the experience is mixed, and the result is often regret. The fat paperback on my bookshelf has an introduction by William Gass, and a second introduction, this one from the 1932 edition, by Holbrook Jackson. I have freed it from the shelf and am weighing it in my hands. There is also a “Note On The Text.” According to this Note, several pages long, no original manuscript of The Anatomy of Melancholy exists. For the five versions printed during his lifetime, Burton made changes and added material. The text in my paperback follows edition number six, which was the first printed posthumously. If I were Robert Burton, I would be digressing now, explaining the complexities of the word “posthumous.” How, in Latin, posterus can mean “coming after” and postumus, the superlative form, might or might not mean “last.” Burton might have added that when Latin was a spoken language, postumus referred to the last born of a man’s children—particularly to those born after a man died. From there, piling on, he could note how “umus” in postumus became entwined with humus, meaning “dirt” or “earth.” And so it came to be confused with the very earth where a child’s father is buried.

  iv

  Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong is on a desk upstairs, in a room I sometimes call “the study.” This book is “a masterclass in navigating failure,” according to Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit, who is quoted on the front of the book’s jacket. Right Kind of Wrong has the subtitle The Science of Failing Well. Angela Duckworth repeats her endorsement on the back cover. She praises Right Kind of Wrong as “a master class in navigating, and even seeking out, the inevitable failures that pave the way to success.” So, failure is inevitable; it should even be sought.

  v

  Management consultants and academics speak of the opportunity to “fail well.” But what is being praised at the Harvard Business School is not failure; it is learning from failure. Thomas Edison will be quoted. I have not failed, the great inventor declares in prefaces and first chapters, I’ve found ten thousand ways that won’t work. That is all fine. Learn and move on is a wonderful strategy, if you can bring it off. But what if your sense of failure is bedrock, not a stepping stone toward success. What if it is as vast as the vista ahead, in the aftermath of giving up? It becomes the final grade, the conclusive assessment, a summing up. It is a black mood you are not moving beyond. There is no curtain you can part, dispersing the convincing darkness with the sunshine that is there, just outside, all along.

  vi

  There is the notion that failure can turn into honor eventually, if you live long enough. Or the transformation may occur posthumously. Those unrecognized during their lives will be lionized after their deaths. Van Gogh is the standard bearer. Franz Kafka, too. I have Kafka on my bookshelves and on the tops of tables. In the hallway, Complete Stories. In another room, The Castle. The slim reprint of Kafka’s Letter to My Father on a desk upstairs is from the Kafka Museum in Prague, from its gift shop. Other editions I have seen of this little book translate it as Letter to The Father, which is a crueler title. I never wrote letters to my father, who died at ninety-four, less than a year after he tripped and hit his head on a concrete stair on his way into a movie theater, to see Tom Cruise in Valkyrie. The day before his fall, he was in robust health, and his subsequent decline was steeper than the stairway.

  I do have one or two letters from him, however. They are more like notes. He wrote his messages in block print and, typically, sprinkled them with capitalizations in the middle of his sentences. If I wrote back, it was only to “Mom and Dad,” as though they were one person. And this was in the years well before email when addresses were physical and a married couple had the same one. I may not have seen my mother and father as individuals then, or not clearly. A marriage can do that, it can be a kind of eclipse. From a child’s point of view, it fuses them into parents and thereby hides each one.

  vii

  Kafka’s Letter to My Father has nothing to do with my father. For that, it would be better to choose a baseball book, the biography of Sandy Koufax that he might have given me. So I look for Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy, by Jane Leavy, and find it on a high shelf in the hallway. It turns out to have been from my father only by proxy. My son has a message for me from 2002 on its first blank page. Dad, it says, I remember you telling me about seeing Koufax play at Dodger Stadium so I got you this book. Ben is misremembering. The night game that my father and I went to was at the Coliseum, not at Chavez Ravine. More formally, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, on August 31, 1959. Dodgers versus San Francisco Giants, Koufax pitching, Johnny Roseboro catching. My father and I are sitting down the line from first base in the bleacher seats high above right field. And Koufax strikes out eighteen.

  viii

  What is failure, really? Is it the gap between who I thought I would be and how things have turned out? Maybe that is just a failure of wisdom and a lack of acceptance. Failing is inevitable, just as the failure to stay alive is inevitable. For parents, having children can be a response to that inevitability. A father might think he will still live on earth in the genes of those who come after him, however difficult it may be to remain satisfied with that kind of immortality. As the father of adopted children, I need some other death-denying illusion, to use the language of Ernest Becker, whose The Denial of Death is buried on a desk downstairs, under Bittersweet by Susan Cain, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and Love Poems of Pablo Neruda.

  ix

  It is also possible to embrace failure. It is possible to joke about it. To belittle it, by belittling yourself. Ornella Sinigalia writes about the use in China of the term “diaosi,” which means something like “loser.” She says it became trendy among the generation born after the 1980s to poke fun at their own low status.

  Some ambitious winner has even started a business called The Failure Institute. The premise of his business is that we all need to free ourselves from the stigma of failure. The need is desperate, according to the text I find under the About Us navigation on The Failure Institute’s website. The Failure Institute is a global movement. It has chapters in some three hundred cities around the world. Its “signature events” are called Fuckup Nights. And the lessons learned from more than one million participants on these Fuckup Nights are distilled by The Failure Institute into “content and community for top companies and organizations around the world.” The slogan of The Failure Institute? Failure sucks but instructs. Private events, workshops, newsletters and reports, blog posts about authenticity and vulnerability, “how to turn failure into opportunity,” and the off-rhyming slogan are all part of the sale. This is not parody, though you might fail to see how it could not be.

  x

  If I need a definition of failure, I can look for it in the two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary I received as a graduation gift after high school. It is on the lowest shelf of one of the seven bookcases that are built into my hallway. This dictionary is one of five or six books my parents gave me over the years, most of them for birthdays. Six or seven, if the two dark blue volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary still in their slipcase count as two. I need to stoop all the way to the hardwood floor in the hallway to find it. The slipcase has a small tray at the bottom, with a tiny knob I can pull to slide the tray outward and reveal a magnifying glass. It is day time, but a magnifying glass is helpful in the dim hallway.

  National Geographic Atlas of the World was also a gift from my parents. It is slipcased, too, on one of the shelves behind the downstairs desk. Most mysterious, my parents gave me P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, a dusty, unread book, its pages a terra more incognita than Papua New Guinea or Antarctica. I can see its jacketed spine on one of the upper shelves in the hall. “By the author of Tertium Organum,” it says on the cover. “The famous Russian philosopher’s story of his quest for a teaching which would solve for him the problems of Man and the Universe.” I never got further in this book than the message my mother wrote on an empty page facing the inside front cover. “For your 16th birthday,” she writes, “with hope that this book will answer some of your questions that we do not know the answers to.” My mother was solving a problem that I did not have, because I would never have asked her questions about Man or the Universe. And my father might not have heard me even had I asked him. You can picture him sitting in his recliner, listening to the ballgame, an ear plugged by the earpiece of his transistor radio. Now might be as good a time as any to read this neglected gift. More than sixty years have passed, and I have never found the miraculous, whether by searching or by accident. Still, In Search of the Miraculous has a message worth finding this morning. “All our love always, Mother and Dad,” it says.

  xi

  The Wislawa Symborska paperback on a hallway shelf is a travel souvenir. It comes from Masolit, a bookstore in Krakow. My memories are sketchy of the years-ago tour whose primary destination from Krakow was Auschwitz, and very little comes to mind of Krakow, other than the name of this bookstore and Symborska’s Collected and Last Poems, at eye level in the hall. Symborska is a canny trickster. Who else would have written In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself? I take Collected and Last Poems from the shelf and open to page 227 in order to read the end of this poem again:

  On this third planet of the sun
  among the signs of bestiality
  a clear conscience is number one.

  In translation, it reminds me of Auden. His Collected Poems, the hardback, sits on a shelf nearby. So does the thin Penguin paperback of Auden’s Selected Poems that I have owned for fifty years. And a badly used copy of A Certain World, Auden’s commonplace book, its paperback cover missing, its spine broken, and the unbound pages held together with a rubber band.

  xii

  The Tao Te Ching asks: “Success or failure: which is more destructive?” Also, “Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. But when you stand with your feet on the ground, you will keep your balance.” The Tao Te Ching is resting somewhere on these bookshelves. When I go to find it, the book I remembered as the Tao Te Ching turns into The Parting of the Way, an explanation of Taoism by Holmes Welch. Joseph P. Walcott is written in blue pen on the inside front cover. I remember Joe, someone I met in Berkeley, the year I dropped out of college. Long stringing hair, looking like Jesus as Jesus might have looked on a college campus in 1973. I must have borrowed this paperback from him and then never returned it. Passages in The Parting of the Way are colored over with yellow marker. There are terse margin notes in the same blue pen. Confucius vs Legalism, for example. I see a Yes above two underlines in a margin alongside a sentence Joe highlighted in yellow. On page fifty, the passage that he colors asks, “Where are those mysterious peaks for which Lao Tzu is famous? They have been right above us all the time, shrouded in obscurity. Let us go up and explore them.” In that margin, Joe has written LSD, with another double underline. (It is 1969 after all.) His also comments or copies halfway through the book: Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak. That is all fine, but where is the Tao Te Ching I am certain that I own? I keep looking on hallway bookshelves. Another book about Taoism, The Shambhala Guide, has a promotional card inside from The Pristine Mind Foundation. This book is crisp as a cracker and looks as though it has never been opened.

  Eventually, I find two different translations of the Tao Te Ching on different shelves in other rooms. Both are handsome, jacketed hardbacks, with unworldly illustrations. They are like art books. I probably bought Tao Te Ching A New Translation, calligraphy of Kwok-Lap Chan, and then forgot it entirely. Years pass. And then I bought Tao Te Ching, An Illustrated Journey, translated by Stephen Mitchell, with the delicate scene on its cover from the ink-on-silk handscroll Twelve Views of Landscape, Southern Sung dynasty, early 13th century.

  xiii

  Ursula Le Guin, whose father wanted pages of it read at his funeral, translated her own version of the Tao Te Ching, in order to “catch the poetry.” She writes that the Tao Te Ching is “the most lovable of all the great religious texts.” She also reports that absolutely nothing about it is certain other than that it is Chinese and very old, written maybe 2500 years ago, and only maybe by someone named Lao Tzu.

  xiv

  Tao Te Ching can be translated as The Book of the Way, but for some reason its title is usually not translated. There is a marketing advantage to leaving it untranslated, an added authenticity to the brand. There are books whose difficulty is part of their appeal. I have Finnegans Wake on a shelf somewhere, never read, not even attempted. Today, late in December, I am leafing through the Stephen Mitchell translation. Mitchell in his introduction to Tao Te Ching says “there is practically nothing to be said” about its author. He then says, “Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces.” Are the habits of an anonymous Iroquois so well known by every reader? Stephen Mitchell ends his introduction with a comment on translation. “If I haven’t always translated Lao Tzu’s words, my intention has always been to translate his mind.” That is also a mysterious notion.

  xv

  Both of the Tao Te Ching books present the text in a series of short sections typeset as if they were poetry. In Stephen Mitchell’s version, “Failure is an opportunity” appears as the first sentence in the poem he numbers seventy-nine:

  Failure is an opportunity.
  If you blame someone else,
  there is no end to the blame.
  Therefore the Master
  fulfils her own obligations
  and corrects her own mistakes.

  This assessment of failure does not appear in the other Tao Te Ching. It is a very different book, its sections are not numbered, and each of its poems is called a chapter. Still, it has plenty to say about failure. The chapter forty-five poem begins:

  A great thing done is never perfect.
  But that doesn’t mean it fails:
  it does what it is.

  As a kind of repudiation of “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” chapter sixty-three begins:

  The sage does nothing,
  and so he never fails.

  Joe Walcott thought Tao Te Ching was deep wisdom. He said so to me. The flap of the jacket cover of Tao Te Ching A New Translation asserts something similar. It says Tao Te Ching is expressing “divine truth.” But then, those who know do not say, and those who say do not know.

  Chapter Three
  THE WORLD’S GREATEST BOOKS

  The seven bookcases that cover the length of the hallway are in dim light. The twelve volumes of The Complete Works of Mark Twain on the top shelf of the first bookcase are bright spots, their spines and covers as yellow as bananas. They sit on a shelf above Sandy Koufax and also have a connection to my father. What the connection is, I do not know, but I have the belief that there is one. These books remained in my bedroom in Los Angeles throughout my childhood. Decades later, they were stored at the Oceanside home that my parents moved to. And then, after my father died, I took them. They are small books, but thick, clothbound, and they fascinated me when I was a teenager, though not enough to have ever read them. I like the banana yellow of their covers and how the name of each volume is set in gold on bands of crimson. On all the covers, gold laurel leaves encircle an embossed profile of Samuel Clemens in a crimson oval, and, outside that circle, there is a second circle of embossed five-pointed stars. Under that, the writer’s signature, also in gold.

  I have not looked at a single page in these books in over fifty years. In the dim light, I am holding Volume 8, The Mysterious Stranger. There are crosshatched illustrations on the endpapers that depict characters from different stories. This is the American Artists Edition of The Complete Works of Mark Twain, published by Harper & Brothers, copyright 1922 by Mark Twain Company. My first-generation American father, who never went to college or ever read an assigned book, is a mysterious stranger himself. Both my parents are. I cannot picture either of them buying this twelve-volume set, but here it is in the hallway.

  ii

  These are the twelve Twains, in order: Pudd’nhead Wilson, The American Claimant, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Mysterious Stranger, The Innocents Abroad, The Gilded Age, A Tramp Abroad, and What Is Man.

  Every American knows Tom and Huck, or used to. But who is Pudd’nhead Wilson?

  iii

  In my childhood bedroom, the twelve Twains rested on one of two shelves made of particle board and supported by metal brackets that hook into slotted metal tracks. The tracks are fastened to the drab green, textured and synthetic wood of the bedroom wall. The longer of the two boards sags under the dark blue burden of an Encyclopedia Americana. These encyclopedias are long gone. I do still have A Treasury of the Familiar, though—one of the “extras” that the publishers of Encyclopedia Americana threw in as an incentive to buy the complete set. It is in a bookcase behind my downstairs desk. Edited by Ralph L. Woods, A Treasury of the Familiar is a sort of greatest hits album in one dark blue volume. Much of it is poetry, though not all. I am looking into it this late December morning. If I wanted to, I can read Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia or George Washington’s Farewell Address, and plenty of Robert Burns or Robert Browning, in these 750 pages of the formerly familiar. What I remember is only the epigraph from Alfred Noyes’s The Barrel-Organ, which remains just as it was, in front of all that follows:

  And the music’s not immortal;
  but the world has made it sweet.

  In the “Index by Authors” at the end, the longest list by far belongs to “Anonymous.” There is no named author for Polly Wolly Doodle or The Boy Scout Oath.

  iv

  Each of the Twains has its own uncredited illustration facing a title page. In my bedroom as a child, I would open these books only to look at the dreamy color scenes. The one that I loved most is in Volume 8, The Mysterious Stranger. Three young men are in the snow, they may be out hunting. One holds a crossbow. He squints, seeming to look right at me. The other two, on either side of him, also peer forward. The three are wearing feathered caps. They have leggings and jackets, outfits that belong to another time and a far-away country. Behind them, on top of a rocky ledge, distantly and under a dreamy sky, there is the castle with six turrets. All is pastels and sunny on the page. Even the silly caption is transporting. Eseldorf Was a Paradise For Us Boys. These seven words worked like a spell. I never read any further, and whoever the mysterious stranger was, that remains a mystery.

  v

  These books are ghosts; or, they are the hosts of spirits. They speak about the past, if only in a whisper. My father is resting under the covers of the Mark Twains. My mother uses a Russian mystic to write to me about my childhood. They are among voices in a crowd on my bookshelves. Bertha, my mother’s oldest sister, talks to me three shelves below The Complete Works of Mark Twain. She is someone I never met, but her twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books have exhumed her and reburied her in the casket of a mahogany bookshelf built into the hallway.

  vi

  Bertha Reegler had rheumatic fever as a child. She dropped dead at age twenty-six on the living room floor of an overcrowded apartment in East Los Angeles, astounding and terrifying her three younger sisters and her mother. That was in 1940. The twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books she left behind are in precarious shape. On most of them, the spines are naked. What little is left of the faux leather paper that used to wrap around their edges will crumble when I touch it, exposing more of the fabric and yellowed glue underneath. I have seen these books in one house or another for seventy years, and have never looked inside them or read even their titles until this morning.

  vii

  Bertha was the star of the family. There was a brother, my Uncle Harold, though by 1940 he was already out of the apartment where the four sisters lived with their immigrant parents. Bertha must have been ambitious. She was interested in a high culture as foreign to her mother and father as Moldova and Bucovina are to Echo Park in East L.A. Or maybe a nice-looking salesman simply knocked on the door to their apartment. An offer was made. Buy a book a month, for practically nothing…

  Whatever was so promising in Bertha, those promises were not kept. My mother held onto all Bertha’s books however. Not just The World’s Greatest Books, but others still on my shelves as well.

  viii

  I have a photograph of my Aunt Bertha. The shelf that holds The World’s Greatest Books is deep enough to also hold a small, hinged gold frame in front, a double frame for two images. In the style of the times, Bertha’s photo is tinted. She is on the right of the center hinge, and the tinted photo of her father, Isaac, is on the left. I never knew Isaac Reegler either. I was one year old when he died. In his photo, he wears a very wide necktie with tinted blue stripes, and he looks a bit like Lee J. Cobb at his angriest. The photo of Bertha is textured with riverine cracks, as though her face had been printed on a geologic study. I slide out the cardboard from the back of the frame, in order to free her photo and turn it over, to see if there is any information, a date, her age. No, nothing. My family is like that, too. No one I grew up with thought that their lives might have any resonance beyond the day to day.

  Has anyone ever read all of The World’s Greatest Books, copyright 1910 by S. S. McClure? Has anyone anywhere done that, since their publication by McKinley, Stone and Mackenzie? These twenty volumes are high culture, with faux marble endpapers and frontispiece portraits, and simply owning them is a signifier. They stand for something. When I pry out Volume XIII, Religion and Philosophy, bits of the binding flake off like old skin. When I open it to the table of contents, the front cover separates and falls to the floor. Under “Religion,” its list of excerpts goes from Apocrypha to Zoroastrianism. There is Koran and Talmud, and snippets from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, and from William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude. All of these excerpts are preceded by scholarly summaries. “Philosophy” in Volume XIII begins with Aristotle but only gets as far as Epictetus. Looking for Volume XIV, I pull out five other tightly-shelved books, doing even more damage to them. The wrapping around most of the spines has disappeared entirely, and the set is not in numerical order. “Philosophy,” Hegel to Spinoza, is in a crumbling Volume XIV that then moves on to “Economics,” from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to a slice of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

  Volumes I through VIII of The World’s Greatest Books are entirely Fiction, with the authors excerpted in alphabetical order. In Volume I, Edmond About and Harrison Ainswater are among the greatest. Volume VIII ends with Emile Zola. Looking into the steady eyes of William Thackery, whose portrait is the frontispiece in Volume VIII, I wondered what Nanny, my grandmother, must have thought about any of this. As her family struggled to make rent or pay bus fare, what did Nanny say when these books showed up at the apartment? Does she welcome Sir Thomas Browne and Edward Bellamy?

  “Mama,” Bertha tells her, “These are for me.”
  And after her favorite daughter’s sudden death?
  “Keep them,” she says, and Bertha’s kid sister, my mother, did.

  There are no complete books in The World’s Greatest Books. The set is a tasting menu, with nothing too filling. After the eight volumes of Fiction, the next two are Life and Letters. Then comes Ancient History/Medieval History, one volume; Modern History, one volume; Religion and Philosophy, two volumes; Science, one volume; Poetry and Drama, three volumes; Travel and Adventure, one volume; and, last, Miscellaneous Literature and Index in the same twentieth volume. Each book has a frontispiece, a colorless portrait or a ghostly photo of an author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Volume VI, for example, John Lothrop Motley in Volume XII. Excerpts are always in alphabetical order by author’s last name. So, Volume I, Fiction, begins with Edmund About. Volume XIX, Travel and Adventure, starts with Sir Samuel Baker and ends with Arthur Young. Ancient History/Medieval History, Volume XI, is different. After the frontispiece portrait of Edward Gibbon, its table of contents has “Ancient History” and, under that, four categories — Egypt, Jews, Greece, and Rome. Herodotus writes about Greece, Josephus and Henry Millman about the Jews. Then, under “Medieval History,” another four categories — the Holy Roman Empire, Europe, back to Egypt again, and then England. Volume XII, Modern History, follows its own pattern. After a portrait of John Lothrop Motley, “Modern History” is granted to America, England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, India, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and The Papacy. The authors are modern, but they are not always contemporary. Voltaire covers Russia. India goes to Mountstuart Elphinstone.

  xii

  How did S.S. McClure decide who belongs in The World’s Greatest Books? Maybe it was a matter of availability, or the laws of copyright in 1910. Why does an excerpt of Henry Milman’s History of the Jews appear in the “Ancient History” section of Volume XI? According to the editors, “The appearance of History of the Jews in 1830 caused no small consternation, but among the Jews themselves it was exceptionally well received.” I doubt it. Henry Hart Milman, Doctor of Divinity in London, born in 1791, buried in 1868 in St. Paul’s Cathedral, served as Dean at St. Paul’s for nearly twenty years, and this is how his excerpt from History of the Jews begins in The World’s Greatest Books: “By the destruction of Jerusalem, the political existence of the Jewish nation was annihilated; it was never again recognized as one of the states or kingdoms of the world. We have now to trace a despised and obscure race in almost every region of the world.”

  xiv

  The joint editors of The World’s Greatest Books are Arthur Mee, Founder of the Book of Knowledge, J.A. Hammerton of Hammerton’s Universal Encyclopaedia, and S. S. McClure. In American publishing, S. S. McClure, whose name sounds like an oceangoing vessel, was in fact a big fish. He was a journalist, editor, and publisher. In 1884, McClure established the very first U.S. newspaper syndicate. In 1893, he co-founded McClure’s Magazine, which championed long-form investigative journalism. It was ground-breaking; its work came to be called muckraking. McClure’s Magazine ran pieces by Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson. McClure was also in business with Frank Doubleday. Their partnership, Doubleday & McClure, became just Doubleday after McClure left. By 1911, McClure had left McClure’s Magazine as well. That year, the magazine published his “autobiography” as a farewell. It was ghostwritten by Willa Cather.

  xv

  Willa Cather is a ghost herself on a shelf in the hallway. She haunts an unread blue green hardback Death Comes for the Archbishop, a decommissioned library book I must have found at a used book sale. Turning its pages this morning, I come to the author’s biography. Born in Virginia, moves west as a child to the hardscrabble farm, graduates from the University of Nebraska at nineteen, begins teaching and working for newspapers in Pittsburgh. Then this: “It was in these years that she wrote the brilliantly original short stories published in 1905 under the title The Troll Garden. The manuscript of this book came under the eye of S. S. McClure, who telegraphed Miss Cather to come to New York, where he offered her a position on his magazine.”

  xvi

  In honor of Aunt Bertha, I am reading three selections that S. S. McClure chose for The World’s Greatest Books. First, some pages in Volume I, from the fiction of Edmond About. Then, Mountstuart Elphinstone on India, and, last, an excerpt from the “travel and adventure” of Arthur Young. These three because I know nothing about them, just as I know almost nothing about Aunt Bertha. Her heart may have failed before she had time to read the three that I am choosing. It is also possible that her goal was never that, but something far less time-consuming. She might have only wanted to be the kind of person who would own The World’s Greatest Books. If so, she did not fail. There was time enough in her brief life for that.

  xvii

  The editor’s note in The World’s Greatest Books says of Edmond About that he is “the most entertaining anti-clerical writer of his period,” and his Le Roi de Montagnes, translated as King of the Mountains, “the most delightful of satirical novels.” Even with twenty volumes to fill, I would not include Le Roi des Montagnes, but here it is, its first chapter filling the first pages of Volume I. Edmond Francois Valentin About, born 1828 in Dieuze, France, died in Paris in 1885, buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery. One rainy afternoon in 1973, after reading my daily lines of Il Paradiso in a Paris café, I walked over to Pere Lachaise to see where Jim Morrison is buried. And if I passed the grave of Edmond About, I was unaware of it.

  xviii

  In 2017, before ten days in India — the Delhi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Agra, and back to Delhi circuit of the first-time tourist — I bought two picture-heavy guidebooks and three histories of the country. Those include a very thick paperback now at the end of the hallway, India A History by John Keay. I never read Mountstuart Elphinstone however, whose The History of India is excerpted on pages 246 to 258 in Volume XII of The World’s Greatest Books. According to an editor’s note, Elphinstone arrived in India in 1795. So, 222 years before I did. And he remained there for over thirty years. Mentions of his history of India do make it into John Keay’s India A History, both in the bibliography and in six separate entries in John Keay’s index, under Elphinstone, Mountstuart, administrator and historian. According to Keay, Mountstuart Elphinstone is among “the most outstanding scholar-administrators in the employ of the English East India Company.”

  xix

  The selection from Arthur Young’s Travels in France in Volume XIX of The World’s Greatest Books is nine pages. In 1784, Arthur Young started writing about agricultural conditions in England. In 1787 he was invited by the Comte de la Rochefoucauld to do the same for France. According to the editor’s note, Travels in France is “the most reliable record ever written about French rural conditions.” The selected excerpt, which reads as a diary, has nothing to do with rural life. “At Versailles,” the entry for May 27, 1787 begins. “After breakfasting with Count de la Rochefoucauld at his apartments in the palace, where he is grand master of the wardrobe, was introduced by him to the Duke de la Rochefoucauld.” Arthur Young mentions the ceremony he attends that same day with the Duke. The king, Louis XVI, is present “and seemed by his inattention to wish himself ahunting.” Marie Antoinette is in the room as well. The French Revolution is two years and two months away. “The queen,” his entry concludes, “is the most beautiful woman I have seen today….” Bertha, forgive me, but I do not have the stamina to make the journey through all nine pages, despite the editor’s note that says Travels in France “is as popular as ever today.”

  xx

  Francois de la Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld and the writer of Les Maximes, was not the Rochefoucauld who brought Arthur Young to a ceremony with the French king and queen. The writer of Les Maximes died in 1680. Arthur met a descendant, maybe Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, the cousin of Francois’s great grandchild Alexandre, the 5th Duke. This 5th Duke only had daughters surviving him, so, following the rules of salic law, Louis Alexandre inherited the dukedom. It was an unlucky inheritance. Louis Alexandre, defender of the American Revolution and friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, was murdered in 1792 by a mob ahunting aristocrats.

  xxi

  A three-ringed binder that I am certain is somewhere on a bookshelf behind the desk downstairs protects the xerox of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims that I made decades ago. And with the stamp of the public library from 1981 on its title page. Found it. There is also a forgotten loose sheet in the binder, folded into a square. This loose sheet has nothing on it besides this single sentence in blue ink: Le pays du marriage a cela de particulier que les estrangers ont envie de l’habiter, et les habitans naturels voudroient en etre exiles. Forty-three years ago, when I was four years into my first, longest and happiest marriage, I must have copied this sentence down from a French edition of Les Maximes, which is also xeroxed and in the binder.

  xxi

  Wedged on the shelf next to the green binder, a faded red spine. The Droll Stories of Balzac, Blue Ribbon Classics, with illustrations by Steele Savage, is another of Aunt Bertha’s books that I took from my parents’ house. When I open the cover, I find a message from my mother penciled on the page that faces the title page. Happy Birthday, Bertie, from Ginny. Which birthday? It could have been the last, the birthday a month before Bertha died. My mother was seven years younger than her oldest sister, so would have given this gift when she was still just a teenager. I am flipping through the Steele Savage illustrations in black ink of bosomy maidens and cowled, leering friars.

  xxii

  The twelve Twains and the twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books are not the only sets on my shelves. There are twenty-one books of the World Book in a freestanding bookcase in the back room that has become a den. They speak volumes about the misadventure of providing my two children, resistant at first and eventually hostile, with “enrichment.” Then there is Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, behind the downstairs desk. It is one of the five volumes in a never-read set of World’s Great Thinkers from Carlton House publishers. In the preface to Philosophical Dictionary, an uncredited editor writes that this Voltaire book “does not demand continuous reading; but at whatever places one opens it, one will find matter for reflection.” This is true enough. I am reflecting right now on how these five volumes got onto my bookshelves, and I am drawing a blank. They might have been Aunt Bertha’s as well, a doubling down on her dreams.

  xxiii

  Voltaire is only one of the five great thinkers from Carlton House. The full house includes Bacon’s Essays, The Philosophy of Spinoza, The Philosophy of Plato, and Sigmund Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Copyright on the Freud is from 1933. In the Plato book, I discover a receipt stamped Los Angeles, April 24, 1947. So, seven years after Aunt Bertha’s death. This receipt has nothing to do with World’s Great Thinkers. It is a ticket – the kind of cheap colored paper ticket that comes off a spool and might be good for admittance to a movie theater in 1947 or a ride at a fairgrounds. I also find a bookmark in Bacon’s Essays, separating the 56-page introduction from the very first essay, Of Truth, where Frances Bacon begins:

  What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

  xxiv

  The six-volume set Psychology, The Study of a Science covers half of an upper shelf in one of four built-in bookshelves in the small room where I sit at night. A veneered table – the downstairs desk — is piled with more books. Most are still waiting to be read, like the disheartened girls leaning against the walls or on each other at a junior high dance. The six volumes of Psychology, The Study of a Science were never mine. My first wife was a psychotherapist, and though I never saw her reading them, she brought them with her into the marriage. On the same shelf, the dimpled white spine of The Family Interaction Q-Sort, a self-published dissertation for her doctorate. It, too, will never have another reader.

  xxv

  Do my Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks qualify as a set? I have two dozen of them, these Ballentine paperbacks, the Tarzans and John Carter of Mars series, and they were a thrill sixty years ago.

  There are other sets on other shelves. There is the two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holyroyd, two volumes of The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, two volumes of the Journals of Andre Gide, and the green, jacketed three-volume Letters of John Addington Symonds. Years ago, I dipped into the four volumes of George Orwell’s writings, which are on a shelf in the hallway. On the other hand, the four volumes of Thousand and One Nights have never been opened. Same with the four slipcased books of The World of Mathematics, with commentary and notes by James R. Newman, which I must have wanted to at least try when I bought them in the late 1970s. I can probably find the definition of a set inside them, but it would not help.

  xxvi

  I cannot know what unreachable shore of culture or assimilation my aunt was pursuing in The World’s Greatest Books. For my grandfathers and grandmothers, not being pursued in Dubrowna or Piatra Neamt was enough. They left no books behind as clues that suggest otherwise. In this way they are more aligned than Aunt Bertha was with the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching. In the Stephen Mitchell translation:

  every day something is added.
  in the practice of the Tao,
  every day something is dropped.

  The way of the Tao is to know and do less and less, until arriving at the condition of “non-action.”

  That would have appealed to my grandfather – my father’s father, who did not know exactly where he was born.
  “It was near the Dnieper River,” he said.
  He did not know what his family name was, either, before it was changed.
  “Something like Purkin,” he said.
  As far as I know, he had come to America by himself as a child in 1905. He drove a cab in Chicago during the Al Capone days but had nothing to say about it. By the time I knew him, he was no longer working. He was smoking unfiltered Camels and driving the 1954 Buick that I dreamed would be mine as soon as I turned sixteen, though my parents stopped that, because, as my uncle Hy confirmed, “An old car will dollar you to death.”

  xxvii

  Stephen Mitchell continues:

  When nothing is done,
  nothing is left undone.
  True mastery can be gained
  by letting things go their own way.

  This was not, however, the way of the children of the immigrants. Bertha did not share the approach to learning or to life that Lao Tzu praises. When she bought The World’s Great Books, she was not letting things go their own way. She had a project, and she was getting things done, and she was not nearly done, when time ran out.

  xxviii

  Of all the sets of books read and unread on my hallway bookshelves, the heavyweight is The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. It comes in at fifty volumes. These fifty fill two shelves completely. And the five feet may have swelled over the years. When I put the tape measure to it, The Five-Foot Shelf of Books measures more than sixty-seven inches. All fifty belonged to Dolores before our marriage, and I never saw her open one. Until this morning in late December, neither has anyone else.

  xxix

  The Five-Foot Shelf of Books is branded Harvard Classics, with a Veritas seal in gold on their crimson spines. Unlike the twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books, which are crumbling, these books do a better job of faking their belonging in a world of wood paneling, lamplight, leather armchairs, and English accents. Their crimson covers, gold type, curlicue embellishments and marbled endpapers almost look real.

  America is a society that promises its members to be free of the limitations of class. To be self-made. Who would want The Five-Foot Shelf of Books? Someone who sees a relationship between self-made and self-taught and wants fifty volumes of it. For what purpose? In the bound Reading Guide that comes with the set, that purpose is declared. These fifty books “will carry you forward upon that road to the high goal toward which all of us are making our way.” All of us know what that high goal is. And, since we do, the Guide also assumes that we all share it.

  xxx

  When P.F. Collier & Son persuaded Charles W. Eliot, a retiring Harvard president, to select and introduce what Dr. Eliot called “this great company of the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages,” it knew there was a market. P.F. Collier published the first twenty-five volumes in 1909.The rest appeared the following year. Fifty volumes, twenty-three thousand pages.

  Something must have been in the water at New York publishing houses in 1909.That was the same year S.S. McClure secured his copyright for The World’s Greatest Books. By then, waves of immigration had brought my grandparents on my mother’s side to the Lower East Side of New York City. Maybe what was in the water was the sense that The World’s Greatest Books might clean up the children of the unwashed. By 1910, seven out of ten people in New York City were immigrants or their children. They became part of the market for The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. The wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting minds of all ages was what Dr. Eliot prescribed for these newcomers from Southern Europe or, even stranger, from Galicia and the Russian Pale.

  xxxi

  In Volume 1 of The Five-Foot Shelf of Books, there are over a hundred pages of Journal of John Woolman. I have never heard of John Woolman, but an excerpt from his Journal is included in The World’s Greatest Books as well. Woolman, who was born in New Jersey in 1720, devoted his life to agitation against the practice of slavery. He was the son of Quaker parents and influenced the abolition of slavery among the Society of Friends. According to the introductory note in Volume 1, “no small part of the enthusiasm of the general emancipation movement is traceable to his labors.” Was John Woolman someone “every schoolboy” knew in 1910? By the time I attended the local public school in Los Angeles fifty years later, John Woolman had dropped out.

  xxxii

  Page six of the Reading Guide that comes with The Five-Foot Shelf asks What Shall I Read Tonight? And follows up with How often does that question come to all of us, as if this were not a question but a statement of fact. This query comes from a far-away world, one with no television sets, no internet, no smartphones. There was no radio, either, in 1910. In many homes, Americans were still reading, if at all, by gas lighting or candlelight. The Reading Guide goes on: “We want something to carry us out of ourselves, to take us a million miles from our humdrum existence.” It says these fifty books of The Five–Foot Shelf of Books will meet the need. They will “bestow pleasure, self-satisfaction and the joy of mental growth to each man, woman and child with impartiality and in infinite variety.” Maybe so. My fifty have sat quietly on two shelves for decades, like children seen but not heard, and mostly not even seen in the darkness of the hallway. The Reading Guide warns about this on page 6. “We urge you,” it says, “to keep at all times several volumes easily at hand on your desk or table to read and browse through. Don’t put your set away in a distant bookcase where you must go to get them.” This good advice was not taken.

  xxxiii

  Two years after publication, P. F. Collier and Son told Dr. Eliot that a half-million sets had already been placed “in the homes of enthusiastic purchasers.” Also, “a stream of unsolicited letters of approval has come from these owners.” The Reading Guide includes a testimonial from one of those enthusiastic purchasers that P.F. Collier refers to.“ My first reading,” a woman writes, “gave me a pleasure likened unto finding small particles of gold.”

  The Guide continues like this for ten more pages. It plugs Magnificent Special Features that include introductory lectures, footnotes, and general Index. The Guide begins to read like an extended script by Ron Popeil for the longest infomercial ever, although the vocabulary is statelier. But wait, there’s more. After prefaces and promotions, the final seventy pages of the Guide are the Daily Reading Guide. This is Dr. Eliot’s 15-minute-a-day program, which he declares “a substitute for a liberal education, to anyone who would read with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day.”

  xxxiv

  I am considering the January through December calendar in the Reading Guide, with its daily assignment “that will take you out of the rut of life in the town you live in and make you a citizen of the world.”

  xxxv

  .December 31. The end of the year at last. With no intention of following the program, I am curious what my assignment would be for New Year’s Day. It is Read from Franklin’s Autobiography, Vol. 1, pp 79-85. In fifteen minutes of “leisurely enjoyment” I will get Franklin’s Advice for the New Year, which includes “Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.” I do not know if I am up to it. Maybe I should try it, if only for the month ahead. If I start with Benjamin Franklin on the first of the month, what will my assignment be at the end of the month? For January 31, Read from Don Quixote, Vol. 14, pp 60-67. A small illustration appears in the Guide, a drawing of a knight on horseback poking a lance into the blades of a windmill It comes with a caption, too. Don Quixote, the ambitious amateur knight, was well ridiculed for his pains.

  Just for fun, I skip ahead to April Fool’s. Dr. Eliot takes the day seriously. He assigns me Browning’s Poems from Vol. 42, near the end of a three-volume sequence, English poetry, from Chaucer to Whitman. For February 14, his advice is Read Pascal’s Discourse on the Passion of  Love, Vol. 48, pp 411-421. November 13 will be my next birthday. What should I be reading then, if I am getting with the program? The Confessions of St. Augustine, Vol. 7, pp 31-38. Austere, but not wrong. I will be turning seventy-three.

  xxxvi

  New Year’s Day. As I knew I would, I forget about Benjamin Franklin. I will never read St. Augustine either. Not next November or in any of the five or maybe ten Novembers that might be left. Aphorisms could be the better choice. La Rouchefoucauld and his Maximes are still dozing in a green binder. So much wisdom, and impossible to take it all in. Mark Twain is excellent at maxims, too. If I looked hard enough, I might find some of his inside one or two of the yellow Twains in the hallway, but I am not looking for them there. I have one of them by heart, which is probably the best place to keep it. According to Mark Twain, or so he reportedly said, the two most important days in life are the day you were born and the day you discover the reason why.

  And if that second day never arrives? It hardly matters. I am lucky to have had the first day. Just being born will have to be enough.

  Chapter Four
  WHAT WOULD DEWEY DO?

  More and more, I ask myself about what I know but have forgotten. The names of trees, for example, the flowering dogwood, which I look at and ask myself what is it, and the crepe myrtles, which I see and the word redbud forms in my mind, though this slender, smooth barked tree is no redbud. Much of my life is dark to me because I cannot remember it. Does that mean I no longer know myself? Or have I just forgotten? Maybe I am less and less one person, and more a sequence of selves, each one replacing the one before.

  This forgetting is because of age, but not only. I have always been like this with certain categories of knowledge. Certainly with the names of plants; not just trees, but the flowers and ground covers, too. Yes, I know that grass is grass, and that ivy is ivy. But the jasmines, the creeping juniper, the liriopes and the monkey grass — which may be the same – those are the names that escape me, even as I place my foot right on them.

  This forgetting what I know applies especially to what I have read.

  ii

  Every reader, as he reads, is actually looking into himself. Proust wrote that. He suggested that books are a kind of optical instrument that a reader uses to discern what he might never have seen in himself. If so, I may be looking at In Search of the Miraculous through the wrong lens. In this new year I am continuing to read it night after night. I can only manage a page or two at a time. It is impossible to understand; and even when it is clear, it is still tedious. It has no answers, but it provokes an obvious question. Why would a mother think this is a good gift for her son on his sixteenth birthday. I am only be reading it now because what else is there to do with it? This gift is a burden.

  iii

  My daughter is lost to me. We are “estranged”. My son is lost in a different way. Out of work, living by himself, and acting as though he wants nothing more than to play video games and watch television, he is “going nowhere”. And a check I write him every three months or so keeps him going.

  This new year he has taken a turn for the better. Meaning, he is working out with a trainer twice a week, and he is seeing a psychiatrist twice a month. Five months from now, he will be forty years old.

  iv

  There is a blog written by a woman named Victoria who shares her “reading tips, lifestyle how-to’s, book lists,” and so on. “Do you have a hard time finding the book that you need at a particular moment?” Victoria asks. My answer is yes, though “need” is not exactly correct, and every moment is particular. Victoria makes the argument that it is important to organize bookshelves. It can make rooms look neater, which is not my problem. It will make it easier to access “all of the knowledge stored away on their pages,” which is somewhat true. Victoria says the right organization “increases the odds of selecting a book to read,” and it will “enrich the overall reading experience.” None of that is true. There are many good reasons to organize books on a shelf, but there has been no reason good enough for me to do it. Still, if I make the decision, how should I do it? Victoria has ten ways:

  Organize by separating fiction and non-fiction. Organize by author. Victoria says you can “take it up a notch” by arranging the books by a single author in order of publication. Organize by separating the classic and the contemporary books. This might mean dividing the living from the dead and would require reshuffling, if I pay attention to obituaries. Organize according to mood or emotion. Books that are funny, those that seem sad, those that are boring. Organize by separating the read from the unread. This might work for me. Except the number of unread books would be so high that another principle will be needed to organize those as well. Organize alphabetically. I am guessing she means by author’s last name, not by title. Organize by separating hardback and paperback. Victoria thinks this will create a “leaner and streamlined look.” So, this is an aesthetic criterion. Organize by subject matter. This is one of the core principles of the Dewey classification system; more on that later. Organize by color. According to Victoria, colored bookshelves “make a statement.”

  Organize by separating out your favorite books. Victoria thinks this makes sense because these are the best candidates to be re-read “every so often.” Organize by height. This is her “extra tip,” number eleven, and it has practicality to recommend it, since both books and bookshelves vary in height. Organizing by color or mood does not work and even alphabetically will have its limits, if the vertical height of a spine exceeds the height of the shelf. That is not Victoria’s point, though. Her organization by height suggests that you make a bookshelf look like a stairstep; tallest books on the left, then descending in size. Victoria then throws in two more extra tips: Don’t be afraid, she says, to stack books horizontally. It creates “pockets of interest,” and the stacks can work as makeshift bookends. Last, put heavier books on the bottom shelf. Victoria says they will act “as an anchor.”This advice makes little sense. Most bookshelves are not adrift.

  v

  What I have on my shelves is the impurity of principles. A bit of favorite books, a bit of by author, some shelves all paperbacks, most a combination of the read and the unread. Nothing is alphabetical. No fiction versus non-fiction, and nothing put in place because of color. Even where there are hints of organization or forethought, the principle is unreliable. Duplicate titles will be shelved in different places. If I find a sequence of six books about the Spanish Southwest together in the hallway, there are five or six others, same subject, scattered elsewhere, separated in ones or twos in other rooms. This may be the way of the world. Systems are appealing, but whatever is coherent is usually incomplete.

  vi

  Imagine a grid, a sort of spread sheet, to help organize all the books in this house. There could be columns for name of book, author, and then a rectangle of space for a comment. In the comment column, a note about the book, why it is here, whether it was read or unread, a story about the book, how it fits not just on my shelf but in my life. Not every book would get a comment. What I am writing now might be notes for these notes.

  There could be a column not just for read and unread, but for “started,” implying mostly unread. For example, The Assyrian And Other Stories, William Saroyan: Started. And in the comment column:“ A friend told me how great Saroyan is, so I found this used hardback on Amazon, but have only read the introduction, and got no further than the pages that use roman numbering. I keep this book on the desk downstairs, as if being in arm’s reach makes it more likely that it will be picked up.“

  This comment will never fit in a rectangle on a grid. It is far too long. Space and its limitations, that is the theme of all book organizing projects. Also, the time it takes. What would Victoria say is the greater obstacle to organizing, space or time? Which is more limiting? Both can seem limitless, looked at from an inhuman perspective. But I am old and running out of both, day by day and shelf by shelf.

  vii

  A vertical bookcase is in a corner of the studio upstairs. An identical one, downstairs in the kitchen, holds nothing but cookbooks.

  These two vertical bookcases are five-feet tall metal shafts on a flat base. Their shelves, square metal plates, are suspended at intervals and will hold a short stack of books, though Design Within Reach says that these bookcases are also great “for holding towels and displaying collectibles.” Design Within Reach calls it the Story Bookcase. The Container Store calls it the Floating Bookcase, which is the better name. Also, the price is better. The matte white Floating Bookcase cornered in the studio upstairs holds fifty-odd books. Both the bookcase and its books are dusty.

  These books are divided mostly by size, smaller on top of larger, between the nine metal plates and the metal base at the very bottom, and have little in common other than going unnoticed in the corner, If I start at the top and work my way down, this is the roll call:

  How To Love, Thich Nhat Hanh. Gratitude, Oliver Sacks. Felicity, Mary Oliver. The Tulip Flame, Chloe Honum. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke. Fervor de Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges. The Elements of Style, Strunk, White and Kalman. Death of the Black-Haired Girl, Robert Stone. The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larson. The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, John Baxter. Lost City of the Incas, Hiram Bingham. Machu Picchu, Ryan Dube. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Mario Vargas Llosa. Peru, Eyewitness Travel. Birds of Machu Picchu, Barry Walker. Los Dibujos del Cronista Indio, Guaman Poma. The Ministry of Special Cases, Nathan Englander. Dear Life, Alice Munro. The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz. Take Joy, Jane Yolen. Canada, Richard Ford. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace. The Tools, Phil Stutz & Barry Michels. Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski. Why Meditate, Matthieu Ricard. Silverchest, Carl Philips. The Zen of Social Media Marketing, Shama Kabani. The Mansion of Happiness, Jill Lepore. Selected Poems, Yehuda Amichai. More Love Poems, Yehuda Amichai. Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa. Barcelona, Robert Hughes. Getting More, Stuart Diamond. Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. John Adams, David McCullough. Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl. Judaism as a Civilization, Mordechai Kaplan. Jerusalem The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore. Codependent No More, Melody Beattie. Beyond Codependency, Melody Beattie. The Son, Philip Meyer. Wild Nights, Joyce Carol Oates. The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene. Nature Anatomy, Julia Rothman. The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks. A Place of Hiding, Elizabeth George. Play Poker Like the Pros, Philip Hellmuth, Jr. The Bible As It Was, James L. Kugel. Value-Based Fees, Alan Weiss. A Life of Picasso, John Richardson.

  Of these fifty some books, I have never opened thirty some of them. As for the rest, I am unsure. Completed, cover to cover? Maybe six.

  The room upstairs, this “studio,” is a second office and has a desk that is covered with other books. The room can also function as a spare bedroom, for guests, or returning children. An orange Roche Bobois couch can be unfolded into a bed, though it never has been. A door near the floating bookcase leads to a cramped bathroom—a shower, a sink, a commode–and to the even smaller space adjacent for hanging a jacket, or pants, or a skirt and blouse. There are built-in drawers for socks and underwear, above a built-in mini-refrigerator, for someone’s white wine or sparkling water.

  viii

  Why do I keep all these books? Like so many behaviors, until you make a count of it, there is no accounting for it. So, at the desk upstairs, I am making a list of another fifty or so books, piled willy-nilly in seven stacks:

  The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton. Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman. The Person and The Situation, Les Ross and Richard Nisbett. Presence, Arthur Miller. Golden Dreams, Kevin Starr. The Currents of the World, Quinn Bailey. Feeding Hour, Jessica Gigot. Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation, Curtis Leblanc. The Marble Bed, Grace Schulman. Other Poems of Longing, Juan-Paolo Perre. Body Count, Kyla Jamieson. The Castle, Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka. Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion. Dead Boys, Richard Lange. Hollywood Notebook, Wendy C. Ortiz. The Dyer’s Hand, W. H. Auden. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Russians, Hedrick Smith. Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson. Just Kids, Patti Smith. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Selected Poems, Anna Akhmatova. Aimless Love, Billy Collins. Houses, Don Barkin. Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey. Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano. The Great Shift, James L. Kugel. Conquest, Hugh Thomas. Ulysses, James Joyce. My Struggle Book One, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Sudden Rain, Maritta Wolff. Vaseline Buddha, Jung Young Soon. Vintage Ford, Richard Ford. Birds of Texas Field Guide, Stan Tekiela. Within A Budding Grove, Marcel Proust. Map, Wislawa Szymborska. Athene Palace, R.G. Waldeck. Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan. Catching Light, Joanna McClure. Masterworks, The Barnes Foundation. The Reader’s Companion to Mexico, Alan Ryan. How The Jewish People Lives Today, Mordecai I. Soloff. The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Robert Alter, editor. American Judaism, Jonathan Sarna. Collected Poems, Eugenio Montale. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway. The Return of Eva Peron, V.S. Naipaul. The Exodus, Richard Friedman. Collected Poems, W. H. Auden.

  Of these, I have read, cover to cover, only five of them for sure – Athene Palace, Balkan Ghosts, A Moveable Feast, Aimless Love, and Life and Fate. Possibly The Gulag Archipelago. Maybe also The Corrections, Ulysses, and The Brothers Karamazov, though those last two might be assignments, from school years.

  So, nine books, tops.

  ix

  A conversation with a therapist this Wednesday afternoon. She is encouraging me to get out of my house more. To be with people more. People, I tell her, are the source of the greatest upsets in my life. She looks at me unsympathetically. “No, really,” I say. “You haven’t had my life.” “So what?” she says. It is not exactly a question, despite how the words are inflected. “I am no longer interested, that’s what.” “Sad for you,” she says. “Sadness is okay,” I tell her. “Better sadness than disaster.”

  x

  Of the books in stacks on the desk downstairs, those at the bottom have been forgotten. Those with spines facing away, even their names are lost. Not Louise Gluck though. She owns the mysterious umlaut over the middle letter of her family name. Her Poems 1962-2012 has the heft of a lifework. I have opened it and tried reading, over and over. Face to face with one of her poems, I have the sense that I am reading a translation. Her Poems is the second fattest paperback on the desk, next to Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, whose spine stares at me like a sniper. Both books have been epic battles.

  Ann Patchett, hardbound, is at home on the desk in her slick jacket. Is it possible that Ann Patchett is as admirable as she appears in the pages of These Precious Days? As blessed, if that is the right word for the overall impression. I am taken by a line from one of her essays. She quotes the answer of a priest, who is himself quoting the wisdom of another, after she asks how he manages with equanimity to be so respectfully engaged with the broken life of a homeless man, who will never change. “He is not my problem to solve,” the priest says, “he is my brother to love.” This is an attitude I want to take toward my son and his difficulties, though I have not been able to manage it. As for the homeless, I keep my car window up at intersections and avoid eye contact.

  xi

  These are the seventy-two books on the desk downstairs, some in stacks, some of them wedged between two art deco bookends sold by the same shop on Greenville Avenue that the desk came from.

  Solenoid, Mircea Cartarescu. The Plague Year, Lawrence Wright. The Koren Tanakh, author unknown. The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova. School Days, Jonathan Galassi. People of the Word, Mendel Kamelson and Zalman Abraham. God, Man and History, Dr. Eliezer Berkovits. Justice for All, Jeremiah Unterman. Majesty and Humility, Reuven Ziegler. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Bittersweet, Susan Cain. Poems 1962-2012, Louise Gluck. Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Gluck. Freeman’s: Conclusions, John Freeman, editor. Making Toast, Roger Rosenblatt. Suicide, Eduoard Leve. The Drunken Boat, Arthur Rimbaud. Gold, Rumi. The Amidah, Lawrence Hoffman. The World of Prayer, Dr. Elie Munk. Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith. Love Poems, Pablo Neruda. Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems, Yehuda Amichai. Baedeker’s Jerusalem. Highway 61 Revisited, Mark Polizzotti. Nutritarian Handbook, Joel Fuhrman, MD. Introduction to the Poem, Robert Boynton and Maynard Mack. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. One Simple Thing, Eddie Stern. The Gift, Lewis Hyde. The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal. Evidence for Special Creation and a Young Earth, Kathleen Dunn. These Precious Days, Ann Patchett. Specimen Days & Collect, Walt Whitman. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain. Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz. Facing The Moon, Li Bai and Du Fu, Keith Holyoak. The Carrying, Ada Limon. Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver. The Trouble with Poetry, Billy Collins. Ozone Journal, Peter Balakian. The Mystic Masseur, V. S. Naipaul. Red Ants, Pergentino Jose. Poems from the Wilderness, Jack Mayer. Look, Solmaz Sharif. The Tool & The Butterflies, Dmitry Lipskerov. The Last Wolf & Herman, Laszlo Krasnahorkai. Story of O, Pauline Reage. The Wisdom of the Heart, Henry Miller. Talmud Bavli, Tractate Berachos, unknown. The Talmud, A Reference Guide, Adin Steinsaltz. The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. Victor Brauner, Emil Nicolae. We Are Children Just The Same, Marie Rut Krizkova. I Live Again, Ileana Princess of Romania. An American Landscape, Henry David Thoreau. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys. These Things I Remember, E. M. Altschuler. The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen. Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman. The Acropolis of Athens, Charles River Editions. Stories, Alexander Pushkin, Russian edition. Poems, Anna Akhmatova, Russian edition. The Years, Annie Ernaux. Hebrew Phrases, Lonely Planet. Holy Land, D. J. Waldie. In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky. The Polish Boxer, Eduardo Halfon. Poems New and Collected, Wislawa Symborska. Halls of Fame, John D’Agata.

  Twelve were read cover to cover. Twenty were started, maybe a few more, but which ones or how far has fallen from memory. And two other columns might need to be added to the hypothetical spread sheet of title, author, read/unread etc. One for unreadable, which is the unkind cousin of started. A check mark goes in that column to the right of The Kraus Project. Also, another separate column for no comment, with a check mark to the far right of Kathleen Dunn’s Evidence for Special Creation and a Young Earth. Kathleen, a very sweet woman, is a neighbor. She lives across the street and two doors down from the construction, and she writes about Biblical inerrancy and related topics. Her slim, self-published book about the age of the Earth was placed in my mailbox. I like to believe that she put a copy in every mailbox on the block.

  xii

  I have no coffee tables, but plenty of coffee table books. Jerusalem Architecture, a flat, handsomely jacketed book of large color photographs, with text by David Kroyanker, lies on the raised granite hearth on one side of the two-sided fireplace that separates a living room from the nook with the downstairs desk. And on the raised glass top of the Platner table in the living room, three more picture books, one on top of the other. In Walking Near Water, An Artist’s View of White Rock Lake, I can see Sue Benner’s photographs of a local lake. I bought it at her book signing. I had not seen Sue in twenty years when I decided to go last year. Although I had to remind her who I was, she signed my copy XOXOX. Lake Flato Houses is a vanity publication, with architectural drawings and photographs of the firm’s polished work. I bought it only because the “Bluffview Residence” on page 224 overlooks my house from the heights of the bluff. A modest O’Neill Ford historic residence, set back and invisible, was torn down and replaced by this modernist monster. Beyond Beauty Irving Penn is from an exhibit at the local Museum of Art. I came home from the gift shop with this coffee table book. Other than the day it was bought, it has never been opened.

  Crowded by a bowl of rocks and shells, and glass vases from Prague, and a hat from Peru, the two other books on this table are not real books. One is a perfect-bound promotional brochure for a Los Angeles photographer. His portrait of Kirsten Dunst on the cover is as seductive as a spell, and so his brochure survives. It needs no other justification. The book underneath it, however, needs commentary. Its tawny, calfskin binding, the four ridges on its spine, the bright gold edges of its pages that look, from the side, like a gold wedding band. No title, no author. Cream colored pages, all of them blank. A bound-in gold satin sash serves as a bookmark, although there is no content to mark on its blank pages. This book that is not really a book was a gift from my second wife, and not unlike her. It is a luxury item.

  xiii

  Other tables in other rooms have books of their own. The room at the end of the hall was a teenager’s bedroom once upon a time. The boy is gone, and the bed is gone, replaced by a NordicTrack. The two side tables in this room have cubbyholes big enough for books. In the side table on the left: In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin. The Greater Journey, Americans in Paris, David McCullough. Great Gardens of the Berkshires, Virginia Small. None of these books has been read. And in the side table to the right, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, Richard Kaczynski.

  This Kaczynski has no relation to Ted.

  xiv

  The room off the kitchen was used as a bedroom during the second marriage, but it is a den now, and seldom even visited. Across from a sleeper sofa that has never been opened, another small round table, with a stack of four unread books: A Susan Sontag Reader, introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick. Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong. Dispatch, Cameron Awkward-Rich. And Book of Jewish Thought, Dr. J. H. Hertz.

  Which is the more interesting name, Ocean Vuong or Cameron Awkward-Rich? Ocean is a wonderful first name, Awkward-Rich an improbable last name. Cameron Awkward-Rich is a scholar of trans theory, with a PhD from Stanford.

  The Book of Jewish Thought, covered in faded red cloth, was published in 1920 by Oxford University Press. It comes from a distant world, and more than miles separates it from the words of Ocean Vuong or Awkward-Rich. Dr. J. H. Hertz, The Chief Rabbi, dedicates it “to the sacred memory of the sons of Israel who fell in the Great War.”

  xv

  I do not read in bed, and there are no books on bedside tables. There are no tables or bookracks in any of the bathrooms, either; so, no books in bathrooms.

  xvi

  The kitchen island is not a table or a shelf. In one corner of its flat, stainless surface, near the vases with dried thistles and other stalks and away from the six gas burners of a stovetop, there is one book. James Van Sweden’s Architecture in the Garden is planted here. I had the kitchen island reclad in shiny metal as part of the remodeling that preoccupied me the year after Pam left. She was a gifted landscape designer, and this house and its acre and a half of grounds were bought for her. Architecture in the Garden is one of the many gardening books purchased in 2007, when the divorce became final.

  In the kitchen, the metal plates of a Floating Bookshelf hold the cookbooks that are close enough at hand to be used, unlike the fifty other cookbooks that fill two shelves in one of the hallway bookcases.

  The cookbooks that made it onto the Floating Bookshelf in the kitchen may have more status than those in the hallway, but they are equally unused. From the top, Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, which belonged to Dolores, from before my time. Inside it, a xerox of the recipe for for Sister Helen’s Meatloaf. Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, weighs in at 800 pages. The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking, Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz, has a bookmark on black bean soup, the Sopa de Frijol. Bits of napkin mark pages in Simca’s Cuisine, Simone ‘Simca’ Beck, and there are Post-its on recipes for Charlotte Rainfreville au jambon and Soupe de Bramafam and Le “Mont Blanc” en surprise, though I have never tasted any of that. Every Night Italian, Giuliano Hazan, has a forward by Marcella Hazan. The New York Times International Cookbook, Craig Claiborne, is one more big book about eating and food. The Book of Jewish Food, Claudia Roden, is a cookbook I actually use, once a year. Its spine is broken. The recipe for matzo stuffing under the front cover is a xerox from Bon Appetit.

  Beard on Bread, never used. The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, by doomed Herman Tarnower, MD, and Samm Sinclair Baker. If I ever look twice at Tarnower’s book, it will be to check the spelling of his co-author’s first name. Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen, Wolfgang Puck. Of these “recipes from Ma Maison,” I made Ground Steak with Roquefort Cheese and Green Peppercorn Sauce once, or, Biftek Hache au Roquefort avec Poivre Vert. It is a cholesterol bomb. A Taste of India, Madhur Jaffrey has lots of torn paper bookmarks on recipes with bi-lingual names. Stir-fried Aubergine is Baigan Kalonji. Kalonji are nigella seeds, so equally mysterious in English. Same with Baigan, which is brinjal, or just eggplant.

  Modern French Culinary Art, Henri-Paul Pellaprat, is over a thousand pages. The Making of a Cook, Madeline Kamman, another 500 unturned pages. The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, Zoe Coulson, 800 pages. It is as if you can never have too many recipes. Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, another 450 pages of recipes, has a badly broken spine, and its cover is falling off. I am throwing it into the rubber trash can in the pantry. despite the two Post-its that mark pages for Pork Dishes and Fruit Salads.

  Come Cook With Me, Maurice Brookway. This is not a cookbook so much as a narrative, with recipes here and there.

  So far, all these books are first marriage vintage. So, at least thirty years old, and the majority much older than that, from earlier lives. The rest of what is on a Floating Bookshelf in the kitchen is second marriage; these cookbooks are more memento than book. There are no food stains or Post-its in any of them, since nothing was ever prepared or eaten from their pages. For example, Paris Cafe Cookbook, Daniel Young, is a honeymoon souvenir, though it may have been bought just after, at a local bookstore. The Tea Book, Sara Perry, is a souvenir from somewhere unremembered. National Geographic Food Journeys of a Lifetime provides its recipes in sidebars, with most of the book a narrative about destination restaurants and other places to eat — Cape Malay in Bo-Kaap or Le Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon or the Asparagus Festival in southern Germany’s “Asparagus Triangle.” On a page about Cusco’s Christmas Market, the sidebar highlights a potato. Business cards for restaurants in Northern California fall out of the pages of Cucina Rustica, Viana La Place and Evan Klieman. I find Fog City Diner, Tra Vigne, and others. They have the flavor of a happiness that has since spoiled. Between pages, on a slip of paper, a handwritten recipe for making the sweet ricotta stuffing for cannoli. The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, Nancy Harman Jenkins. The bio on a flap of its book jacket challenges the reader to not envy Nancy, who “divides her time between Maine and Tuscany.” Next, Fresh – Healthy Cooking from Lake Austin Spa Resort. Then Chez Panisse Cooking, Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters, a book that sports a David Goines graphic on its jacket. A Kitchen Safari, CC Africa, is another travel souvenir, this one from a trip to Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar that I took with my second wife. None of these recipes has ever been used, but it was a very sexy, thrilling trip. The title page is signed by CC Africa staff, the guides, the chef, and the white-jacketed guy serving sundowners on a photo safari. I find a receipt in the middle of the cookbook. This receipt is dated October 2005, which surprises me. Pam left the marriage just a few months later. So, from her point of view, not thrilling enough.

  xvii

  If the hallway cookbooks have ever been used, those occasions are from distant, prior lives—from my first wife’s earlier marriages, or from Dolores’s mother’s house. Some are collections of recipes from a neighborhood women’s group or from school fundraisers or from other collectives, their recipes held together in bright plastic ring bindings. Altogether, they make a crazy salad of measurements and memories.

  Texas Capitol Collection, prologue by Ann Richards, is one of the plastic, wire-o bound booklets. These are recipes from Texas legislators. Governor Richards submitted her Jalapeno Cheese Cornbread. Among the wire-o bound: Never A Day Without Chocolate, from Neiman Marcus, and Reci Peas from the Black-eyed Pea Jamboree in Athens, Texas. Also, Red Chile Recipes, Rosina Rodriguez, which may be a souvenir from Santa Fe. At the end of one of the hallway shelves, a photo album lies on its side, its plastic sleeves stuffed with recipes from local newspapers and from magazines and handwritten on index cards. A recipe for Baked Eggs appears and reappears. There are duplicates of duplicates, the instructions saved over and over. An accordion-like satchel underneath this photo album holds even more recipes and handwritten index cards in its pouches. According to the headline on a faded scrap from the local paper, “Grapefruit-Ice Cream Mix Gives Dessert Oriental Flair.”

  Martha’s Kean’s Le Petit Gourmet is signed by Martha Kean, who thanks my ten-year-old son for attending her one-day cooking course, and adds a biblical quote, from Proverbs 15:15: “The cheerful heart has a continual feast.” Neighbors with Good Taste is from the Women’s Club of the neighborhood where Dolores and I lived. Page 12 has a recipe for Eden Salad submitted by Dolores and named for our daughter. It is a very sweet jello mold, calling for marshmallows, lime jello, and pecans. On page 27, the recipe is for Chicken Benjamin, named for our son. Chicken breasts, cream of mushroom soup, pearl onions, black olives. The Best of Cooking in Carrollton has a recipe from Dolores in it as well, though her last name is from an earlier marriage, when she lived in a different neighborhood. The recipe submitted? It is for the very sweet jello mold, with marshmallows, lime jello, and pecans, but she was calling it Bavarian Salad back then. A Taste of the Hill – Recipes from Greenhill Families, the wire-o book of recipes from our daughter’s middle school, has the Bavarian Salad or Eden Salad jello mold with marshmellows and pecans once again. This time, however, since Dolores was no longer living, I changed its name again. Now it is Dolores Delight.

  There is plenty of fat on these hallway shelves. Before I knew her, Dolores or her mother ordered the American Family Cookbook, McCall’s Cookbook, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, The Terrace Times Minimum Time Maximum Effect Cookbook, The Puddin Hill Cookbook, The Complete Middle East Cookbook, Dear James Beard, Prize Winning Recipes from the State Fair of Texas, Lebanese Cookbook, Dictionary of Gastronomy, The Cranberry Connection, Dining with David Wade, The Complete Book of Pickles and Relishes, The Albert Stockli Cookbook, The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, The Art of Greek Cookery, Old Time Pickling and Spicing Recipes, The Year-Round Holiday Cookbook, Homemade Candy, The French Chef Cookbook, Freezing and Canning Cookbook, Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, Papa Rossi’s Secrets of Italian Cooking, The Good Sense Family Cookbook, The Art of Salad Making, All Manner of Food, The Blender Cookbook, The Art of Viennese Pastry, and on and on. Dining with David Wade has a picture of the author on its jacketed cover, wearing an ascot and holding a silver platter of hors d’oeuvres. Dictionary of Gastronomy, Andre Simon and Robin Howe, lists terms “from Abalone to Zwieback.” Dear James Beard has no identified author and comes from The Beef Industry Council. Lebanese Cookbook, Dawn Elaine and Selwa Anthony, has a Post-it bookmark on Baba Ghanuj. The President’s Cookbook, Poppy Cannon, includes recipes for The Widow Johnston’s Hasty Pudding, which it attributes to Abraham Lincoln’s father’s second wife; its only ingredients are hot water, corn meal, salt, and cold water. The Albert Stockli Cookbook, with illustrations by Bill Goldsmith, has recipes for Crepes Finlandia with Herring, and for Chestnut-filled Cabbage Leaves. The Good Housekeeping Cookbook offers another 3,500 recipes; the cover says “over 3500.” Bill Goldsmith drew the illustrations for this cookbook, too. Suzanne Huntley’s The Year-Round Holiday Cookbook was designed by Milton Glaser and has his drawings of cakes and cookies. Homemade Candy is from the editors of Farm Journal. So is Freezing and Canning Cookbook. The Art of Salad Making, Carol Truax, is a “Book Club Edition” book, as are many others on these two shelves. The Blender Cookbook, Ann Seranne, is a Book Club book. So is The Art of Viennese Pastry, Marcia Colman Morton. The subscriber may have been Dolores, when she was a young wife. It could have been her mother, a hoarder, who bought for the sake of buying.

  What does it all mean, to own The Albert Stockli Cookbook, or Papa Rossi’s Secrets of Italian Cooking? Like every book in this house, these cookbooks are fun-house mirrors, reflecting and distorting. The never-used Art of French Cooking does the same work as the unread World’s Greatest Books. Between their covers is the story of life in an imaginary future, when the art of pickling has been mastered, and the frozen pizza or the fried egg has turned into dining with David Wade.

  xviii

  The Dewey Decimal Classification system is the most widely used way to organize books, at least in libraries. Some 200,000 libraries in more than 135 countries use it. It is available in English and in over thirty other languages. A full print edition, in English, filled four volumes. That stopped in 2017.Now you have WebDewey, in electronic format and updated online at intervals. There is also a single-volume abridged edition designed for libraries with 20,000 titles or fewer. That is the Abridged WebDewey and still far too heavy an artillery for my battle of unorganized shelves.

  The Dewey system is one of those artifacts that anyone who has been in a public library has been exposed to. You may think you know what it is. But like most familiar things, it is far more strange than familiar. Isn’t everything in front of our eyes the tip of an iceberg, to use that timeworn inadequate analogy? Inadequate in part because if I saw a mountain of ice jutting up from the surface of an Arctic sea, I would never think that all of it is only what I am seeing above the water’s surface. But with everyday surfaces, or in our everyday consciousness, what is underneath is not only unseen, it is mostly ignored, and often presumed unreal.

  Melvil Dewey was the New York State Librarian for almost twenty years, starting in 1888, and one of the founders of the American Library System. He also belonged to a private club with the usual Whites only, no Jews allowed rules. And he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, most of whom were librarians.

  He may have also been an obsessive compulsive, with his passion for putting things in their place. Dewey came up with the Dewey Decimal System in 1876, when he was only 25, and he was smart to copyright it. Today, his copyright is owned by OCLC – the Online Computer Library Center – which licenses it OCLC is serious about protecting the system. When a hotel with a library-themed décor used Dewey decimals for its room numbers, OCLC sued.

  Dewey also advocated for the reform of spelling. That is why his own first name is even odder than it was. He changed the spelling from Melville to Melvil and briefly tried out “Dui” as a replacement for Dewey. In his letters, “have” becomes “hav.” In a publication about his system, he spelled “pamphlet” as “pamflet.” In short, Dewey believed in simplification. The system he copyrighted is not exactly simple, but it is orderly.

  His system uses Arabic numerals, defined categories, and hierarchies, and it divides the world of knowledge into ten main classes. Each class is then subdivided into ten divisions, and each division into ten sections. Melvil Dewey was also an advocate for the metric system. So, every book in his system starts with three digits. The first digit will represent one of the ten main classes, the second is for one of the hundred divisions, and the third stands for one of the thousand sections. Like so many systems, its objectivity is like an iceberg. All the judgment underneath it is below the surface. These are the ten main classes and their associated Arabic numerals:

  0 – Computer science, information and general works
  1 – Philosophy and psychology
  2 – Religion
  3 – Social sciences
  4 – Language
  5 – Science
  6 – Technology
  7 – Arts and recreation
  8 – Literature
  9 – History and geography

  A second digit in a Dewey system gets you into the hundred divisions. For example, under the class Philosophy and psychology, second digits represent:
  0 – Philosophy
  1 – Metaphysics
  2 – Epistemology
  3 – Parapsychology and occultism
  4 – Philosophical schools of thought
  5 – Psychology
  6 – Logic
  7 – Ethics
  8 – Ancient, medieval and eastern philosophy
  9 – Modern western philosophy

  Then It gets stranger, as you come to the thousand sections. And after that there is a decimal point and other numbers used after the first three numbers, for more specificity. The explanation that OLCS gives is that all topics not including the ten main classes are part of the broader topics above them. Meaning that numbers at every level are subordinate to the number to the left of them. This is the example that OLCS gives in a twenty-page “brief introduction” to the system:

  600 Technology
  630 Agriculture and related technologies
  636 Animal husbandry
  636.7 Dogs
  636.8 Cats

  This does not imply that cats are subordinate to dogs. Despite the difference in their numbers, they have the same number of digits.

  I am struggling a little. When I go back to class number 1, or what the system calls 100 for Philosophy and psychology, 196 is Philosophy of Spain and Portugal in the Dewey system.

  Does that make sense? I cannot understand it, not completely, but I am not a librarian.

  xix

  In a novel by Nathan Larson published in 2011, Dewey Decimal is the name of a character In post-apocalyptic New York City. This anti-hero has taken on the task of reorganizing the shelves in what remains of the main public library. My task is only the books in this house, and, step one, just to list their titles and locations. So far, I have done the desks, the tables, the two floating bookshelves, and made a start in the hallway, where there are some fifty-one shelves to go, on seven separate bookcases. I am leaving those for last.

  Chapter Five
  CUBES AND GLASS

  In the 1950s, the room behind the kitchen might have been the garage of this three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house. It is the only room that is not pier and beam. I bought the house in 2001, newly remarried, when the former garage had already been turned into a den and half-bath. It became a master bedroom for me and Pam. Our three sullen teenagers – my two, her one – lived behind their closed doors in the original three bedrooms. The only remodeling during our five years of marriage was to the half-bath. Pam added a tub, a new floor of twelve-inch granite squares with a heating element underneath them, a new sink, and a new commode. These days, the bedroom is a den again, and the only space in the house that needed no more remodeling after our divorce. Just the removal of a king-sized bed, and the addition of a freestanding bookcase.

  ii

  Cheap wood, stained the darkest brown, the freestanding bookcase is against a wall. It has the pleasing geometry of its twelve backless cubes, four rows of three, surrounded in its sturdy, five-foot frame. I liked the symmetry as soon as I saw it on the floor at Wayfair. No one goes into this den anymore. So this bookcase holds the most neglected books, if neglect can be measured and compared. There are physics and history textbooks with yellow used stickers on their spines, from my children’s failed semesters. A twenty-one volume World Book series, early 1990s, intended to help prepare them for what did not lie ahead. Other books Ben or Eden must have lugged in the weighty backpacks that bent them over between classes, on the sidewalks of their private high schools or their year or years in college.

  These leftover text books have the flavor of the food fed to animals in a public zoo. Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness: Documents in American History Volume II, 1861 to Present. Evolution, a “companion” to an educational television series. Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems. I don’t know which child was assigned Longman’s American History Atlas. I am sitting on the floor with it and paging through it and falling under its knowing spell. Maps of Europe and the United States have been transformed into infographics. I see “Voyages of Exploration and Colonial Empires, c. 1700.” “The Rise of Tenancy in the South 1880.” “Post-War Immigration to the Sunbelt and West Coast.”

  iii

  The twelve cubes serve as bookshelves for a mixed multitude. In one of them, three vanity publications showcase the work of commercial graphic designers. Graphis, Graphic Design USA 10, and Graphic Design USA 11 are all award show publications; the only thing ever read in these books is the index of winners’ names. In the same cube, All The Whiskey In Heaven, Charles Bernstein, is an unopened book of poems I thought I wanted.

  In another cube, other unread books: Feast, Tomaz Salamun. The Devil in The White City, Erik Larson. Next, James Hynes. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, Henry James. Testimonies: Four Plays by Emily Mann. The Daily Mirror, David Lehman. Fear of Dreaming, Jim Carroll. Art Spiegelman Conversations, Joseph Witek, editor. Explanations are not reasons, but I can at least explain why I bought Testimonies years ago. In 1972, my sophomore year, I walked into the wrong bedroom, startling my college roommate. He was on the bed, underneath his naked, redhaired girlfriend, Emily, author eventually of Testimonies: Four Plays. When I met her, she was further along than foreplay. I remember her reaction as she turned around to see who I was. Not frightened, not embarrassed. Annoyed.

  Iv

  The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector, is in the same cube with Emily Mann. Also, Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz, The Great Escape, Kati Marton. And History of the Jews in Sighet, 1600-1940, Ioan Popescu. I picked up Popescu in the gift shop at the Hotel Gradina Morii in Sighet, Romania, on a trip in 2019 to see where one of my grandfathers came from. It seems no more out of place than any of its neighbors in this cube. It squeezes in beside A.D.D and Romance, Emotional Freedom, World of Our Fathers, The Bridge at Andau, The Catholic Writer Today, White Privilege, The Byline Bible, and Banthology, a collection of stories from Muslim countries published by Deep Vellum, reacting to the “Muslim ban” of 2017.

  v

  The spines and covers of the 21 volumes of World Book are a deep brownish red. The gold edges are like a gleam on all the pages. These books filling two of the cubes were bought for children, but the content is not childish. I can slide out S-Sn, Volume 17, and open to pages 126-127, if interested Jean Paul Sartre, or Sargon of Akkad.

  The next cube down holds Making Literature Matter, a thick paperback from my son’s three semesters at the University of Kansas. Also, Heath Anthology of American Literature, and Exploring Literature, and Readings in United States History Since 1877.Ben lasted a year plus at KU before failing out. It was a combination of not caring, loneliness, drinking, dyslexia, and personal crises that have never departed. This same cube shelters 2001 Yiddish Verbs, never attempted, and Positivity Bias, poorly understood; so, two failures of my own. One cube over are some leftovers from Dolores: WAIS Manual, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. And Theory of Psychology and Measurement. And Personality, a collection of essays edited by Eugene Southwell. These are not warm and fuzzy titles. Erik Erickson’s Identity Youth and Crisis is next to Harold Gulliksen’s The Theory of Mental Tests. And, last, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, whose authors are Dollar, Doob, et al.

  Other cubes have byproducts from Ben and Eden’s college reading lists. There are dictionaries and reference books, assigned novels and mandatory poetry. My son’s name is on the inside covers of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations. Is it any wonder he quit college? This freestanding bookcase is weighted down with Merriam Webster Desk Dictionary, Webster’s New World Dictionary, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition. Also The Everyday Writer, next to Crafting Expository Argument. There is Biology 1408 and a physics textbook called Physics. A Concise History of the American People is followed by These United States. Next, Zen and the Art of the Internet, and Selected Poems of Emily Dickenson, and Mother of Pearl, and one of the paperbacks of To Kill A Mockingbird — this one is the 35th Anniversary Edition. I have never heard of Mother of Pearl, but it is an Oprah’s Book Club selection from 2001, and then I discover, inside its cover, “To Eden, with Love, Dad.”

  vi

  In another cube, wafer-thin books from my children’s earliest childhoods bring back memories. Not of anything in particular; rather, of an atmosphere, soundless, a silent film with no intertitles. Who wouldn’t want to have read That’s What Friends Are For. It is a Golden Book. Simple Simon’s Nursery Rhymes is a board book, as is Jack and Jill’s Nursery Rhymes, still with its price sticker from Toys R Us. Nearly forty years have passed since Oscar’s Rotten Birthday, and Get Well Clown-Arounds, and Puss In Boots. Hide and Seek is a Mystery Picture Book. Where’s My Hat is another Mystery Picture Book. Even Baby’s First A B C is here, snug in its cube. And Bear’s Pot of Gold, safe in my den.

  vii

  All of the cubes in the freestanding bookcase have objects in front of the books. A framed photograph. An ashtray filled with rocks. A Pets.com sock puppet still in its packaging. Knitted mice. A dead bonsai tree in a blue rectangular pot. A metal box holding matchbooks from Santacafé, Madrona Manor, and The Cabin of Willowick. A sand dollar. Colored, misshapen ceramic bowls that were my daughter’s craft projects; and these bowls are carrying chestnuts, and three pinecones, and pieces of twisted wood.

  The framed photograph of my son with my sister was taken at her third marriage. That happened in Denver, when Ben was working in the produce section of a grocery store in Boulder, after two semesters at another college and once again dropping out. Behind the photograph, there are five books that belong to earlier aspirations; not Ben’s, but mine for him. They have to do with Microsoft certifications and an imagined career as a technician. I do not understand a word of these imposing, serious hardbacks. The dreams they refer to were shelved long before the books were. There is MCSE Windows 2000 Server, MCSE Windows 2000 Network Infrastructure Administration, MCSE Windows 2000 Directory Services Administrator, MCSE Windows 2000 Professional, and MCSE Windows 2000 Four-In-One Core Requirements. The same cube also has a cheerful orange paperback: MCSE Study Tips For Dummies. And, next to it, Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 13th Edition. I was the purchaser. The reader was no one.

  viii

  The Ian Fleming paperbacks lashed together in another cube are a raft drifting back to my teens. From Russia With Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice. And then further back, to boyhood, the nine Edgar Rice Burroughs, five of them from the John Carter of Mars series, and then four Tarzans. The titles on their eye-candy covers are like spells for time traveling. There is Swords of Mars, A Fighting Man of Mars, The Master Mind of Mars, Synthetic Men of Mars, and Thulia Maid of Mars, and then Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan and The Lion Man, Tarzan and the Golden Lion, and Tarzan’s Quest. At the end of this same row, one hardback: Tarzan and the City of Gold, illustrated by Tony Sgroi. When I pry City of Gold out of the cube, its cover detaches. I am unwilling to do further harm by rereading even one of its golden sentences.

  ix

  The last of the cubes in the freestanding bookcase is more narrowly dedicated to my daughter’s childhood. These books have her breath on them. Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman. Skin, an X-Files Novel by Ben Mezrich. More Spaghetti I Say, Rita Golden Gelman. Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert Heinlein. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Judith Viorst. The Biggest Pumpkin Ever, Steven Kroll. The City In Which I Love You, Li-Young Lee. This Li-Young Lee must have traveled close to Eden’s teenage heart. The book’s flowery pages are weedy with Eden’s penciled comments. Some of those read like poems of her own. Bought used, The City In Which I Love You is signed by the poet and dedicated on its title page, For Sue, My City to yours, Peace. On that page, Eden added her own poetic response: A dedication – words written to another, a postcard, a love note. Here I find them, these words not meant for me. Who will write for me, then? Or will all I find dedicated, engraved with the echo of my name be stones, silence, ashes, hurt.

  The phrases she scatters through the rest of the pages are in the same key. Why tonight do my words return in a blue hour? Why am I compelled to desecrate margins? There is nothing lonelier than love. The darkness of the self. I wonder if the day will come when I have forgotten your smile. Always, always waiting. I remember your voice, low and sweet like rain. I cannot, I cannot let go. My own heart broken and rusted shut. I am once again a poet, a dreamer, and laughing all the same. Truth be told, her penciled lines are not that different from the printed poems, which were winners of the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets in 1990. The arbitrary line breaks, the swollen emotion. They were written “in a blue hour,” as Li-Young Lee might have put it himself.

  One last book in this cube: The Eleventh Hour, A Curious Mystery, Graeme Base. It has its dedication, too: “To Eden, on your 9th birthday,” it says on the flysheet inside. “Love, Dad & Mom.”

  Eden remains a curious mystery, her path away as crooked as a corkscrew, and yet from the beginning headed exactly where it has led.

  x

  Before the Dewey system, libraries put books on shelves using a simpler method. It was the first come, first served system, and a new book took its place at the end of the line. Too late for me to use that method. I may know that In Search of the Miraculous, a gift for my sixteenth birthday, would belong near the front in that system. And the Norton Anthology of English Literature, along with all the other books that retain their odor of the classroom, would be dated, at least roughly, from my late teens to earliest twenties. But which came first, Night Train to Turkestan by Stuart Stevens, or Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk? Did Jonathan Kozol’s Death At An Early Age arrive sooner or later than Birth of the Cool by Lewis MacAdams? It is impossible to sort out a history of purchases, unreturned borrowings, inheritances, thefts, and other provenance.

  I wrote thefts, because at least two books on my shelves were stolen. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats has the Ex Libris sticker from the college library I took it from. I must have felt justified at the time. Rimbaud Oeuvres Poetiques, Garnier Flammarion edition, was pilfered from Catherine Demongeot’s bookcase in the Paris apartment I rented from her mother for two months in 1973. I made my confession on the blank page opposite its inside back cover: “20 Mai. Sunday. Leaving Paris Thursday morning. In a café, St. Germain and Rue du Bac. I have seen some of the Louvre today. Decided to take Catherine’s Rimbaud with me when I go.” Shelving by dates, this paperback could be put in its place precisely.

  xi

  In the Dewey system, a book’s place is based on subject matter. This is clarifying only if the subject is obvious. Does The Anatomy of Melancholy belong between two books on human psychology or two books of English literature? Or, sandwiched between two books of meandering nonsense? Dewey’s numbering has the inherent biases of the times. The subject of homosexuality began under 132, under mental derangements, and 159.9, with abnormal psychology. It has wandered since then, to 301.424, the study of sexes in society, and to 363.49, social problems, and finally to 306.7, sexual relations. So, classifying by subject can be subjective. Once upon a time, the Dewey placement for the subjects related to women belonged next to the category for etiquette.

  xii

  After he finished his afternoons walking on a treadmill at the Verandah Club behind the Anatole Hotel, Bill Gilliland liked to tell stories of the days when he co-owned a bookstore downtown with Larry McMurtry. McMurtry was a book collector at scale. He bought blocks of buildings in his own hometown of Archer City in West Texas to house the ones for sale. McMurtry also acknowledged the emotional freight of book ownership. He even wrote a book about it. In Books, he writes about the relationship between book seller and book collector. For both, ownership is only a temporary condition, as is ownership of anything. Something to think about as I consider any re-organization of my shelves is the fate of these books. Wherever I put them, they will not be there that much longer.

  xiii

  Bookstores are transit stations. Libraries are another, although they seem more permanent. The Library of Alexandria was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was destroyed in a fire. My shelves are likelier to go by wrecking ball. The appraisal district values this brick veneer house at only $141,000.It is the 1.59 acres the house sits on that are valuable. Total value of house and land, $2,101,000 according to the 2024 appraisal by the taxing authorities. Despite all my remodeling, my redoing of nearly every room, which includes widening a hallway in order to build seven bookcases into it, this house will be a teardown when I am no longer here.

  My shelves and their contents are not remarkable enough to preserve. This is not the Vatican Apostolic Library, with 26 miles of shelving for 1.1 million books and 75,000 manuscripts. These shelves are not in the Biblioteca Joanina, the library of the University of Coimbra, in Coimbra, Portugal, which has a colony of bats that consume any insects that might damage rare texts from the 16th century. What I do have in common with some of the great collections is my ignorance of what actually rests on my shelves. It turns out that lots of libraries are unaware of what they own under their vaulted ceilings. At the Bavarian State Library in Munich, a codex of homilies by the Alexandrian theologian Origin, likely copied by an anonymous scribe in the 11th century, was only discovered in 2012.

  xiv

  When the garage here was first converted into a den, a cheap metal fireplace was installed in one wall and recessed spaces were added on either side of the fireplace, with quarter-inch glass shelves for books. Now the shelves mostly display family pictures in easel-backed frames – children, wives, baby pictures, teenagers, a former “significant other.” They hold a stereo receiver and a CD player and CDs in boxed sets and stacked jewel cases. Only three of the shelves are used for books, but those three are booked up, packed tight.

  xv

  A chilly day today, a late February day, grey skies. I am taking the afternoon off to open every book on the glass shelves – there are 75 of them, or thereabouts – naming them, using my thumb on their pages as though they were cards in a deck, finding bookmarks and bits of paper and the notes that fall out of the pages. Inside A Short History of Byzantium, John Jules Norwich, the bookmark is a Post-it with a quote from Checkhov, who describes the human condition as “a dislike of life strangely combined with a fear of death.” The bookmark in Journal 1935-1944 The Fascist Years, Mihail Sebastian, is an opera ticket from Saturday, March 17, 2018, the performance of Sunken Garden that has left no echo. Reflections, Walter Benjamin, has a boarding pass for economy class on a Lufthansa flight inside it. The FRA on the boarding pass is airport code for Frankfort, where I have never been, and the pass is so faded it could be PRA, airport code for General Justo Jose de Urquiza Airport on the southeast side of Parana in the Entre Rios province of Argentina. New and Selected Poems, Stephen Dunn, is a portmanteau, stuffed with printouts of half a dozen emails and the folded pages from an essay on Martha Nussbaum.

  These four books share a shelf with FSG Poetry Anthology, edited by Jonathan Galassi, and with Beautiful Country, Burn Again, Ben Fountain. I am whiling away the afternoon, looking into The Future Is History, Masha Gessen. Matthias Buchinger, Ricky Jay.El Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Ben Fountain again. Horoscopes for the Dead, Billy Collins. A Poet’s Fate, Selected Writings of Louise Bogan. And yet… Christopher Hitchens. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. Quichote, Salman Rushdie. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen. Finding Home, Jill Culiner. A Greek Jew from Salonica Remembers, Yaacov Handeli. The Jewish Nation – Photography from the S. An-Sky Ethnographic Expeditions, edited by Avrumtin et al. The People and the Books, Adam Kirsch. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks. Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder. Ultimate Visual Dictionary, Dorling Kindersley. Chowkidar, which is only a pamphlet, from the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia. The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield. To Urania, Joseph Brodsky. Rome and Jerusalem, Moses Hess. And The Secret Knowledge On the Dismantling of American Culture, David Mamet, a used, decommissioned library book that is stamped Roselle Public Library District.

  Have I read any of these books? Some, though I am using most of them as filing cabinets for postcards and email printouts.

  V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers has an oversized postcard from Tally Dunn Gallery midway through it, advertising a Chihuly exhibit. A page from Steve King’s newsletter Borne Back Daily hides inside Robert Fitzgerald’s In The Rose of Time. This newsletter came regularly into my email inbox, bringing its sad, elegant legend at the top of the masthead: “So we beat on,” it quotes, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” There is a poem saved inside Selected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz, from Poem-A-Day. On April 30, 2016, I printed out all 28 lines of The Collectors, by Marion Strobel:

  The barnacle of crowds-
  Like a tuck
  On a finished skirt, unnoticed –
  He collected his materials
  Covertly:

  A ragpicker, A scavenger of words.

  And the gleanings
  Of his hearing
  He would costume
  In his own words.
  And parade before
  A listener…

  And so on.

  Czeslaw Milosz may never come down from the glass shelf to be looked at it again. Even less likely, another look at the bio of Marion Strobel on this Poem-A-Day printout. She is a shadow in a grey sky. Born in 1895. Lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois. Two collections of poetry, one published in 1925, the other in 1928.Her one- and two-word lines must have felt like daring, how she punctuated and broke ordinary sentences into pieces. Died in 1967, while I was in high school.

  xvi

  More books on glass shelves in the den, and the keepsakes deposited inside them:

  The Hindus, Wendy Daniger, subtitled An Alternative History. Inside, a grey and white card with a red star stamped on it, titled Schindler’s Factory – Krakow, January 18, 1945.And then a storyline: “Units of the Red Army enter Krakow. The German occupation of the city is over.” This souvenir is at page 104 of a book with 750 pages about Hindus. On page 449, a postcard from the same July 2017 trip to Poland and the Czech Republic. It is a black and white photograph of Felice and Franz Kafka taken in Budapest in July 1917. Atomic Ranch – Midcentury Interiors, Michelle Gringeri-Brown, photographs by Jim Brown, is a hardbound, coffee-table type book The gift card under its front cover is signed Jim, 2013. Forty-three years earlier, Jim Brown and I used to sit together at the lunch table in high school. The Jews of Spain, Jane S. Gerber, carries an expired Individual Charter Member membership card from the Dallas Holocaust Museum Center between two pages. The Wisdom of the Talmud, Ben Zion Bokser, has a printout, too. This one is from “Ask The Rabbi,” a newsletter courtesy of the Torah Association. A reader has asked the rabbi about souls. In Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger, I saved an unrelated article about the word “September” – why this word that seems related to “seven” has become the name of the ninth month. And tucked inside Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems, a printout of the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art”, with its untrue, repeated line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Nothing inside Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West, just the thousand unread pages, in paperback.

  xvii

  More on glass shelves:

  The Seventh Sense, Joshua Cooper Ramo. The Third Kind of Knowledge, Robert Fitzgerald. Super Mind, Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens. Mudbound, Hilary Jordan. The Sleep Revolution, Ariana Huffington. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander. Epitome of Desire, Robert A. Wilson. When Parents Hurt, Joshua Coleman, Ph.D. Torn Windows, Jane Hirshfield. Turning The Mind Into An Ally, Sakyong Mipham. The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon. The Art of Flight, Sergio Pitol. The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers. Dali – Poetics of the Small, 1929-1936, Meadows Museum. Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin. Budapest 1900, John Lukacs. The Prophetic Faith, Martin Buber. So Forth, Joseph Brodsky. Turn Out The Lights, Chronicles of Texas During the 80s and 90s, Gary Cartwright. Dallas Noir, edited by David Hale Smith. More Light, Selected Poems 2004-2016, Frederick Turner. And Tao Te Ching, the version from Fall River Press, the one with calligraphy by Kwok-Lap Chan.

  Still more:

  The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, Charlotte Elisheva Farrobert, editor. Seventy Facets – A Commentary on the Torah, Gershom Gorenberg. A History of Judaism, Martin Goodman, 600 pages, Princeton University Press. The Broken Road, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Between The Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor, introduction by Jan Morris. And The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter.

  xviii

  In Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, I got no further than page xiii, still in the introduction. But I buried two unused tickets to La Traviata for Saturday, November 4, 2017 between its pages. Also, a Poem-A-Day, “Scaffolding,” Seamus Heaney, from Wednesday, February 14, 2018. And a souvenir postcard from Hotel Casino, Morelia, Michoacan. And a business card from Galeria Esmeralda, Patzcuaro, Michoacan. And two ticket stubs from April 21, 2018, for Symphony Hall in San Diego, where I had gone after my mother’s death that January, just to spend time in her house. And the two unused Dallas Opera tickets, Don Giovanni, also for that Saturday, April 21, 2018

  I am using books for hiding places, leaving clues to a life, though the mystery is hardly interesting enough for anyone else to solve. Time to stop for today. The afternoon will be turning into nightfall. On a grey day, there may be no seam between the two. Making lists of titles and counting spines is not difficult work, but it is tiring.

  It is like counting grains of sand; each one is different, but the difference has little meaning. In the end, all I have is sand.

  Just three more, just to be done in the den:

  Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce. The prototype of the unread book, a book that was bought with no intention of reading it, or even skimming. It has a Poem-A-Day hidden in it, this one from January 18, 2017, e.e. cummings:

  My father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give…

  South and West, Joan Didion, holds a printout of a passage from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” about the time “in every man’s education” when he comes to know that envy is ignorance and so on. The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon, a slim paperback, conceals a scrap of paper with a Lola Ridge poem. Do you remember, it begins.

  Do you remember
  Honey-melon moon
  Dripping thick sweet light…

  The glass shelves are thick and unbending under the weight of these books. This glass is less fragile than memory, and clearer as well.

  Chapter Six
  PHILIA AND PHOBIA

  People have been driven crazy by a love of books. Crimes have been committed. A man named Blumberg is one example of bibliophilia gone wrong. In The Guinness World Records, Blumberg holds the record for stealing books. He stole more than 26,000 of them from libraries and museums. Mostly, he took rare books. And not for the money, but simply because he wanted them. He kept them on his shelves, at his home in Ottumwa, Iowa, rather than on the shelves of the nearly 300 libraries where he found them, or in the caged enclosures at museums, or the locked display cases and the restricted areas where they had been kept. After he was arrested, the FBI used a 40-foot tractor to haul away the nineteen tons of books he had stolen. His crime was no spree. And if it was craziness, it was not a temporary insanity, because Blumberg had kept at it for two decades.

  Bibliophobia is also real. And it can manifest in different ways, from the simple nervousness about reading out loud in front of an audience to a crazy fear of being around books. A sufferer might have a horror of bookstores and libraries. Or, as if this phobia were a Dewey dream, it might manifest as a fear of some specific category or subcategory of books. Fear of textbooks. Fear of historical novels. Fear of self-help.

  ii

  The ten shelves behind my desk downstairs have a second career as a Zoom background. They are the décor, the books and ornaments behind my balding forehead and the two ellipses of my eyeglasses during Zoom meetings, as I peer at a screen. Other faces appear on that bright rectangle, with bookshelves as backgrounds for most of them as well. It is a shared preference. Better the bookshelf than the fake beach that some Zoomers use, when they are actually in front of a laptop at their kitchen tables or sitting on their unmade beds. So common is a bookshelf background on Zoom that it has become a product. Bookshelf Zoom Backgrounds are downloaded “to make you look smart.” That is exactly what the sites say. The download is free, the background is fake, just like the Caribbean beach or the Finding Nemo motif, which are also popular.

  iii

  The National Geographic Atlas of the World is the biggest book on these shelves behind the downstairs desk. The tallest, anyway. It lies flat, a large lake of a book in its blue slipcase. On top of the slipcase, two frames with children’s photos, the children probably four and five years old, and a dusty toy wooden ukulele, the same one each of the children is holding in the framed photos. I need to set it aside to take the lost world of the atlas out of its slipcase. My name, including middle initial, is debossed near the lower edge of the blue cover. When or on what occasion this gift of an atlas was given has not made the journey through my unmapped memory from then to now. Maybe it happened in 1963, which is its publication date. If so, it might have been the big birthday gift from my parents when I turned twelve In November that year.

  That would be a wrong guess.

  There is another book, on the shelf just below it, that is also from National Geographic. Its illustrated jacket is in tatters. In the torn illustration, Robert E. Peary dashes to the Pole. Instead of a paper jacket, this book needed the footwear of an Arctic explorer. Some of the five hundred pages of this Great Adventures with National Geographic are water damaged and sticking together. I am reading the text on the front jacket flap. Peary, it says, got to the pole in 1909; so, he got there the same year the first 25 volumes of The Five-Foot Shelf of Books got into print. Exploring a little further, I discover an inscription on the Great Adventures title page: To Our Son on his 12th Birthday with All Our Love –

  iv

  On this same shelf, there are 25 titles on spines, books of different heights, different widths and colors. Five are paperback. Eleven are sets by author. Four Graham Greene, three Yvor Winters, two H.G. Wells, two Andre Gide. Of the remaining fourteen, two are poetry, two are books of letters— actual correspondence — and two are writings about writing. Two others might fall under a Dewey number 200, for Religion. The six remaining books are solos. One is a novel, one a book of essays on the Trans-Mississippi West, one in praise of fathers. One is by a famous feminist, one is the autobiography of an entrepreneurial mystic. And then, at the head of the line forming to its right, Great Adventures with National Geographic.

  So, no obvious organizing principle is at work here.

  These twenty-five could be divided into the four that were read, the eight that were started, and the thirteen that have never been looked at.

  v

  To start, I try doing alphabetical order, by titles only: 3 By Graham Greene, Autobiography of a Yogi, The Book of Goodbyes, The Colony, The Coming of Age, Creating Fiction, The End of the Affair, Entering the High Holy Days, Forms of Discovery, The Frontier Challenge, The Function of Criticism, In Search of a Character, The Journals of Andre Gide Volume I, The Journals of Andre Gide Volume II, Letters on Literature and Politics, Lord Byron Selected Letters and Journals, Our Man in Havana, The Outline of History Volume I, The Outline of History Volume II, Put Your Hands In, Thoughts to Share with a Wonderful Father, To Be A Jew, What I’m Going To Do, I Think.

  vi

  Trying again, right to left, after Great Adventures with National Geographic, this time keeping books that seem to belong together, together. So, 3 By Graham Greene, which includes This Gun For Hire, The Confidential Agent, and The Ministry of Fear, but count it as one. A postcard “Self-portrait with skeleton arm,” Edvard Munch, is bookmarking page 94. Next, Our Man In Havana, Graham Greene. Then, In Search of a Character, Graham Greene’s two African journals. Then The End of the Affair. This is a first edition still in its jacket and, under its flap, I find a trimmed article from 1991 reporting Graham Greene’s death, age 86, at a hospital in Vevey, Switzerland. Next, The Outline of History, H.G. Wells, is Volume I of what the cover claims to be “The Whole Story of Man.” I left a souvenir postcard from Wayside Motor Inn, Tigard, Oregon, at Chapter XX, “The Greeks and the Persians.” Then, The Outline of History Volume II begins with Chapter XXX, “Muhammad.”

  Volume I of The Journals of Andre Gide, 1889-1913 has an Ex Libris signed by “Hal.” The book is inscribed Christmas, 1947, A sincere and honest book for one of the most sincere and honest people I’ll ever know. Clarice. Presumably, Clarice is talking about Hal. The Journals of Andre Gide Volume II, 1914-1927, has the same Ex Libris, and Clarice inscribes this one, too. Christmas, 1948, To Wilbur, who has a special place in my affections that no other person can ever fill. Clarice. In Defense of Reason, Yvor Winters, hides a folded New Yorker article about John Williams and his novel Stoner. Next, The Function of Criticism, Yvor Winters. Forms of Discovery, Yvor Winters.

  At this point, things become arbitrary.Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, has saved a receipt from September 20, 1974, Self-Realization Fellowship Gift Shop, 17190 Sunset Boulevard. Then, The Frontier Challenge, edited by John G. Clark.What I’m Going To Do, I Think, L. Woiwode. Letters on Literature and Politics, Edmund Wilson. And then Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway. This stiff book of essays is as untouched as the day it was published in 1999.

  Next, The Colony, John Bowers.The tops of its pages are spotted and browned; they look like the backs of my hands. To Be A Jew, Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, has a folded review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature inside it and, even more out of place, six typed and stapled pages titled “Jesus Fulfilled Old Testament Prophecies As The Coming Messiah“, with two columns on each page, one for prophesy and the other for fulfillment. For example, a quote from Genesis on the left, a passage from Galatians on the right. How did this Jesus get here undercover? And what is a Galatian?

  There is The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir. Lord Byron, Selected Letters and Journals. Entering the High Holy Days, Reuven Hammer. Then The Book of Goodbyes, Jillian Weise, and Put Your Hands In, Chris Hosea. These two are slim paperbacks, books of poetry, both of them award winners according to the silver seals on their covers.

  Last in line, Thoughts to Share with a Wonderful Father, from Blue Mountain Arts. This is a crafty, homemade-looking small book of sayings, paragraphs, poems, wisdoms. It includes two quotes from Bill Cosby.

  vii

  If I do not remember a word of a book I have read, have I read it? If I have no memory of an experience, did it happen? If a tree falls in the forest…. The answer to all of these sophomoric provocations is yes, the book was read, the experience was experienced, the tree fell. As to whether the tree made a sound, ask the squirrels, ask the birds.

  viii

  Despite keeping it at my elbow for a month, I have gotten no further than page twenty of In Search of the Miraculous.

  ix

  The money from the sale of Pam’s diamond ring has already been spent. I am using it to replace the water heater in my son’s condominium and repair a broken tile floor in his kitchen. He had no hot water for several months before letting me know that something is wrong. This is typical. Also, water leaking under the kitchen floor has buckled a handful of the square ceramic tiles. Several of them broke. Repairs have to be made. The cost is almost exactly what I received from the sale of the diamond.

  The water heater is replaced, the repair is done. This morning Ben comes over. My son has not worked in nearly two years, and I am supporting him in the townhome he bought and moved into when he was working. We are going together to meet the “weight coach” who will set up the six-month program that promises to help him lose sixty pounds. If successful, he would then weigh just under 300 pounds. He would move from morbid obesity to being fat. Neither of us believes it will happen, but one of us believes in trying, and the other pretends. On the drive over, Ben says he has something to tell me. “My water heater isn’t working.” How is that possible, I ask him. He says a breaker tripped, and the new Rheem 50-gallon water heater that was installed so recently never came back on after he reset the breaker. So, no hot water, for another week now. Also, the sink in the kitchen does not drain, and the garbage disposal has not worked for months.

  x

  People are reading less and less, yet more and more books are being sold, according to data that tracks the sales of printed books. I get it. My bookshelves are packed with unread books that I bought. Consider only this shelf that starts with the fanfare of Great Adventures and peters out at Thoughts To Share with a Wonderful Father. Twenty-five books, only four of them read. Of those, two are Graham Greene novels, and not of trace of them remains in my memory, not a plot, not the name of a single character. Only their titles, Our Man in Havana and The End of the Affair, have made it through Likewise with Autobiography of a Yogi, I remember it mainly as testimony to the real estate genius of the Self-Realization Fellowship, which owns the prime Lake Shrine property in Los Angeles, on Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, where I found this book in the gift shop. The Colony, John Bowers, is a book that has left its residue behind. Published in the 1971, it recounts the year and a half its author spent twenty years earlier in a “writing colony” in Southern Illinois. So, a story of dreams unlikely to come true. One of its sentences has somehow planted itself. I am a writer, I am, I am, Bowers wrote. Such a sad, insistent line; pathetic, in a way, and yet here it is, appearing in his published book.

  xi

  The downstairs desk in the small study is separated from the living room by a double-sided fireplace that can be seen around and through. The desk is perpendicular to a wall of windows, and bookcases are built into the other two walls. Two bookcases on each wall, and each bookcase has five shelves above cabinet doors for hidden storage. So, in the bookcases behind the downstairs desk, nine shelves to go.

  xii

  The book jacket of The Role of Government in a Free Society, Phil Gramm, is designed by a graphic artist I knew, and he gave me this free copy, its jacket bright red, the lettering in blue and white, and lots of serifs in the title and author’s name, all upper case, some small caps, and letters interlocking here and there, nodding to the 18th century. Inside U.S.A., John Gunter, came from my parents’ house. It was published in 1947. When I open the cover, a gate-fold chart tumbles out, with data for the forty-eight states. The chart gives a state’s total area, its rank by size, the population, nickname, capitol, date of admission to the Union, number of foreign born, number of Negroes, per capital income, value of school property per pupil, number of residents in Who’s Who, number of rural homes without toilet or privy, percent of population with no library service, telephones per 1,000, number of auto registrations, the number of lynchings from 1882 to 1944, the majority’s choice for president in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, the number of persons killed in automobile accidents in 1943, and the total number killed in World War II.

  Then, A Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph Woods. No one needs to read this book cover to cover. Its pages are for snacking.

  The World of Mathematics, James R. Newman, four volumes in a slipcase, is next to Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley, Modern Library. The Way Things Work, Volume One, Simon and Schuster, is an “illustrated encyclopedia of technology.” It has never been used to fix a water leak or rewire a light switch. A Post-it is poking up from the dust on the book’s top edge, marking the page with a diagram of the manufacturing process for Plexiglas. Next, The Way Things Work, Volume Two. Then, Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe. In Search of History, Theodore H. White. This is another book from my parents’ house. I wonder if my father ever read it. According to the back jacket, Theodore H. White was born in 1915. My father was born the following year.

  xiii

  Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys And Sorrows is eye level on the shelf with In Search of History. I have read every page of this book, much of it lying in the hammock that is suspended between live oak trees near the creek that borders my backyard. Next to it, Romania, Debbie Stowe, one of those “essential pocket guides” that have been replaced by a smart phone in your pocket. Then, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel, and Transfigurations, Jay Wright. Tucked inside Nil Nil, Don Patterson, a printout with these lines from Rabindranath Tagore: The moon has her light all over the sky, her dark spots to herself. Smoke boasts to the sky, and ashes to the earth, that they are brothers to the fire. The raindrop whispered to the jasmine, “Keep me in your heart forever.” The jasmine sighed, “Alas,” and dropped to the ground.

  Also on this shelf, The War In Eastern Europe, John Reed. It is a book “in the public domain.” The title page says that the war is “described by John Reed” and “Illustrated by Boardman Robinson.” Someone has named their child Boardman. Boardman Michael Robinson, an American painter, editorial cartoonist, and muralist, was also a book illustrator. And a radical socialist, and a teacher. He married Sarah Whitney, who studied sculpture with Rodin and dance with Isadora Duncan. His friends called him “Mike.”

  xiv

  Lioness, Francine Klagsbrun, is an unread gift. A Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, George Sampson is not so concise at 1,091 pages. Next, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Christianity In Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky. Elijah’s Violin & Other Jewish Fairy Tales, retold by Howard Schwartz. And then A Country Herbal, Lesley Gordon, which is a hardback book about Figwort and Hyssop and Pimpernel, with curious stories and engravings.

  Also on this shelf, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison. I met Robert Lowell once. I wanted to be in his poetry-writing class at Harvard, and he turned me away. To be fair, admittance was competitive. As for his biography, I turned away at page four. Wordsworth, Poetry and Prose, selected by W.M. Merchant, has my sister’s penciled notes in the margins of The Prelude from Book First through Book Thirteenth. I claimed this thick paperback the summer after my sister married and moved out of our childhood home.

  A two-dollar legal tender bill from the Central Bank of Belize is deposited in The Prelude. On the front of the bill, Queen Elizabeth II. Maya ruins of Xunantunich is on the back. These are ruins less than an hour drive from Blancaneaux Lodge, where Dolores and I stayed two nights with our children on a Spring Break thirty-two years ago. In this way, Wordsworth, Poetry and Prose is a kind of unwritten diary.

  xv

  Last on the same shelf, a cluster of alumni directories. In varying shades of red, the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 10th Anniversary Report; Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 35th Anniversary Report; and Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 40th Anniversary Report. My listing is among pages and pages of Perkins in Harvard Alumni Directory 1980. My listing has the address at the time, three homes ago. It has the correct year of graduation, the A.B. degree, the scl for summa cum laude. It ends with ”Ext.” What is that? It is for occupational field. I was unemployed in 1980. According to the list of abbreviations in the front of the directory, Ext is for Extractive Industries.

  xvi

  In the introduction to my copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Llewellyn Powys is quoted as saying that The Anatomy of Melancholy is “the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose writing.” But as I stand in the hallway and open Burton’s book to a random page, and read it out loud, my mouth fills with gobbledygook. Near the middle of a paperback, from Part Two, Section Two, Digression of Air, this is the first sentence of the first paragraph my finger falls on, halfway down the page: “If the heavens then be penetrable, as these men deliver, and no lets, it were not amiss in this aerial progress to make wings and fly up, which that Turk in Busbequius made his fellow-citizens in Constantinople believe he would perform: and some newfangled wits, methinks, should some time or other find out: or if that may not be, yet with a Galileo’s glass, or Icaromenippus’ wings in Lucian, command the spheres and heavens, and see what is done amongst them.” Flipping pages, I try again, reading this at the start of another paragraph: “Aetius, 22, 23, commends hieram Ruffi. Trinxacellius, consil. 12, lib. 4, approves of hiera; Non, inquit, invenio melius medicamentum, I find no better medicine, he saith.“

  This is how it goes on most pages. There seem to be no rules, and it is not going anywhere, despite all the traveling.

  xvii

  Burton is concerned about the causes of melancholy. Speaking plainly, he quotes Galen, “It is in vain to speak of cures, or think of remedies, until such time and we have considered of the causes.” He writes that those causes must be either supernatural or natural. The supernatural will include God and His angels, and also, by God’s permission, the devil and his ministers. For melancholy that is brought upon us by God, there are no cures, other than through God. As for troubles with devils and spirits, he devotes page after page to their kinds, their qualities and numbers. There are the fiery and aerial, the watery and terrestrial, the ghosts, the omens, and their powers, and those instruments of the devil, the witches and the magicians.

  Natural causes begin with the stars. But then Burton brings things down to earth. Old age is a cause of melancholy. Yes, it is, it can be. Parents are also a cause, and Burton has no doubt about that. He asserts that a mother’s influence begins even before birth. “If she be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented and melancholy, not only at the time of conception but even all the while she carries the child in her womb,” he writes, referencing Fernelius, Path, lib, 1, 11, “her son will be so likewise affected, and worse.”Fernelius is Burton’s go-to when he writes about the influence of the parent on the child. According to Fernelius, “If a great-bellied woman see a hare, her child will often have an hare-lip.” He is not a eugenicist, not exactly; Burton wrote in the sixteenth century. But he agrees with Fernelius, “It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for humankind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry.”

  Burton fills pages with the ways parents screw up their children. He reminds me of Philip Larkin, on a shelf nearby, the Larkin poem that starts:

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. It is comic, especially the next two lines:

  They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra, just for you. I do not find it entirely funny though. Given my experience as a father, nature and nurture are on my mind and have been for many years.

  Philip Larkin Collected Poems sits on a shelf behind the desk downstairs. Snug, its spine wearing a bright green jacket, it is part of my bookshelf background on Zoom.

  xviii

  Other causes of melancholy that Robert Burton considers? Bad diet in all its variations, meat, fish, vegetables. And what he calls “retention and evacuation.” Then he is off to the races, chasing down every cause imaginable. Bad air, too little exercise, too much exercise, idleness, solitariness, imagination, sorrow, fear, envy, malice, hatred, discontents, miseries, desires, ambition, covetousness, hawking, hunting and gaming, wine and women, pride, too much study, bad nurses, education, scoffs and calumnies, poverty and want, loss of friends, loss of goods, fears of the future, superfluous industry, unfortunate marriage, disgraces, infirmities, and distempered body parts. All those things, among other things. As if everything is a cause of melancholy, or can be.

  xix

  Books that share the same shelf with Philip Larkin: First in line, the World’s Greatest Thinkers series, the five books from Carlton House. Then, The Last Post, Ford Maddox Ford, a faded blue, cloth-bound book, published in 1928 by Albert and Charles Boni. Next, Why Are We In Vietnam, Norman Mailer. Then The Same Door, John Updike, signed by Updike or by someone who wrote John Updike on the page facing the inside front cover. The Coup, John Updike. On Writing Well, William Zinsser. Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Josip Novakovich. And Craft of the Short Story, Richard Summers. I borrowed Craft of the Short Story fifty years ago from the Lamont Library at Harvard College. It still has its 813 Dewey number glued to the spine. It also has a Thai 20-baht bill as a bookmark on the Hemingway short story “Fifty Grand.“

  The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Janet Lewis, is next in line. Then World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow. Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship, Gore Vidal. The Republic of Plato, with translation, introduction and notes by Francis Cornford. Romania, A Photographic Memoir, Florin Andreescu. This book of photographs is a gift from Costin, my driver and guide on a trip in 2019 from Bucharest to Piatra Neamt to Cluj, where I tried to touch the spirits of unknown great grandfathers with names like Reuven and Jacob and Moses. God Save Texas, Lawrence Wright. When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron. The subtitle of Chodron’s book is Heart Advice for Difficult Times. It was published in 1997. I saved printouts on grief between many of its pages; also, a note on stationery from the director of The Warm Place in Fort Worth, where I took Ben and Eden for peer counseling through most of 1998. We went two times a month. As the note says, “The head does not know how to play the role of the heart for long.” The Heart Advice for Difficult Times book jacket has a blurb from Alice Walker, who keeps David Icke books about reptilian people on her bedside table. Walker is “one of Pema Chodron’s grateful students.”

  Next, A Glastonbury Romance, John Cowper Powys. I have not read one page of these 1,108 pages. John Cooper Powys is the older brother of Llewellyn Powys, the one who overrates Robert Burton in the introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy.

  xx

  Art books, vanity publications, and oversized books that are magazines with hard covers and high pretentions lie on top of each other at the end of the shelf. Graphic Design America, Communication Arts, and Art in America are in a stack with Audience. A softbound Posts and Rugs covers Herculaneum To Malibu, a souvenir from the first J. Paul Getty Museum, on Pacific Coast Highway. Audience, November December 1971, Volume 1, Number 6 begins with an interview between Arthur Miller and William Styron; it was Dolores’s, from three years before I met her. Posts and Rugs, H. L. James, tells “the story of Navajo rugs” like the one still on the floor, next to the downstairs desk. Dolores and I bought it in 1978 from the gift shop at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. Ten feet by five feet, brown, grey, and black. It was sold as a Teec Nos Pos, and for all we knew, it is.

  xxi

  Twenty-two books so far on this one shelf. The number that I have read? Three. Those with contents I can accurately recall? Zero. Two other books are upright, wedged at the end of the shelf. Short Stories, Guy De Maupassant and Plain Tales from the Hills, Rudyard Kipling. These were both taken like spoils from my parents’ house. They must have been Aunt Bertha’s. They have that odor of hope and ambition. Cousins of The World’s Greatest Books, they belong to Immortal Masterpieces of Literature, a series published in 1937 by The Spencer Press in Reading, Pennsylvania. They have blue bindings, and their titles and author names are in gold on their spines. Both have a formal frontispiece and nine other illustrations. I still wonder, what was in the air or the era that the child of immigrants from eastern Romania wanted De Maupassant and Kipling? The Spencer Press introduction offers this answer, “Man owes it to himself to see that the right books are upon the bookshelves in his home.”

  xxii

  Suit jackets and sports coats and dress shirts and cuffed trousers are suspended on gleaming metal rods and fill most of the upper and lower spaces in a walk-in closet that I can enter from the master bedroom. This space, created in 2009, is part of the remodeling after Pam left. Almost none of these clothes are worn anymore. Still, if they were all thrown away, or taken in bags down to the Stewpot or The Bridge or the Family Gateway, what would be left? I would not like the emptiness left behind. My bookshelves are like that, too. So much of what is on them is for the sake of appearance. To have something there, instead of nothing. On my 104 shelves, two desks and four tables, there are 1,843 books that fit that category.

  xxiii

  The four volumes of The Babylonian Talmud from the Art Scroll edition – Berachos, Avodah Zerah I, Avodah Zerah II, and Sanhedrin – could compete for the title of least likely books on my shelves to be read for pleasure. Nicolas Berdyaev’s Christianity and Anti-Semitism, next to Sanhedrin, is an easy read, and it is remarkable to have made the point that Berdyaev did—that hating Jews is incompatible with being Christian–when and where he did. An Armenian Sketchbook, Vasily Grossman, is on this same shelf, just above Great Adventures with National Geographic. So are The Mythic Image, Joseph Campbell, and Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volume 2, edited by Cyril Birch. If Volume 1 is in the house, I am not aware of it.

  Winning Chess Strategies, Yasser Seirawan, International Grandmaster, is part of a three-book series. The other two are Winning Chess Tactics and Play Winning Chess. I have all three. I have never opened one. The last time I played chess? 1972.

  The rest of this row: Pilgerman, Russell Hoban. A second hardbound copy of World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe, as if a second 700 pages were needed. 20 Master Plots and How To Build Them, Ronald B. Tobias. Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories, A. Conan Doyle. The Droll Stories of Balzac. Both the Balzac and Conan Doyle came from my parents’ house. A Distant Episode, The Selected Stories, Paul Bowles. Between its pages, a postcard from Sue Benner. The postcard promotes her fabric art show at the Lucy Berman Gallery in Palo Alto, in 1992. Sue adds a note to the promotion. Her father has died. It is “a peaceful end to a long, hard struggle,” she writes. Peaceful for whom?

  The Life of Captain James Cook, J.C. Beaglehole. Beaglehole’s competition would be for best last name. His book goes on for 760 pages. Borodino: Napoleon Against Russia, 1812, Christopher Duffy. To Pray as a Jew, Hayim Halevy Donin, holds a laminated copy of Psalm 23 in English and Hebrew. There are notes, asterisks, and penciled translations in the margins of this book, next to some of the Hebrew prayers. The Torah, A Modern Commentary, edited by W. Gunther Plaut. Its bookplate is on the inside front cover, which is the inside back cover. Next in line, The Thousand Nights and One Night, Volume I, translated by Powys Mathers. Volume II, Volume III, and Volume IV of The Thousand Nights and One Night are here as well. They have been here unread for more than a thousand nights. Powys Mathers, the translator, is a poet, a translator, and, according to Wikipedia, the pioneer of cryptic crossword puzzles. Does this Powys Mathers have a connection to John Cowper Powys of Glastonbury Romance? They both share the name of the most sparsely populated county in Wales, and have books only a shelf apart.

  Then, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume I, edited by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters.Symonds was an industrious Victorian – a poet, translator, and essayist. There are 619 of his letters and notes in the 867 pages of Volume I, and he was not finished. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume II, also here, has 838 items filling another 1,011 pages. His 660 letters in the final volume, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume III, take up 930 pages. So, around 2,000 letters and notes, on 2,500 pages. I know as little about John Addington Symonds today as I do about what I was thinking decades ago when I said, yes, I want all three volumes.

  This shelf is done. Of its 28 books, I have read two. An Armenian Sketchbook and Christianity and Anti-Semitism. I have waded into two others. The rest are a salt sea I have not even dipped a toe in.

  xxiv

  Out of curiosity, out of guilt, I am sliding the first volume of The Letters of John Addington Symonds off its shelf. The fit is tight; so, more a wrench than a slide. Volume I begins with ten pages of introduction. I tell myself I will read that, that is the least I can do, though I do not make it even through ten pages. According to the editors, “the reader will be struck by the presence of a profound melancholy in the letters, of a personal angst almost Dostoyevskian in its scope.” They write about Symonds’ “advanced consumption, poor eyesight, and a traumatic sexual drive intensified by an exaggerated moral idealism.” They admit he “confused his torments with St Augustine’s,” and that he “revealed himself in a way he perhaps only vaguely understood.” In short, “Symonds, the man, is an absorbing subject.” This is not very convincing. The only thing certain to be absorbed by the pages of these three volumes is a lot of time.

  xxv

  Books on shelves show their spines, but hide their covers. No one ever said not to judge a book by its spine, though that is all that the shelf will show. A book’s secrets are inside. There are flysheets on hardbacks. Half titles on the first recto or right-hand sheet. And sometimes a frontispiece on that same sheet’s back. Title pages, dedications, epigraphs, forewords, prefaces, acknowledgements — this insect world of activity under the rock of a book’s cover. So much thinking goes into what I never think about when passing by these shelves.

  xxvi

  Israel, Martin Gilbert, begins another row of books behind the desk downstairs. Then Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald. Jefferson’s Children, Leon Botstein. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Gloria Steinem. The Shifting Point, Peter Brook. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud. And The Crisis of the Aristocracy, Lawrence Stone. The Crisis of the Aristrocracy was required reading for a college course I do not remember taking, though my notes are on its flysheet and on a blank page facing the inside back cover. I bracketed sentences in the text as well. On page 128, “The key to early and mid-16th century society is to be found in the word ‘manred,’ meaning control of persons for military purposes” is underlined. My note in the margin says it is a word that disappears in 17th century. Next, Taoism, Eva Wong. Then The Torah, The Jewish Publication Society of America. This copy has my name is on the flysheet, below Presented To. It is a gift from the Sisterhood and Brotherhood of Temple Jeremiah, Los Angeles, the working- class synagogue where my sister and I attended Sabbath school in a former union hall, and where the big macher was a plumber. It is dated October 25, 1967. An index card is holding my place in Genesis, Chapter 41, at the story of the dreams of Pharoah and their interpretation by Joseph. It is a tale of chance and changes of fortune, if chance is how you interpret it.

  xxvii

  More in this row:

  Prize Stories 1984 The O. Henry Awards. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards. The Sufis, Idries Shah, introduction by Robert Graves. In The Western Night, Frank Bidart. Two place holders in this one: An entrance ticket to Musee Maillol Fondation Dina Vierny 59-61 rue de Grenelle, Paris, and a business card from Madeleine Gely. After we married, Pam and I went to Paris. I came home with a parapluie from the Madeleine Gely store at 218 Boulevard St. Germain. It was lost, not too long after, probably left behind in the padded booth of a local restaurant. Next, The Basis of Criticism In The Arts, Stephen Pepper. A Krutch Omnibus, Joseph Wood Krutch. And Love is a Stranger, Rumi. Inside the Rumi, an article about testosterone replacement therapy.

  Then The Cuts, Malcolm Bradbury. The Truth About Lorin Jones, Alison Lurie. The Last Old Place, Datus C. Proper. Success Stories, Russell Banks. Defending Pornography, Nadine Strossen, is signed on the flysheet and dated April 1995. Dolores was on the local ACLU board, and Nadine Strossen, the national president, was visiting Dallas, selling and signing her book. Next, Lancelot, Walker Percy. Wilderness, Robert Penn Warren. Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth. The Bureaucratic State, H. R. Shapiro. Mother Goose, selected and Illustrated by Michael Hague. And The Limits of Language, edited by Walker Gibson. This slight paperback was assigned in an “advanced placement” course I took at UCLA while I was in high school. I remember none of it, not one word, other than the epigraph, from T.S. Eliot, which stuck: I gotta use words when I talk to you.

  xxviii

  The bookmark at page 16 of Hand To Mouth, Paul Auster, is a ticket to Aspen Santa Fe Ballet at Dallas City Performance Hall, September 17, 2016. Poems 1934-1969, David Ignatow, is one of those books that had me saying, “I can do that, I can do better than that,” although I never have. A Book of Memories, Peter Nadas, is unread. I admire the accents over the first ‘e’ in Peter and the first ‘a’ in Nadas on the jacket of this 700-pager published in 1986. According to the quote from Freitag on its back cover, it “must clearly be placed alongside the great works of the century.” I made it to page 26 of The Five Stages of the Soul, Harry R. Moody, PhD, which may not even be to stage one. Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, is modern as of its publication in 1919. Next, The Gilberto Freyre Reader, translated by Barbara Shelby. Then Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Imre Kertesz, bought in Budapest in October, 2019. There is a handout inside, a takeaway from a museum, titled: “Room of Gabor Peter, head of the Hungarian Political Police.” The Blood of San Gennaro, Scott Harney, is a small book of poems published by Arrowsmith Press. It has a printout under its cover. It is an email from chabad.org and offers a much-needed sentiment: Where there is no forgiveness, there is no love. Also under the cover of The Blood of San Gennaro, a printout from Poem-A-Day. This Mina Loy poem, which seems like a private message, is in the public domain:

  We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment,
  Or broken flesh with one another
  At the profane communion table
  Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips.
  We might have given birth to a butterfly
  With the daily news
  Printed in blood on its wings.

  What Happens After I Die, Rifat Sonsino and Daniel Syme, has my notes handwritten in the margins of page after page. I copied “Teach us to number our days, that we may get ourselves a heart of wisdom” on its empty last page. This book is a buffet of answers to the question in its title. It offers scholarship rather than worship. It is more overview than insight. Like the director’s cut of a movie, it also holds added content. I find a newspaper article about grieving, and a letter to the editor about grief. And, on a bit of paper, someone else’s wisdom, copied and saved. The light is far away, it says. The only way to see it is to close your eyes.

  The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, is a difficult book that fascinated me in 1977. I can still summarize my takeaway. Religion is the biological residue of a long-ago time when there was little difference between perception and hallucination. A folded sheet of paper wedged between its pages has all five stanzas of a Kipling poem typed on it. I am the land of their fathers, it begins. In me the virtue stays. I will bring back my children, After certain days. Counting to the end of this shelf, there are 37 books. And there is evidence that I have read five of them. Another nine were looked at, or started, and I read a few of their pages before concluding that those pages were enough.

  xxix

  Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, has left its shelf. It rests on the desk now, though It can be neglected there just as easily. Its flysheet has an inscription from Dolores, dated December 1977. That is the month after we met. So, this book was a first gift.

  Dolores admired its aaba pattern and odd capitalizations. She was also a fan of Broadway’s Mame and its life-is-a-banquet message. 

  xxx

  It might have been in 1969, or earlier, when I was still in high school. Maybe in 1971, home from college for the summer in Los Angeles. Somewhere around then, I enrolled in the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course. Maybe it was a year or two later, during the summer I lived on Beach Street in Venice. According to my friend Richard, I was sharing that house on Beach Street with Steve Miller, when Steve was a student at UCLA’s School of Dentistry.

  “Who?”

  I tell Richard, a childhood friend, I have no memory of a Steve Miller on Beach Street, but he insists Steve was my roommate. Steve had rented the house and he needed someone to share the expenses.

  “He tried to get you to pay extra to cover the cost of the houseplants.”

  “I do remember Beach Street,” I say.

  Meaning, I have an fuzzy image in my memory of the small wooden house with a chain link fence. But the only Steve Miller I can think of is the guy who sings Fly Like An Eagle.

  xxxi

  This conversation with Richard occurs last summer, over lunch in Vista at the Hungry Bear Deli, while I am in California staying at the house in Oceanside my sister and I inherited from our parents. Richard is one of those people who remembers high school as clearly if not better than he does what he ate for breakfast an hour ago. Richard tells me that long after my time in the house on Beach Street, Steve Miller was found in the trunk of his car, murdered. Steve was a practicing dentist by then and married. Before the body was discovered, his wife reported him missing. Richard also says that Dennis Weaver, the actor, made an appeal to the public on the local evening news, asking for help finding Steve. I must have looked confused.

  “You know,” Richard says, “the guy from Gunsmoke.”

  Dennis Weaver’s involvement has nothing to do with dentistry. Richard tells me that Weaver knew the woman Steve was married to. Weaver was her godfather.

  This morning, taking a break from my bookshelves, it is time to look all this up. Sure enough, I find an article online from the archives of The Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1986. Local News in Brief: Missing Dentist’s Body Found in Car’s Trunk. According to the Times, it was no murder. It was suicide, and there was a note. “Steven Michael Miller, 36, last seen leaving his Encino office, died of a drug overdose, Deputy Fosselman said.”

  Just like the refrain that the other Steve Miller sings, Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’. In the song, however, time is slipping into the future.

  The slipperier slope is into the past.

  This afternoon I kick an anthill in the backyard and pour poison granules on the excitement that I have deliberately provoked.

  xxxii

  The classroom for the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course was in Westwood. If there was no classroom, there was at least an office visit to sign up and receive materials. I believe there were classes, though the classroom itself is a ghost of a memory.

  No one named Evelyn Wood ever appeared. There must have been a teacher, male or female, who taught the students, if there were other students, how to sweep the fingers of our right hands faster and faster across sentences and paragraphs and down the pages. The point was to see the writing not word by word but in blocks of text, and to take it in, swallowing it whole. The goal was speed, no loss of comprehension was the promise.

  Evelyn Wood’s theory is that people can read faster if they learn to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page. And if more could be taken in at a glance, thousands of words could be read per minute.

  As my fingers zigzag down the page, my hand becomes a pacer.

  Evelyn Wood claimed she could read 2,700 words a minute, which is ten times faster than the average reader. Before she invented her system, she and husband Doug were living in Utah, where she taught remedial reading in high schools. They were entrepreneurial. Eventually, she opened Reading Dynamics institutes around the country, and speed-reading became a craze. I saw the television advertising as a teenager, as I sat on the sofa near the brown braided rug in my parents’ house. Reading Dynamics was on the air and in the air. President Kennedy had sent his staff to the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute in Washington, D.C. President Nixon did the same. For the speed reader, the main thing was to consume words in blocks. And never ever say words silently to yourself as you read.

  Reading Dynamics is still out there. It still has its claims to accelerate reading speed, improve vocabulary, and even enhance memory. In 1986, a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Brittanica bought the name and the system, though it sold it a few years after that, to a company that sells business training.

  I do not know what has been proven or disproven in the science of speed reading, but surely the sound of a word is a charming part of its personality, and saying a word silently and sometimes even aloud can be a pleasure.

  I also do not know whether the system would have worked for me if I had stuck with it. I tried, but quit, because speed reading is like speed eating. Words have a taste, and Reading Dynamics wanted to stuff them down my throat.

  xxxiii

  Only two more shelves to through, behind the desk downstairs. Both are rows of travel books, some bought before traveling, others after dreaming of traveling. So, there are books about places gone to and for trips that will never be taken. Some are pocket-sized phrase books, others are travelers’ narratives. There are Lonely Planets, Rough Guides, Frommer’s, Fodor’s, Cadogan, Baedecker, and Access guides. In all, there are ninety of them on the two shelves. And inside most are handouts and tear-outs, street maps, country maps, pages ripped from glossy travel magazines, printouts of online articles, and “literature” from travel agents.

  So many books in my home are about leaving home.

  A lot of these books hide their authors. They have publishers, or teams of editors. Not always, but often, the publisher is the brand. I see Fodor’s Pocket Beijing The Best of the City, and Berlitz Latin-American Spanish for Travelers, and Frommer’s Buenos Aires Day By Day. I bought Top 10 Hong Kong from Eyewitness Travel without knowing or caring whose eyes did the witnessing. I never did go to Hong Kong; Hong Kong was wishful thinking.

  The travel books are closest in spirit to the cookbooks. They are filled with recipes to be followed. Where to stay, what to see, where to eat, what to buy. As a rule, they have even less personality than the cookbooks. There is a vogue of the cook or chef, a fandom for Julia or Wolfgang. But the sensibility of these travel guides seems to belong only to the publisher, to Frommer, Fodor, Cadogan, or Baedeker. Who actually wrote the guide might not be who did the staying, seeing, eating and buying. Travel guides are like little cathedrals, constructed by teams, by the anonymous masons working for the greater glory of Frommer.

  Still, these books are among the more personal on my shelves. There is a germ of memory on even the most sterile of them. And unlike most of the other books, these were put to use. Some were even carried; they made the trips that are their subjects. Their pages are littered with snack wrappers and food stains. They hold business cards, receipts, and restaurant reviews for places, and in that way they are placeholders for memories.

  What else do they have? The check marks and underlines made by two wives. So they also articulate the truth that there is no going back. And not just because the same castle or museum or hotel lobby cannot be stepped into twice, but because the feet taking those steps will not be the same.

  xxxiv

  Lonely Planet Buenos Aires Encounter, Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook & Dictionary, and Lonely Planet Pocket Moscow & St Petersburg Top Sights are sitting next to each other on the shelf with Baedeker’s Tuscany, Cadogan’s Southern Spain, and Italy from Berlitz. China, The 50 Most Memorable Trips, Frommer, shares a border with Japan, The Rough Guide, by Jan Dodd and Simon Richmond. Both are neighbors of Switzerland at Its Best, Robert S. Kane, and Baedeker’s Thailand, and Fodor’s 1995 California. I have Frommer’s Beijing and Fodor’s Pocket London The Best of the City. Venicewalks, Chas Carner & Alessandro Giannatasio, and Florencewalks, Anne Holler, are close to Steven K. Bailey’s Exploring Hong Kong.

  I relied on Access guides to Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Santa Fe/Taos/Albuquerque, Paris, Rome, and London. Their pages are stuffed with newspaper articles and notes that were made on branded hotel notepads. Though most of the Access guides are focused on cities, guides foro Mexico and Caribbean expand the franchise. Access Wine Country covers three counties in one state.

  The Access city guides go street by street, even building by building. Richard Saul Wurman, who presided over them, was both a skilled graphic designer and an architect, and those passions are evident. I have two of his Paris Access guides. The original, used during my first marriage, took a graphic approach to its cover, showing a single large image of a baguette. The updated Paris, used in my second marriage, surrendered to market tastes. It has the touristy street scene on its cover. Wurman was also the creator of TED and chaired the conferences for their first 18 years.

  xxxv

  Not all travel guides, even from the big brands, pretend to be unauthored. Choose Costa Rica, A Guide to Retirement and Investment, Special Section on Guatemala, is by John Howells. Blue Guide Morocco, Jane Holliday. Next, two never-went-there destinations, Lonely Planet Hawaii, Ned Friary and Glenda Bendur, and The Rough Guide, Bali & Lombok, Lesley Reader and Lucy Ridout. Arizona, a Moon Handbook, is written by Bill Weir. The Northern California Handbook is by Kim Weir, who must be related, since her book is also from Moon Publications. I have never opened it before, and am now seeing that the foreword to Northern California Handbook is by Ursula K. LeGuin; it is an excerpt from Dancing At The Edge of The World, used with the permission of Grove Press. In a foreword to this foreword, Kim Weir writes about the “happy but humbling experience, after finishing a book the size of Northern California Handbook, to discover that someone has already said it all, and in many fewer words.” This could not be true. Northern California Handbook is nearly 800 pages. The Ursula K. LeGuin excerpt is only two pages. Kim Weir also makes use of an epigraph on the blank page in front of both forewords. It is from Herman Melville:

  True places are not found on maps.

  xxxvi

  Here are some other travel and travel-related books. They are going nowhere yet, behind the downstairs desk:

  Frommer’s Italy 1991. Belize Guide, Paul Glassman. Richard Saul Wurman’s Barcelona Access. Lonely Planet East Africa. Lonely Planet Tanzania. 2 to 22 Days in Asia, Roger Rapoport and Burl Willes. Also, 2 to 22 Days in France, Rick Steves and Steve Smith. And Costa Rica, Barbara Ras. Within Tuscany, Mathew Spender. Madrid, Insight Pocket Guides. London Step by Step, Christopher Turner. Fodor’s London 1988. Morocco, Lonely Planet, Damien Simonis and Geoff Crowther. Let’s Go France 1994. Thailand, Eyewitness Travel Guides. Guatemala and Belize, Cadogan. Shanghai, Odyssey, Nancy Johnston. Xian, Odyssey, Simon Hollege, revised by Kevin Bishop. Baedeker’s China. Istanbul, Insight Guides. Thailand, Travelers’ Tales Guides, edited by James O’Reilly. Route of the Mayas, Knopf Guides. Beijing, Cadogan, Peter Neville-Hadley. Fodor’s Pocket Shanghai. Shanghai, Lonely Planet. Thai Phrasebook, Lonely Planet. The Rough Guide to Swahili. Japanese Phrasebook, Lonely Planet. Iberia, James A. Michener. The Greek Islands, Lawrence Durrell. A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece, edited by Richard Stoneman. Diving and Snorkeling Guide to The U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John, Susanne and Stuart Cummings. Buenos Aires, Lonely Planet. Green Alaska, Nancy Lord. Alaska Best Places, edited by Nan Elliott. 501 Must-Visit National Wonders, Bounty Books is a Christmas gift from a neighbor, in 2007. It is a picture book, the author not even mentioned on the cover. My neighbor’s name was Betty Lou Linehan and, in 2007, she was in her nineties. It is her house across the street that has been torn down to make room for the colossus that the Mexicans are still working on. Alaska, Insight Guides, is still storing a letter from June 1999. A lodge manager is writing excitedly, “Thank you for your interest in Chelatna Lake Lodge! We would love for you and your sons to enjoy the Alaskan fishing experience of a lifetime with us!” Someone has neglected to edit out “and your sons” from the standard letter. Other books in this row: Night Train to Turkistan, Stuart Stevens. Access Los Angeles, Richard Saul Wurman. Access New York City, 1994. Access New York City, the 2002 edition. The original New York City has the dominant single bagel on its cover; the update has a street scene, a storefront. Then, Fodor’s Virgin Islands, and in a blur of destinations, Fodor’s Alaska, Cadogan Western Turkey, Fodor’s Greece, Insight Guides Costa Rica, and Frommer’s Arizona 2004.

  The writers and researchers who know Where to Eat, who actually walk down the back streets or report on the price of a bus ticket, are not always downplayed. The Cadogan guides credit the authors. For example, Cadogan’s Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches, Dana Facaros and Michael Paul. The same pair shows up in Paris for Cadogan, and they are Cadogan’s go-to for Southern Spain and in Western Turkey as well. People who know Where to Eat or What to Buy or How To Dress have skills that transfer from place to place. Portugal, Cadogan, credits a single author, David J.J. Evans. Cadogan’s Carl Parkes also works alone. As does Mary Fitzpatrick, though on a Lonely Planet. Still, these are not books that were bought because of who wrote them. Other than James Michener’s Iberia and Lawrence Durrell’s The Greek Islands, only one book on these two shelves of travel books was picked for its author. The World of Venice, published by Faber and Faber in 1960, was written by the gifted James Morris. It became an international best seller. After James Morris transitioned from male to female, the four revisions of The World of Venice were written by Jan.

  xxxvii

  Some of these travel books are as packed as a valise with loose paper. Maybe I thought it would keep Let’s Go France 1994 up to date if I inserted seven pages into it, from Travel+Leisure July 2014, about “The Other Loire Valley.” As if in a future more distant than any of these destinations I will want to see the professionally propped photograph of the room at La Chanceliere, or the view from the dining room at Prieure Notre-Dame D’Orsan. It is time to unpack. I am discarding this magazine article. The fact that it will never be looked at again makes it no different than the thousands of photos taken on actual trips and are now in photo albums in a filing cabinet in the garage, or somewhere on a phone.

  Most of the other travel magazine articles must go, too. The language of these articles is as glossy as their paper. Amberley Castle is “set amid the rolling chalk hills of the South Downs.” Amangiri, in Utah, is “surrounded by some of the most overwhelming scenery in America.” Lydmar Hotel in Sweden is “a handsome butter-yellow 1829-vintage building.” Hotel Le Fontanelle is “set on a hilltop overlooking miles of rolling countryside and houses dating from the 13th century.” All countrysides are rolling, and the landscape is always lush. Headlines are usually too clever by half. The writing has that knowing tone. It invites the reader to be in on the secret. Small Wonder is the headline for an article on never-visited Ecuador. Pedal Pushers is the caption for the photo about families bicycling in Denmark. It’s no myth, the subtitle for the skinny about a favorite Greek island.

  Who knew that El Jacarandal in the Maya Highlands is “a word-of-mouth inn, shared by initiates and their confidants like a secret handshake.” There must be a school where this vocabulary is taught. Graduates will have learned that “the reward is not merely experiencing nature at her most seductive but also savoring it surrounded by the ruins of ancient civilizations.” They will know how to write about The San Miguel Seduction, and to come up with sidebars headed Culinary Cool and Casa Chic.

  Articles about Villa Bordoni, Banjaar Tola and Tambo del Inka may have been saved as much for their place names as for the likelihood that I would ever stay at these “best places to stay.” The only journey I ever made with Fernando Broussalis from Patagonia Adventure was the one back and forth in our printed-out emails, left without explanation between the pages of Bali & Lombok, The Rough Guide. In Let’s Go France, I preserved an article about how “the dollar’s slide” sent the cost of a European vacation soaring, and “the greenback’s rally, when combined with rare deals,” has finally made the trip affordable again. This was timely information once upon a time. I kept it, from a torn page of Conde Nast Traveler, only to find it decades after the economic cycle has turned and turned again.

  Time has blurred the difference between plans that were imaginary and those that actually came to be. In Japan, The Rough Guide, someone has used a yellow marker, highlighting the fact that Hanabi Taikai happens in late July and August, though that never happened. In Thailand, “a few minutes in a tuk tuk is enough.” Yes, especially with Pam and three teenagers, on a trip that was taken. Frommer’s Beijing has dogeared pages and the business card of a Chinese guide, whose first or maybe last name was Ding, though neither his name nor where he took me rings a bell.

  xxxviii

  There are throwaways that, if you throw them away, the memories go with them. A ticket stub from the Xian Beilin Museum left in Odyssey’s Xian, with a note in Chinese and English; the English says “Please send us to the South Gate.” In Access Santa Fe, the rack brochure for Ten Thousand Waves, with its Communal Tub & Sauna and its Giajin Getaway. There are four business cards in Access New York from the same restaurant, Kam Chueh Restaurant at 40 Bowery. An article inserted into Wine Country Access details one of the “iconic itineraries,” with its “5 Perfect Days” of driving from vineyard to vineyard and restaurant to restaurant and boutique hotel to boutique hotel. Some of this may actually have happened, but the recollection of it is woozy. And is there really any such thing as a “perfect day”? Referring to the weather, it is a matter of opinion. If about experiences, there is no possibility of perfection, not for one whole day, and certainly not for five.

  “Sanitary conditions are not up to Western standards.” So warns a “What To Do There” report from Rudi Steele Travel that falls out of Eyewitness Thailand, along with brochures for River Kwai Village and Tony’s Fashion House on Rajparop Road in Bangkok. Things to do include kickboxing, tuk tuk rides, river taxi, celadon pottery factory, Lumpin Park, and Klong Damnoen Saduak floating market. Some of that was in fact done. A celadon serving platter is in my kitchen. The crackling of its sea-green glaze is a beautiful imperfection. The factory itself is a memory of dirt yard and sheds.

  A ticket to St. Pietro In Vaticano Cupola falls out of Frommer’s Italy. What seems to be the train ticket to or from Firenze is inside Florencewalks. Cadogan’s Paris has a business card from Le Rideau de Paris (Depuis 1924).What else do these travel books release? From China, a “To The Hutong” brochure, from Beijing Hutong Tourist Agency. It offers to two choices. The Hutong Tour is 3 hours. Or, there is “To Be A Beijinger,” which says “you can step into the ordinary Beijing resident’s home to enjoy a home-made meal.” This option takes 4.5 hours but requires “ten people at least.” In my second marriage, we were only five.

  Venicewalks is hiding between its pages a xeroxed copy of the Forward to Luigi Barzini’s The Italians. I am taking the time today to explore its few short paragraphs, and discover one sentence in it of special interest. In Barzini’s opinion, it is rare for any Italian author to have anything to say about the Italian national character, and what they do say is not very trustworthy. There are, however, “thousands of books by foreigners.” Of those, he thinks Stendhal is best. And then he adds this sentence: “John Addington Symonds is, in my opinion, the next best, although blinded at times by his stern moral views and his hatred for Popery.” So, here is Symonds again, on a shelf to the right and one up from three volumes of letters.

  xxxix

  Six of the ten shelves behind the desk downstairs are filled with books. Two are half full, the rest of their shelf space taken up by whatnots. The top shelf on the left and the right are bookless – nothing to read or catalog on them, just framed photographs, a floppy sunhat, a stack of small crafted boxes, and a veneered case for cigars. The case was a gift from Pam, who did not take a book with her when she left.

  Chapter Seven
  STARING ME IN THE FACE

  A book of average length has between sixty and ninety thousand words. And what is the average length of time to read a book of average length? The average reader reads 238 words per minute. So, if I really work at it, as an average reader I could read between one and two books of average length a day. The average lifespan of an American male is 76 years. Which means that at the outermost limit, the number of average length books that I could read in the years I have left, on average, reading eight hours a day, five days a week, will be close to the number of books on my shelves. Maybe a little less, but close.

  ii

  Sixty-six more shelves to go. It is obvious, and more obvious the further I go, that there is nothing in these books of interest to me as much as the bits of paper that are inserted in them. The scraps, poems, tickets, postcards. The stories they are storing, those are where the memories are.

  iii

  Ten shelves are built into the wall in front of me, opposite the desk downstairs. Two bookcases, five shelves in each. I might as well face them.

  Start on the bottom row, right:

  Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, Lisa Randall. I went no further in its 500 pages than the length of the title. Sliding this book from its shelf reveals the dried body of a cockroach buried behind it. It is the Texas brown roach, which I call a waterbug, though they are two different animals. Waterbugs are predators; they hunt. Cockroaches are scavengers. The differences between them are hard to see. Both have bodies that are flat and oval. Both are tan or reddish-brown. Both are disgusting.

  Next to Warped Passages, Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated by Chana Block and Stephen Mitchell. A postcard from Talley Dunn Gallery between its pages promotes an opening reception on a Saturday in August, 2015. The artist’s exhibit has its own piquant title, “Monday’s Romance is Tuesday’s Sad Affair.” Next, Lick ‘Em, Stick ‘Em The Lost Art of Poster Stamps, H. Thomas Steele. The forward to this picture book says that its author “was astounded to come upon yet another area of printed ephemera that has remained uncatalogued until now.” His book includes pictures of stamps that are not for postage, known as “Cinderellas.” Next, Phoenix, Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson, David Gordon and Maribeth Anderson. A scrap of paper with a poem by Sarah Arvio is bookmarking one of its pages. The poem’s first lines: The new news is I love you my nudist/the new news is I love you my buddhist. On the book jacket of Phoenix, it says that “the depth of Milton Erickson’s knowledge and the sweep of Milton Erickson’s skill have awed anyone fortunate enough to discover them.”

  Notes to Myself, Hugh Prather, was published by Real People Press in 1970. It is a period piece. The subtitle, My struggle to become a person, also gives it away. Here is a characteristic sentence: “Why do I judge my day by how much I have ‘accomplished’?” And, on the same page, “When I get to where I can enjoy just lying on the rug picking up lint balls I will no longer be too ambitious.” Ambitious people – who else would publish a book — have been advising others to just relax since the beginning of time.

  On the same shelf: Catalog of the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Its list of members begins in 1772, with Joshua Barker. Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald, 700 pages about the Enron debacle. Practical Gods, Carl Dennis, with a silver seal on its cover, for the Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Men & Grief, Carol Staudacher. Men & Grief has the crispiness of the unread book. Its final page offers a list from the publisher of Other New Harbinger Self-Help Titles. There are dozens, from The Taking Charge of Menopause Workbook to Lifetime Weight Control to Flying Without Fear.

  iv

  A Jewish Guide To Death and Dying is more pamphlet than book. There is a souvenir postcard inside from The British Museum, its image a detail from a stone Assyrian bas-relief, “a protective spirit carrying a goat and an ear of corn.” Mourning & Mitzvah, Anne Brener, has been read, written in, underlined, and used to hide related articles. I am finding it on the shelf with the surprise of someone who finds a set of lost keys many years after losing them. The locks have already been changed. In fact, it is so long after, that I no longer know what lock – a side door, a filing cabinet, the chained gate – any of these keys ever went to.

  Mourning & Mitzvah may be the most used book on my shelves. Far more than any travel guide. Mourning & Mitzvah is practically a diary. It is a book I could recommend but could never lend, because it is a workbook, with labeled exercises and blank lines to be filled in over the course of two hundred pages. As I turn its pages, I can see that I filled them in. I wrote responses to Anne Brener’s prompts and questions. Mourning & Mitzvah has not been opened in nearly thirty years, and I have no desire to read these responses. I would rather wonder about Anne Brener, who writes in her introduction that Mourning & Mitzvah started “with my own journey,” after her mother committed suicide in 1971, and, three months later, her only sibling, her nineteen-year-old sister, died in a car crash.

  No doubt I could not recall this conversation without this book:

  “Will you be with me after you have died?
  “If I can be,” she said.
  “How will I know?”
  “You will feel it.”
  “Feel what? “
  “A little bird,” she said, “touching you, there.”

  Dolores touched me on the arm with her finger. This is written in the lined space Anne Brener provides in the chapter “Remembering the Illness and the Death.” It is Exercise 5.1 “Telling the Story.”

  v

  Also on this lower shelf:

  The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by George Lyman Kittredge. This far above average length book comes from the same Encyclopedia Americana set as A Treasury of the Familiar. The covers of its 1,561 pages are the same dark blue. It has all of the plays, and its black and white glamour shots are from ancient productions at the Old Vic. There’s John Gielgud. And Paul Scofield. Lawrence Harvey, Anthony Quayle. Laurence Olivier as King Lear. The women are less well known. Ann Todd is “the ruthless Lady Macbeth.”

  Regions of The Great Heresy, Jerzy Ficowski, is a biography of Bruno Schulz. So, an unread book about a writer I have never read. Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, Harold S. Kushner, must have sounded useful whenever I bought it. It sounds even more so now. Its last chapter is titled “How to Write Yourself a Happy Ending.” The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, John M. Gottman, Ph.D., has a forgotten photo inside from my second marriage. Pam and I are on a graveled path at Lake Austin Spa Resort, both of us in spa robes. Pam must have asked resort staff, or maybe a guest, to snap the picture. It is a bookmark on Chapter 2, “How I Predict Divorce.” Next, All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin. The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron. Break, Blow, Burn, Camille Paglia. College of The Overwhelmed, Richard Kadison, M.D. Coming To Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn. Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway. Carpenter’s Gothic, William Gaddis. And, concluding, No Plot? No Problem!, Chris Baty.

  Of the twenty-two books on this shelf, one book has been read cover to cover, three were read here and there. Eighteen might have been glanced at, then ignored, like the pet turtles that children think they want but soon tire of.

  vi

  On to the shelf directly above Warped Passages:

  A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram. This massive book weighs in at 1,196 pages, not counting the twenty pages of index. The back flap of its jacket has Stephen Wolfram in a photo the size of a postage stamp. Text below the photo says that Wolfram was born in London and educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the age of 20, “having already made lasting contributions to particle physics and cosmology.” In the photo, his egglike, bald forehead, with tufts of barely black hair on either side, rises far above his eyebrows. He is almost smiling.

  The Collected Plays, Lillian Hellman. Pentimento, Lillian Hellman. Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman. There are pencil marks, arrows and asterisks on pages of Scoundrel Time, but I cannot imagine why they were made. The book has a section of photographs, with photos of a very homely Hellman. The pictures of Dashiell Hammett include one of him in handcuffs being led off to jail. How does a boy get the name Dashiell? It sounds posh. It might be from the French surname de Chiel, transforming de ciel and meaning “from the sky,” or “heavenly.”

  Next, Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler. When Cats Reigned Like Kings: On The Trail of the Sacred Cats, Georgie Anne Geyer. Istanbul, Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk. Loyalty Myths, Timothy L. Keiningham. Loyalty Myths is a business book, about customers, not about love or marriage. In An Uncertain World, Robert E. Rubin, has a center section of photographs; a sample caption: “I’m holding a sea-run brown trout in Tierra del Fuego on a fishing trip with President Jimmy Carter.” The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon, a book about depression. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, Caroline Alexander. The inscription on its inside cover is Pam’s. She writes in her shaky handwriting that the trip we took to Alaska “was wonderful,” which it was, she signs “with love,” and dates it August 1999. This helps me recall that both the trip and the sentiment are from before the marriage.

  vii

  I am reading online. A woman writes about her book-hoarding father and the room in her childhood home she called The Book Room, which could not be entered from inside the house, since the books blocked the doorway. She recalls the musty smell in a room that had to be entered through a small window on the outside of the house. And there is no space to read in The Book Room, either; there is hardly space to breathe. The rest of the house was no different. The piano cannot be played because clothing is piled on it. What she calls “worthless knick-knacks” cover pretty much everything.

  viii

  Another true story: There is a former art dealer who finds that he can make an even better living selling the trivial possessions of celebrities. The shoes or sweaty t-shirt that a rock musician wore at an arena concert. The prop some star held onto from a movie set. Anything that has the touch of the famous on it, as long as it could be authenticated. The fame of the life would mysteriously transfer to a pair of pants, a letter, even a harmonica. People will pay, and at high prices. This story calls into question the meaning of value.

  No one will pay for the t-shirt that I wear. My books, and whatever spills out of them, will be worth next to nothing. That is true enough. At the same time, I do not accept a possible corollary, the lower value of my fameless life.

  ix

  There is an age in life where the past seems less understandable than the future. Less predictable even, and less certain, despite having already happened. The unremembered past is fragmented and in shadows.

  The older I am, what lies ahead seems very clear in comparison.

  x

  On the same shelf as The Endurance, fourteen more books:

  Tibet, Life, Myth, and Art, Michael Willis. This coffee table book has color photos of collectibles, treasure after treasure, and a foreword by “His Holiness The Dalai Lama,” who writes that kindness and compassion are the most important treasures a person can collect. Welcome to Your Crisis, Laura Day. This book was published in 2006, so the relevant crisis was not Dolores’s death in 1997, but the divorce from Pam ten years later. I have no memory of having ever opened this book before, but its pages are full of my comments. Next to the sentence “Is something important – pleasure, success, a relationship – missing in your life?” I wrote “no doubt.” This is on page 14, within a longer list of questions meant to help determine “whether there is a crisis in your life” or not. “Crisis is our way of evolving,” says Laura Day, “when we lack the courage to do so on our own volition.” I underlined this sentence. I must have liked its compound of positive and negative, comfort and criticism. Then there are the Laura Day sentences that are more like utterances; their truths are woven into their vocabulary. For example, “Our most satisfying dreams are the ones we create, not the ones we cling to.” So, “creating” is good, “clinging” is bad. The last of my notes appears at the top of page 268.The last page in Welcome to Your Crisis is only two pages later.

  Next, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. Then The Essential Confucius, translated and presented by Thomas Cleary. His introduction is full of inessentials, unknown names, tidbits such as “Guan Zhong died in 642 B.C.” and “King Wen and King Wu are revered.” Then Children of Light, Robert Stone. And Birth of the Cool, Lewis MacAdams. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The Best American Poetry 1998, John Hollander, guest editor. And Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen. Crossroads has a photograph under its cover of Portola Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, taken on a trip my son and I took in November of 2022 to see the redwoods. Ben wanted to do that. He was not able to walk the trails without stopping to rest every thirty or forty feet. He weighed almost 400 pounds. I remember becoming impatient, all the way to the edge of anger. I needed but have never read the advice in The Essential Confucius.

  The Collected Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a fat paperback, over 600 pages. The flyleaf is inscribed “Happy birthday, with all my love – Mom” and is dated 2004. This is a passing of forty years since the gift of In Search of the Miraculous in 1964, for my 13th birthday. It seems like a long way, from thirteen to fifty-three. In 2004, my father is still alive, but he no longer gets a co-billing on the inscription.

  xi

  The stiff pages of Where The Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein, have a never-been-turned quality. Uncommon Therapy, Jay Haley, is one of the books Dolores left behind. Ditto, Families & Family Therapy, Salvador Minuchin, and Clinical Uses of Dreams: Jungian Interpretations and Enactments, James A. Hall, M.D. Clinical Uses of Dreams is inscribed to Dolores, by the author, “with warm regards.”

  That is the end of this shelf. Of twenty-five books, two of them were read for sure – Robert Stone and Joan Didion, and one I am forced to admit having read, Welcome To Your Crisis. Three others were read in part, Freakonomics and maybe two of three Lillian Hellman, though too much time has passed to recall which two. So, twenty of them are books that might as well have been left in an Amazon warehouse.

  xii

  What is the most widely read book in the world? Is it the Bible? The Bible as a right answer is based not on reading, but on the number of copies out in the world. That number according to research by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 2021 is between five and seven billion copies.

  According to Guinness World Records, these are the top ten best-selling books of all time, in ranked order:

  The Bible
  The Quran The Little Red Book: Quotations for Chairman Mao
  Don Quixote
  Selected Articles of Chairman Mao
  A Tale of Two Cities
  The Lord of the Rings
  Scouting for Boys: An Instruction in Good Citizenship
  The Book of Mormon
  The Little Prince

  Six of the ten are in my bookcases. No Book of Mormon, no Scouting for Boys, and no The Lord of the Rings. No Selected Articles of Chairman Mao, either, though his Little Red Book is somewhere down the hallway.

  xiii

  Two down and eight to go, on the two bookcases with five shelves each facing the desk downstairs. On the left, the very top shelf top has no books, just clay figurine my daughter made in elementary school, a straw hat, and woven basket with a band of cowrie shells bought in Zanzibar. The top right shelf is half full of books. Most of those are Dolores’s, they were schoolbooks. She made her notes in their margins. She underlined paragraphs in them. She used the last name of her second husband when she wrote her own name on their inside covers. A heavy broken brass clock, inherited from her mother, is the bookend that keeps these books of hers from tumbling to the left.

  No one will open A History of Experimental Psychology, Edwin G. Boring. Or Learning Theory and Symbolic Processes, O. Hobart Mowrer. Or Theories of Personality, Gardner Lindzey. Or Fundamentals of Social Psychology, Eugene L. Hartley and Ruth E. Hartley. Rorschach’s Test, Samuel J. Beck, is a book about the ten famous ink blots. It sounds intriguing, so I take it down and open it to the middle. It is a muddle. Here is a taste: “Persistent efforts on the part of E could not evoke M in this response. It must be scored F, in spite of the fact that S produced the extraordinary total of 19 M….” Next, Psychotherapy and Growth, W. Robert Beavers, M.D. The author writes “warmest regards” to Dolores on the flysheet. Games Divorced People Play, Dr, Melvyn Berke and Joanne B. Grant, also has a note to Dolores from one of the authors. The note says “I shall return!” — odd, even for a psychologist.

  Only three more books until the brass clock: Principles of Electricity, Leigh Page, PhD. Fighting for Your Jewish Marriage, Joel Crohn. Rebuilding When Your Relationship Ends, Dr. Bruce Fisher and Dr. Robert Alberti. I am convinced I have not read this book and never will, but find my notes are in its margins, and many of its sentences are underlined.

  xiv

  The thirty-two books on the next shelf down:

  Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini, William Weaver. La Boheme, the libretto, published by G. Schirmer, in Italian and in English. Puccini’s Turandot, William Ashbrook and Harold Powers. Between pages 14 and 15, there is a postcard with Brassai’s black and white photograph “Girl Playing Snooker, Montmartre, Paris, c 1932.” Also, a xerox of a letter from Margaret Dibble, the mother of a colleague at work. The colleague was a friend until I let her go in order to cut costs after 2008.The letter has nothing to do with that, it is about opera. Shakespearean Pragmatism, Lars Engle, a friend from college who remains a friend, if that category can include people who are not in touch. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, Nicholas Carr. The Polish Texans, T. Lindsay Baker. The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, Robert Byrne, is a book of quotes and a gift from my son. Each quote is numbered. Did Evelyn Waugh really say, “All this fuss about sleeping together, for physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist”? This is quote number 126.

  xv

  A New Dictionary of Quotations, selected and edited by H.L Mencken, is one of the books brought home from my office after I was done earning a living. Also on this shelf are David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man and Ogilvy On Advertising. Megatrends, John Naisbitt. The McKinsey Mind, Ethan M. Rasiel and Paul N. Freiga. The McKinsey Way, Ethan M. Rasiel. The Money Lenders, Anthony Sampson. eBoys, Randall E. Stross. Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey A. Moore. Then We Set His Hair on Fire, Phil Dusenberry. And The Anatomy of Buzz, Emanuel Rosen. None of these books-from-the-office was read. The Ogilvy books were skimmed. The Dusenberry book celebrates a “hall-of-fame career” in advertising. On its jacket, it praises phrases that “aren’t just slogans, they’re game-changing insights.” Visa: It’s Everywhere You Want To Be. It’s Not TV, It’s HBO. We Bring Good Things To Life. And it says Dusenberry is “a legend.” He is the man who works with Gillette to “distill the insight” that Gillette’s razors and blades are “the best a man can get.”

  There is a puddle of regret soaking into the spines of these books-from-the-office. If not regret, then disbelief, or an unwillingness to believe what is the fact. My forty years of work at an advertising agency was the best this man could get.

  xvi

  On the same shelf, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright, and A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean. The Maclean book has wood engravings by Barry Moser, mostly of fishing flies. A picture postcard inside is from Mount Moran, Grand Teton National Park, bringing back memories from a trip to Jackson Hole. First, of fly fishing, when I tried to learn how. I managed to lodge a barbed fly in Pam’s clothing as we sat together in a small boat on the Snake River with our hired guide. Second, our guide’s response when we told him that we were staying at Amangani, the Aman resort nearby. “We call it Oh My God I,” he said. “Oh my God I can’t believe how much it costs.”

  Next to Norman Maclean, Mark Twain’s A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage, foreword by Roy Blount Jr., illustrations by Peter de Seve. And then Down The Highway – The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes. The Judge is Fury, J.V. Cunningham, a slender book with a plain grey cover, is a first edition, from The Swallow Press, 1947. Printed on its title page:

  These the assizes: here the charge, denial,
  Proof and disproof; the poem is the trial.
  Experience is defendant, and the jury
  Peers of tradition, and the judge is fury.

  There is a receipt inside from Booked Up, Larry McMurtry’s bookstore in Archer City, Texas, July 6, 2002. I had forgotten all about that, the long drive out there on a Saturday morning. Pam is spending the extended July 4th weekend elsewhere. More than likely, on the acres that she owns in Montalba in East Texas. Archer City is west, beyond Wichita Falls. The penciled receipt marks The Judge is Fury at thirty dollars. It also lists My Day for twenty dollars and The Materials for ten dollars. I have no idea what those two books are. It is possible I will find out, when I get to the hallway shelves.

  xvii

  Pens and Needles, David Levine, a book of caricatures selected and introduced by John Updike, has a thank-you note sandwiched between drawings of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, pages 20 and 21. Engraved on a card, this perfect statement: The family of Annette G. Strauss deeply appreciates your kind expression of sympathy. Annette Strauss is a former mayor of Dallas and the mother of one of my former neighbors. The card unfolds. It has a handwritten message inside from my neighbor. It says, Thank you so much for your thoughtful note. It meant a great deal to all of us. Sincerely, Janie. I doubt this is sincere. It is polite, it is well-behaved, and that is not nothing.

  xviii

  Introduction to Judaism, edited by Rabbi Stephen J. Einstein and Lydia Kukoff. Dolores’s name is on the flysheet. Her handwriting is all over the other pages. She must have taken conversion seriously, after her Catholic schooling and then her spell as an Episcopalian, which lasted into her thirties. She made notes on the holidays, and on marriage, conversion and death, which are chapter headings and were also her experiences. She copied Hebrew words, using the alphabet, though transposing the order in some of the phrases, so that some phrases are written left to right, but the Hebrew characters are correct.

  On the rest of this row, from right to left: The Empress of Elsewhere, Theresa Nelson. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Leon Edel. Selected Poems Theodore Roethke, edited by Edward Hirsch. Questions About Angels, Billy Collins. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier. Back to the Sources: Reading The Classic Jewish Texts, edited by Barry W. Holtz. Restoring Relationships: Five Things To Try Before You Say Goodbye, Peter M. Kalellis, Ph.D. The copyright is 2001, so its wisdom was available during my failing second marriage and before my estrangement from my daughter. Its pages have a pristine, unread look. No notes in pen, no underlines or asterisks. The epigraph for Chapter One, “When we pollute our relationships with unloving thoughts, or destroy or abort them with unloving attitudes, we are threatening our emotional survival,” is credited to Marianne Williamson, who ran for President of the United States more than once. It is frightening, this quote.

  xix

  Some books are read at the time when they are most needed. From that time forward, they are like the tune of a popular song first heard as a teenager, their titles or just the sight of them on the shelf can evoke the past. They are conjurors of places and events. But unlike a song that will still be hummed three or even four decades after its time, a song with lyrics that might even be remembered word for word, book memory is weak. It may be more sight than sound, an image on a cover, or nothing more than a name on a spine.

  xx

  There are those who finish what they started, and those who only claim to. I think of myself as someone who finishes what he starts. I stick to the program. I stay on the path. But here on these shelves is evidence to the contrary. The ratio of unfinished books to those I have completed must be a hundred to one. If the books never even started are excluded, the ratio falls and is more in line with my sense of myself, but that ratio must still be ten to one.

  There are two other kinds of people in the world as well. Those who know the truth about themselves, and those who only think they do.

  If I do not complete this project of listing every book, this task, so silly on the surface, and ridiculous even underneath, will offer a truth that is both personal and universal:

  We are rarely who we think we are.

  xxi

  The browns and blues and yellow and auburn of the spines on the next shelf are like a length of Missoni scarf. First in the row, Escape from Childhood, John Holt, followed by Death at an Early Age, Jonathan Kozol. Then Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, Volume One, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett, introduction by Thomas Mann and illustrations by Philip Reisman. Volume One is published by Random House in 1939, as was Volume Two, the book next to it. These could have been Aunt Bertha’s books, but might not have been. I find a receipt inside Volume One that says $5.00, and $5.25 total, for “two vols”, including tax. Bertha died long before the sales tax was five percent.

  Next, A La Mode, Rene Konig, introduction by Tom Wolfe. Between pages 218 and 219, someone left a business card from Williams Western Tailors, 123 W. Exchange, Fort Worth, Texas. On its reverse, the tailor or the salesman wrote 45”.What could 45 inches be? Not waist size. Not the length of my inseam. Not chest size, either, as far as I know.

  I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother…A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, Michel Foucault, is unread. Collected Plays, Bertolt Brecht, Volume 7, edited by Ralph Manheim, 437 more unread pages. Members of the Tribe, Richard Kluger, another 470 unread pages. Busted Scotch, James Kelman. The bookmark on page 19 is a ticket stub from Musee Rodin, 77 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, and comes with a warning: Toucher, c’est salir. On the title page of From A Logical Point of View, Willard Van Orman Quine., my notes are lines copied from the book:

  How much of our science is merely contributed by language and how much is a genuine reflection of reality. And:

  The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea. And:

  Everyone has the best seat. John Cage. This last statement makes the most sense, though it is illogical.

  xxii

  LOGIC Techniques of Formal Reasoning, Donald Kalish and Richard Montague, is a shabby, used textbook. When I was sixteen or seventeen, on 1968 or 1969, I took Logic, the beginning course, with Kalish, and after that the next course in line, with Montague. This was at UCLA, when I was on Advanced Placement. The Kalish classes would meet outside on perfect Spring days and discuss the illogic of the war in Vietnam. Professor Montague leaves a memory that is even crisper. In his classroom a week before the end of the term, a student raised a hand and argued that the fearsome final exam should be untimed. His logic: it makes no difference how long it takes to arrive at an answer, as long as the answer is correct. The request was denied. “Other things being equal,” Professor Montague said, “speed is a virtue.”

  Professor Montague drove a gold Rolls Royce. Also, some years later, someone told me that Professor Montague had been murdered by one of his Chinese houseboys. That was after I had transferred to Harvard and took the logic class that Willard Van Orman Quine taught and understood none of it.

  xxiii

  Next, Herzog, Saul Bellow. To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow. Six or seven handwritten notes are left on the blue flysheet of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow. One of these notes says, “Best line so far in an awful book” and, right above it, this quote from page 153, “Well, everybody has a history, said Sammler.”Then, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie. In his picture on the flap of the book jacket, young Salman Rushdie looks like the twin of the comic Arab terrorist in True Lies, one of the Schwarzenegger movies that play all the time on one television channel or another. I have seen True Lies several times and always enjoy the stereotyping but have never read a page of The Satanic Verses. Johnno, David Malouf, has a printed paragraph in Thai on thin brown paper, bookmarking page 15. Below the Thai script, in English: “Your fortune is so proper and middle, not the worst and best. Don’t think to do a big project, it will make you confused and troubled in the futurity. You have to wait for your hope including your lover.” There is something pure about this awkward translation. It, too, is a true lie.

  On the rest of this shelf:

  The Optimistic Child, Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D. About Fiction, Wright Morris. Rotten Reviews, edited by Bill Henderson. Rapture, Susan Minot. The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Facing Codependence, Pia Mellody. Americans’ Favorite Poems, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves, edited by Rachel S. Mikva. How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman. Ordinary Horror, David Searcy. Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu; this version is the “illustrated journey” with Stephen Mitchell’s translation. A Light in the Prairie, Gerry Cristol. Oh What A Paradise It Seems, John Cheever. The Shipping News, E. Annie Prolux; judging by the dog ear, I only made it to page six. The Meaning of Life, His Holiness The Dalai Lama. Healing Anger, His Holiness The Dalai Lama. The last three pages of this glossy paperback are the glossary, from Abhidarma to Yogachara. The definition of Yogachara: a synonym for Chittamatra.

  Scoring this row: Thirty-two books, two of them read, ten others started or sampled, the rest of them shelved.

  xxiv

  A friend suggests a principle for reorganizing these bookshelves.Any book used as a kind of therapy, any belonging to the “self-help” genre, throw it out. Even if there are sentences underlined, notes in the margins, and asterisks. Especially if there are. So, goodbye to Mourning & Mitzvah. It goes into the trash. And drop Rebuilding into the white cylinder of the wastebasket under my desk as well. The wounds these books were meant to help heal will become holes on my shelves.

  “If you drop dead tomorrow…” my friend says, half smiling, not wishing it, but pointing out that tomorrow, as the song says, is only a day away. So these books must go. She is implying that I would not want anyone to read my raw responses to the sorrows of death or divorce.

  Agreed. I would not want anyone to see my distant helplessness or longing today. But after my death, why not? After my death, I will be unaware, that is the perfect time for it to be seen. Perfect, and also pointless.

  I tell her my handwriting is barely readable anyway. I have trouble myself reading these scribbles. Also, she is making an assumption, that anyone will be interested.

  xxv

  The books across from the desk downstairs are twelve feet away. So, out of arm’s reach. And their titles are too blurry for my nearsighted focus, which stays on the desk, the glowing screen of a MacBook Pro, spotted hands, bent fingers, the qwerty keyboard.

  Pam, wary or wise from the beginning, had returned to the yard and home she owned before our marriage, and went back to her career as a landscape designer. Designing With Water, James Van Sweden, on the second shelf down, bookcase on the left, is a gift from Berit Hudson, who supervised the redoing of my own landscaping. Berit’s work includes the fountain just outside the window nearest the desk downstairs. The fountain’s core-ten steel cladding has turned from blue to a lovelier rust, and its water seranades. Next, Wooden Houses, Judith Miller. This book has a Post-it note from Susan Brook, on a page with pictures of floors. “Silver floor stain,” Susan notes, “I hope you are as pleased with this as I am.” An interior designer, Susan played her part in the redoing of every room, ceiling to floor, after 2007.This house has no silver-stained floors, so I must not have been as pleased with that idea as Susan was. Susan was a Jehovah’s Witness. Coloring a hardwood floor with a silver stain was one of the less strange of her ideas.

  After Henry, Joan Didion, holds a postcard in place on page 253, at the start of a chapter titled “Sentimental Journey.” It is the tarjeta postal that Dolores sent from Mexico to her mother, Monday, August 25, 1975. “Dear Mother,” she writes. “Our room has a balcony on the beautiful Paseo de la Reforma Ave, with its flowers and trees. Saturday night we visited the home of my friend Dr. Luis Feder, and he took us to a local café where we had all kinds of native food. Mark has Montezuma and a fever today.” That I do recall. At the restaurant where Dr. Feder brought us, I ordered the stuffed green bell pepper covered with pink pomegranate sauce and did not recover quickly.

  Systems of Psychotherapy, Donald H. Ford and Hugh B. Urban, has Dolores’s name on its flysheet. Sentences are underlined in red pen throughout its 700 pages. The underlines are perfectly straight. I find a paper ruler, under the inside back cover, advertising Stedman’s Medical Dictionary on one side and, on the other, a chart of Normal Blood Composition, with figures for the normal ranges, from Bilirubin to Uric Acid.

  The dark green spines of the next six books belong to the Psychology: A Study of a Science from Dolores’s school years. Psychology: A Study of a Science, Volume 1, edited by Sigmund Koch. Psychology: A Study of a Science, Volume 2.Psychology: A Study of a Science, Volume 3. Psychology: A Study of a Science, Volume 4. Psychology: A Study of a Science, Volume 5. and Psychology: A Study of a Science, Volume 6.These books on a shelf that will never be read again, if they were ever read a first time, are no different than decoration, they are like props in a play, half recalling, half imagining the past. If there is any reason for keeping them, that reason is psychological.

  Last in this row: The Talmud, A Biography, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, and The Conquest of the Incas, John Hemming.

  xxvi

  Four books on the next shelf have no author. No titles, either, just the names of genres. They are “No-Frills” paperbacks, which are spoofs and novelties, copyrighted by No-Frills Entertainment Associates. This is all the copy on their covers, promoting and smirking at the same time:

  No-Frills Book Mystery. Complete with everything: Detective, telephone, mysterious woman, corpses, money, rain.

  No-Frills Book Romance. Complete with everything: A kiss, a promise, a misunderstanding, another kiss, a happy ending.

  No-Frills Book Western. Complete with everything: Cowboys, horses, lady, blood, dust, guns.

  No-Frills Book Science Fiction: Complete with everything: Aliens, giant ants, space cadets, robots, one plucky girl.

  xxvii

  When I think of Dolores, my thoughts are never of will-we-meet-again. Instead, I think of my approaching opportunity to share an experience with her again. It may not match exactly the five-and-half months dying from cancer, as she did in 1997.No port in my chest, not the same injections of heparin and lorazepam in an upstairs bedroom. It may not be exactly the same. But, one way or another, I will have the experience. And it will be sooner rather than later, given my age.

  In the interim, I could also share the experience of reading the books that she read. Maybe one of the six volumes of Psychology: The History of a Science. But I never saw her turn a page of that. It could be Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, which has the personalized message to her from Gloria Steinem. Or the signed Nadine Strossen book, Defending Pornography. Truth be told, I never saw her reading those books either. Many of Dolores’s books were a kind of merch, like a t-shirt brought home from a concert, as proof that she had been there.

  xxviii

  The amount of information on these shelves is terrifying. The quantity on these thin pages, the lifetimes of study to produce it, the lifetime to read n just a portion of it. I know this is an irrational overreaction. Not unlike my terror at being slid into a tube, even an open-ended one, in order to have a scan this morning. It is required for diagnosis of whatever is going on with my shoulder. I know I am safe in the tube, of course, but that knowledge does not help. I need alprazolam, one in the car on my way to the MRI, and another one when I arrive.

  xxix

  For example, how jaw-dropping it is, to come to terms with what is known about something as ordinary as a sparrow. There is an Audubon guide on a shelf in one of the bookcases across from the desk downstairs. On page 28, I see a drawing of a bird and the names of all its parts. Top to bottom, there is so much to know. There is the crown, the eye-stripe, the nares. Auriculars, upper mandible, lower mandible. Nape, chin, side of neck, throat, mantel, back, breast, scapulars. The bend of its wing, and its shoulder. The wing coverts, the side, the secondaries. It has a rump, flank, abdomen, upper trail coverts, primaries, undertail coverts, tail feathers, and tarsus.

  National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds Eastern Region is the work of John Bull and John Farrand, Jr. Next on the shelf, Birds of North America, Chandler S. Robbins, Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim. Then The Rocky Mountains, also Herbert S. Zim. And then the series of “field guides.” A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, George A. Petrides. A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets, Donald H. Menzel. A Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, John J. Craighead, Frank C. Craighead, Jr., and Ray J. Davis. And A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, Frederick H. Pough.

  xxx

  Both Mockels have signed Mockel’s Desert Flower Notebook, Henry R. Mockel and Beverly Mockel. They signed the flysheet, “Sincerely.” I cannot recall when I bought it, but I know why and can guess where. It was in the window of a bookstore, somewhere on the way to Anza Borrego Desert State Park. It could have been Palm Springs or Twentynine Palms. In the late 1970s, probably, or into the 1980s.On page 55, the illustration of Wild Buckwheat, Eriogonum Wrightii, is stained with the brownish orange remains of a plant. Same on page 131, where I discover a piece of Brittle Bush, smashed like a grey moth between pages. On page 159, the sample of Creosote Bush, Larrea divaricata, collected in the desert, has made a mess. Its brown smudge is spotted with yellow, as if a thing this dry can also splatter. Between pages 190 and 191, my Ocotillo sample has held its own far better. Better by far than Chuparosa on the following page, plucked and smashed on top of a color illustration. The last of these specimens, Arizona Lupine, is between 256 and 257. On page 256, the Mockels assert that “the color of the Arizona Lupine blossom is more delicate than that of other lupines.” This holds true for my specimen. Its delicate blossom seems perfectly preserved, but the purple tips, as slight as hairs, have faded and flattened. Some of the same affect is captured in the title of Walt Whitman’s book, which I keep on the downstairs desk, Specimen Days, his memories preserved, faded, flattened.

  Alongside the Mockels, Roadside Flowers of Texas, Howard S. Irwin. And on the same shelf, The Life of John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe. History of the Sierra Nevada, Francis P. Farquhar. The Anza-Borrego Desert Region, Lowell and Diana Lindsay. Cacti, Shrubs and Trees of Anza-Borrego, Paul R. Johnson. The Complete Indoor Gardener, edited by Michael Wright. The Plant Kingdom, Ian Tribe. Early Uses of California Plants, Edward K. Balls. The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale.

  The Muir book crushes a March 14, 1994 receipt under its back cover, from PJ’s Bake N Broil at 446 So Main, Lone Pine, California. Next, in How To Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest, Jill Nokes provides 566 pages of instruction. Beyond The Wall, Edward Abbey, saves a receipt from Furnace Creek Inn, in Death Valley. Check-in, March 15, 1994, it says. Also inside, a folded page with map and descriptions of twenty different day hikes in Death Valley. Number two is Desolation Canyon. Thirteen is Coffin Peak, which is not up Coffin Peak, but only a cross-country hike to a view of it.

  What is it all about, all those unread books about plants? Pam, a landscape designer, could point out every plant by name. So, maybe that was it. It was a competition.

  xxxi

  Last three on this same shelf: Lost In America, Isaac Bashevis Singer, with paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. Published by the World Syndicate Publishing Company, this copy is very old. Its pages are the color that cream-colored paper becomes over time. Not brown, but a brown with orange in it, the brown of age. On the flysheet, “Kellie Babington” has written her name. Someone I knew? I think it might be, but as I try to picture her, all that rises into that borderless space of memory is the girl from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Not Phoebe Cates, but the other girl, the one Phoebe Cates shows how to give a blowjob while they are sitting together in the high school cafeteria, using a carrot to demonstrate. Alongside Gulliver’s Travels, another old book, Heidi, Johanna Spyri, translated by Louise Brooks and illustrated by Roberta MacDonald. Its binding is separating, the pages are discolored and spotted. This is a book from childhood, it might have been my sister’s. The phone number in the upper corner on the title page looks like her writing. The OR in OR-O4891 is for Orchard. There is no need any longer for this phone number to be written down, not because it no longer exists, or because I have not dialed it in fifty years, but because I have not forgotten it.

  My sister calls me in the evening. I ask her if she remembers how our parents used to fuss at us about long distance calls and toll charges. I tell her about Heidi and ask her if she can remember our old phone number. She can, without effort. “What are you doing every day?” she asks.

  “I don’t know what I am doing,” I tell her. “I hope I have enough years left to figure out what I am doing.” That is true enough. In the meantime, there are more shelves to go through.

  xxxii

  Next shelf, another book with “Love Mom & Dad” under a happy birthday inscription, this one from November 1977. It is on the flysheet of The Spanish West, by the Editors of Time-Life Books. Then, Spanish Archives of New Mexico 1621-1821. There are circles and check marks throughout its 180 pages, which are nothing more than a list of archival documents on microfilm, indexed in order of their dates. The first entry, Roll 1, Frame 1, Twitchell Number 1, Jan. 9 1621, Royal Audiencia, Mexico, are instructions to Fray Esteban de Perea concerning the conversion of the New Mexico Indians. Next, Old Spanish Missions, Guidelines for a Texas Mission, transcript and translation by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger O.F.M. And then Fr. Jose Rafael Oliva’s Views concerning the Problem of the Temporalities in 1788, translation by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger O.F.M. And Journal of a Texas Missionary 1767-1802, the Diario Historico of Fr. Cosme Lozano Narvais, another translation by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger O.F.M. And then Origins of New Mexico Families in the Spanish Colonial Period, Fray Angelico Chavez, illustrations by Jose Cisneros. Fray Angelico dedicates his work “To My True Father Saint Francis of Assisi.” He brings a mixture of malice and self-pity into his dedication: “Failing to find a Maecenas or a Lord Chesterfield to finance this venture,” he writes, “even among those who ought to care, I dedicate it to thee, so lacking in funds, like myself.”

  xxxiii

  The television miniseries Roots had appeared in January, 1977, when I was still in my first job after college, at the local PBS station in Dallas. In April, I had an idea. Why not a multi-generational drama for public television about a different minority. Black had been done. I would do brown. What if there were family that might be traced from Spain to Mexico to New Mexico, and from there to San Antonio, and even to California. I came up with one named Chavez, half fictional but plausible, since the name Chavez turns up everywhere, from a statue in Santa Fe to a ravine in Los Angeles. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded the research and scriptwriting, including the purchase of related books. All those purchases are on the shelves. I spent nine months researching in archives, working with scholars, and writing a script and five treatments for the rest of the series. But I am not Hispanic, so production funding was rejected by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Or maybe the script was just not very good.

  xxxiv

  Other books on the same shelf: The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton. It was read but has left no trace of its plot or the name of its heroine. What I do recall is the name of Edith Wharton’s former estate in Massachusetts, because I took a girlfriend through the Berkshires, and we stopped to tour the Wharton home, in Lenox, and I bought a wrapped bar of soap from the gift shop. This soap souvenir is still on a ledge above my bathtub. It says The Mount on its ornate packaging, which is as patterned as a French wallpaper. After Wharton, September 1, 1939, Ian Sansom. Then Goodbye to a River, John Graves, a dull book that is much admired. Then Snobbery, The American Version, Joseph Epstein. Its Chapter 17 is titled “Fags and Yids.” Next, Walking the Black Cat, Charles Simic. And then a chapbook, This Is Where I Find You, Tom Geddi.

  Three photos of my daughter and her high school boyfriend are wedged between Charles Simic and Tom Geddie. One was taken at the creek behind my house, one at the front door, and one at the high school dance they are going to. These are photos of teenagers, snaps, from 2002 or around then, and somehow they came to be hidden between two unread books on an untouched shelf. Eden and this boy married ten years further on. He was her second marriage, and she and he seemed destined for each other. But the boy had physical problems and, eventually, a drinking problem, and he killed himself in the summer of 2022. They were arguing together in their apartment when it happened. He shot himself in the head. Eden told him she was going to leave him if he did not stop his drinking. They argued, she left the room, and heard the shot a minute later. Or so I was told, second hand, because we have no contact with each other.

  xxxv

  A Brief Illustrated Guide To Understanding Islam, I.A. Ibrahim, is next in line. Then The Search for Modern China, Jonathan D. Spence, 718 pages of text and another 138 of appendices. My bookmark is on page 11. Then, This Time, New and Selected Poems, Gerald Stern. The Pueblo Revolt, David Roberts. The Afterlife, Penelope Fitzgerald. Ten Little New Yorkers, Kinky Friedman. Scenic Driving Texas, Laurence Parent. Jesus and Yahweh The Names Divine, Harold Bloom. The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren. All Consuming Images, Stuart Ewen. Bird Checklist Tanzania & Kenya, CC Africa, more pamphlet than book, as is Grumeti River Camp, Serengeti – Tanzania, also from CC Africa. Next, Sydney Laurence, Painter of the North, Kesler E. Woodward. And then, An Image of Monhegan, John Kleinhans.

  An Image of Monhegan is a book of platinum prints, and of memories of a trip to the island off the coast of Maine, and of Pam not yet unhappily married. The photographer has signed the title page. His black and white photos of rocks and empty skies have a kind of cool and prophetic beauty. Next, In Denali, Kim Heacox, another book of photographs, this time in color, and also a souvenir, from a trip to Alaska with Pam and our three combined teenagers. We sent them home after a week, so we could take a seaplane to a remote fishing lodge and be by our besotted selves for another few days.

  HIP Hotels, Herbert Yoma, is a book about nobody’s real life, with hundreds of color photographs of hotels in France, food on plates, beds, windows, gardens and pools. It offers the respite of nothing to remember. Interpretations of Life, Will and Ariel Durant, is another birthday gift from my parents. This one was for my nineteenth, in 1970.As usual, there is a handwritten message from my mother inside. This time, on the inside cover. “If the man you are becoming lives up to the potential of the boy you have been,” she writes, “the world will be a better place.”

  I never read the Durant book. A birthday card that came with it is still in its envelope, preserved between pages 122 and 123. Its commercial Happy Birthday to Our Son is from a rack in a drugstore. There is a message, too, opposite the rhyme inside. “This is the first time the family hasn’t been together for your birthday,” my mother begins. “Nevertheless, you are in our thoughts and in our hearts always.” My mother died at 96 in 2018.It would never have occurred to me when I was nineteen, but it is obvious now that, one way or another, a mother is the irreplaceable woman in our lives.

  xxxvi

  The Polish Boxer is the book I am rereading, so it is no longer shelved. At the moment, it stays on the downstairs desk. In The Polish Boxer, the narrator, who may be Eduardo Halfon, declares, “When I write, or when I want to understand anything, which is almost the same thing, I always start from images.” Unlike this narrator, I never start with images when I am looking for understanding. But if I wanted an image, it would be of bookshelves and the multicolored spines of books.

  xxxvii

  Sunny, all day today. I am saving the 56 hallway shelves for another day. I am resisting beginning, in part because I do not want to finish. It is warm outside, not nearly summer yet, but warm. The kitchen door is left open to a retractable screen door. A bird, one of the familiars of the yard, is repeating the same notes. Two squirrels chase each other around a tree trunk. Down they go. The path of their descent is as inevitable as a corkscrew, as are all our paths.

  xxxviii

  Last shelf, opposite the desk downstairs: The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer. Lost & Found, Kathryn Schultz. Then stacks of book-like things. Magazines with hard covers, catalogs of exhibits. Eros, Summer, 1962, Volume One, Number Two, Ralph Ginzburg Editor and Publisher, Art Director: Herb Lubalin. Eros, Winter, 1962, Volume One, Number Four, with its “Black and White in Color” photo sequence of a naked white woman and naked black man, and an editorial from Allen Ginsburg about government and sex. These were Dolores’s, from her graduate school days. A Create magazine, Fall 2005. A perfect-bound 2005 Santa Fe Opera Festival Season. A Neiman-Marcus 1985 Christmas Book. A flat, “easy-to-assemble” paper model of The Executioner, still in its shrink wrap, from the gift shop in The Tower of London. Or, as it says on the package, from Her Majesty’s Palace and Fortress The Tower of London. Then Dallas Museum of Art, Selected Works, Dr. Anne R. Bromberg. Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong, Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, is a colorful book from a museum gift shop. So is Palace and Mosque, Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tim Stanley. The exhibit traveled in 2005 to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where it was visited and forgotten.

  More books about gardens and gardening. The Glory of Gardens, edited by Scott J. Tilden, and The Flower Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, and Gardens by Design, Noel Kingsbury. The Butchart Gardens is a souvenir booklet, from a trip in 1988. Dolores and I went by ourselves, but who stayed with Ben and Eden, who were four and three then? Maybe Sandra Killough, one of Dolores’s patients, who babysat for us, in violation of standards of practice. I am throwing out the garden enthusiast magazines. All are from 2008, part of a redoing of the gardens that Pam left behind, part of the greater redoing. There is no end to the number of niches in publishing. Magazines such as Hardscaping were given to me by Berit from Roundtree Landscaping, “for ideas”, as was Fine Gardening (“31 Shrubs for Great Fall Color!”), and Garden, Deck & Landscape.

  Home, Kim Johnson Gross, is part of the “Chic Simple” series. It says in its introduction that it is “a primer for living well but sensibly in the 1990s.”Home is mostly a picture book, but its pages are sprinkled with quotes as well. This one, attributed to Australian aborigines, is on the first blank page: “The more you know, the less you need.”

  Next, Monet’s Passion – Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter’s Gardens, Elizabeth Murray. A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders. W. B. Yeats The Last Romantic, edited and with an introduction by Peter Porter. Then Yeats, A Selection of Poems, a beautiful little book. It is a vanity publication that Heritage Press produced in order to build relationships with commercial graphic designers. It is designed by Joe Duffy of Duffy Design, which was part of Fallon McElligott – names that meant something in that world, the way Garden, Deck & Landscape might in others. End of the shelf, bookcase done. A last look at Monet’s Passion, which I thought was a gift from Pam. A glance inside the cover for an inscription, but there is no message. Not on the flysheet, not on the coated titled page.

  xxxix

  Most of the time there are no final totals, only subtotals and partial measurements, because there is always something more. Isn’t there at least one finality? I will take my last breath, surely that will be final. If so, there is a countable total to the number of breaths I am allotted. But even of this no one is sure. If there is no disembodied next life, could there not be reincarnation? The soul coming back and inhabiting another breathing body? One of the unshelved books – it is on the desk downstairs — is I Live Again, the autobiography of Mother Alexandra, former Princess Ileana of Romania. Despite its title, this book has nothing to do with reincarnation. It refers to her second career as the foundress of a monastery.

  Of the 208 books on the ten shelves facing the downstairs desk, only twenty books were read cover to cover. Probably the most eye-opening is Conquest of the Incas, John Hemming’s account of a gang of Spaniards that overthrew a civilization. And the book with the largest gap between the promise of its title and what it delivers? That prize may go to His Holiness The Dalai Lama, for The Meaning of Life.

  Chapter Eight
  DOWN THE HALLWAY

  My father, who was diagnosed with colon cancer, died 14 years ago. My first wife died of colon cancer 27 years ago. So, cancer is one of my familiars. I know its particulars. There is the visit to a general practitioner to discuss certain pains, a complaint or a symptom. Then, medical imaging. And then to the oncologist – to the first one, and then to a second, in order to hear the same news twice. Surgery, then. And if it is Stage 4, not all the cancer can be cleared, the spread is too far. Treatment next. And treatment, were it to happen, may or may not increase your chances to live another five years. To be, as one of these doctors put it, as Dolores and I listened in a recovery room after her initial surgery, “at the far end of the bell curve.” In Dolores’s case, another five months.

  There is time for a quote, this one from Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald, a book that is somewhere down the hallway. Sebald writes “how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself.”

  ii

  The cedar waxwings that feed on berries from the yaupon hollies just outside a bedroom window do not know when enough is enough. They fly together to the glossy leaves of the trees. They eat more than their fill. Like the drunk at a bar, they are the accident waiting to happen. And it does happen. I hear a thump. One of the birds has flown into a windowpane on the south side of the house. Either it is stunned or it has broken its neck. It lies on the wooden deck. Perfectly still, as if nothing were wrong, as if it were only sleeping. It looks exactly like the description of Bombycilla cedrorum on page 645 of the Field Guide To North American Birds I have just bumped into on the bookcase shelf. In its beauty, it belongs in a still life, in one of those paintings reproduced on the pages of the textured book from the Barnes Foundation on my desk upstairs. Not the Paul Cezanne Still Life (Nature Morte), which is on page 153 in the Barnes book. That painting is mostly fruit, fabrics, a bowl, and a water pitcher that is itself decorated with unliving flowers. The dead bird on my deck, smaller than a robin, is sleek, crested, and brown. It is just as described, with its black mask, the bright yellow tips on its tail feathers, and the red tips on its secondary wing feathers. Those are the tips that the experts call “wax-like,” though I do not see why. According to the Field Guide, this bird is always seen in flocks, but it is not so in death, as it lies on the wooden deck. In death this cedar waxwing has been abandoned by all the living of its kind. And for that, I feel some kinship with it. The flock has moved on. I take a broom and a blue dustpan from the kitchen closet and gather up the bird. Even as the broom straws hit it, this cedar waxwing maintains its perfect shape. Not a feather out of place, as it is rises on its way to a trash can by the garage.

  iii

  There are seven bookcases from the head of the hallway to its foot near a bedroom door. These bookcases are built in, recessed along one side of the hallway. Each has eight shelves. On the top shelf, first bookcase, there are 22 titles:

  At the Top of the Muletrack, Carola Matthews. A Promise to Ourselves,  Alec Baldwin. A History of English Prose Rhythm, George Saintsbury. Selected Poems 1942-2006, Donald Hall. Orpheus Last, Janette Turner Hospital. Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves. A Shooting Star, Wallace Stegner. Matters of Fact and of Fiction, Gore Vidal. August 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Bullfinch’s Mythology. Lincoln, The Biography of A Writer, Fred Kalman. Four Complete Novels, Mark Twain. Then, the banana yellow Twains, twelve of them. They fill out the rest of this shelf. There is Pudd “N Head Wilson, The American Claimant, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Mysterious Stranger, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, The Gilded Age, A Tramp Abroad, and What Is Man? At some point in school, I was required to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But otherwise not a single book on this shelf has been read. A sticker on the inside of Four Complete Novels explains why it is here. It says Duke University Talent Identification Program presents this book in recognition of outstanding performance in the Talent Search for Mathematically and Verbally Gifted Seventh Graders. Eden took a test and won Four Complete Novels as a prize. Back then, she was a shooting star.

  iv

  At the Top of the Muletrack is one of those books by someone who spends three summers on a Greek island and includes the inset of black and white photographs, with captions such as “Costa in his garden” or “Langatha, the view from the house.”

  The Wallace Stegner book reminds me of my friend Peter, who was a Stegner Fellow but spent his scholarship year in Palo Alto watching Perry Mason reruns in his apartment. Then he returned east and found work as a janitor. After two years of that, Peter tested into the Foreign Service. Then a career, early retirement, and an early death at 54 of pancreatic cancer. The book is a first edition.

  The Solzhenitsyn uses a strip of Kodak film for a bookmark. Its ten frames are the same image, a color picture of my sister holding a baby against her left shoulder. Patti’s children are all in their forties now. The baby is her eldest, David, who was diagnosed with tongue cancer in his twenties. Most of his tongue was removed. Since then, he has not eaten solid food.

  The Robert Graves book, Goodbye To All That, is the autobiography of a thirty-three-year-old. He dared to tell the truth… according to the book jacket.

  v

  Ben lives by himself in his condominium on Church Street. He has his food delivered. They are Factor meals, which is a service that a nutritionist recommended, in order to help him count calories and, in theory, lose weight. The meals are delivered a week at a time. It may be twenty-one meals a week, it may only be eighteen. They arrive on his doorstep in a large box, with eighteen or twenty-one ready-to-heat packages inside. There is a lot of padding and insulation to throw away, which is lets pile up, because it is a longer walk to the dumpster than he is willing to make.

  He has not worked in nineteen months. To the degree that he has a plan, he does not plan to go back to work. I write him a check every three months that he deposits into his bank account, and from that he pays his mortgage, his homeowner’s association fee, and insurances, utilities, gasoline for his car, and for the Factor meals.

  vi

  An orange jacket covers Good-bye To All That, the autobiography by Robert Graves from Blue Ribbon Books. Half of its cover is taken up by a portrait of the author. It shows his face, a shadowed neck, some bare shoulders and chest; so, the author shirtless, the photograph cropped. It is a simple black and white but has the mysterious richness of a painting. I look at it, trying to tell which it is. And Robert Graves stares back. This same picture is used as the frontispiece as well. Except it is not the same. A shadow on the neck is to the right, not to the left, and the dark hair is descending on his forehead to the right, not to the left. So, it is a photograph.

  vi

  Second shelf from the top, first bookshelf in the hallway: AIDS, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. A Book of Luminous Things, Czeslaw Milosz. The Journals of John Cheever. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, Ernest Hemingway. Beloved, Toni Morrison. The Sonnets of Shakespeare, Heritage Press. Night/Dawn/Day, Elie Wiesel. My Losing Season, Pat Conroy. Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D. The Art of Happiness, His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutter, M.D. The Joy of Living and Dying in Peace, His Holiness The Dalai Lama. A Simple Path, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Montezuma, C.A. Burland. Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes. Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein. Digging to America, Anne Tyler. Collected Poems, Thom Gunn. Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck and E.F. Ricketts. Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 25th Anniversary Report. Dubliners An Illustrated Edition, James Joyce. Thoreau, The Library of America. The Oxford Book of English Verse, Christopher Ricks. Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace. India: A Million Mutinies Now, V.S. Naipaul. Selected Poems, Seamus Heaney. St. Peter’s Day, Anton Chekhov. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow.

  Two of these twenty-seven were read to their very last page. Six others were sampled. Not counting Mark Twain, His Holiness The Dalai Lama is the author with the largest number of unread titles on my shelves.

  vii

  Third shelf down,. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Short Stories of De Maupassant. Dare to Forgive, Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass. Fire and Blood, T. R. Fehrenbach. The Sultans, Noel Barber. The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. Classical Scientific Papers – Chemistry, arranged and introduced by David M. Knight. Bay of Souls, Robert Stone. Writings 1902-1910, William James, The Library of America. The Art of Travel, Alain de Boton. A Johnson Reader, E. L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne. Cultural Amnesia, Clive James. Turtle Moon, Alice Hoffman. Illumination Night, Alice Hoffman. Local Girls, Alice Hoffman. Statutes of Limitations, Monroe Engel. Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy. Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire, Alan Dundes. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll, Chancellor Press. Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon. Nine Horses, Billy Collins. Then The Rain in Portugal, The Trouble with Poetry, and Sailing Alone Around the World, Billy Collins. Box of Matches, Nicolson Baker. My Day, Jean Rhys. The Poets Corner, Max Beerbohm. Animi Figura, J.A. Symonds. Hopkins, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. Late Wife, Claudia Emerson. City, Uncity, Gerald Huckaby and Corita Kent. The Art of Friendship, Roger Horchow and Sally Horchow. The Courage the Heart Desires, Kathleen Fischer. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro. And On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz, Arthur Kurzweil.

  Sliding it from its place, I look at Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, wondering if the book jacket will have a photo of Alice Munro, which it does. Here she is, on a porch and dressed in velour. Poor Alice, she is now the subject of an unflattering tell-all written by her daughter; but then, sooner or later, every parent is guilty. And what would Kerouac think of On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz, the last book on this shelf?

  In any group of any kind, there are oddities. There will be a fact that has no forerunner, a reality that arises without explanation. On this shelf, there are the three Alice Hoffman novels – why three, since not one of them has been read? They may be here only because I like the name Alice. Alice Hoffman, Alice Munro, Alice Kramden, Ralph’s wife on The Honeymooners. And these three unread Alice Hoffman novels are not as odd or misplaced on this shelf as the appearance of another J.A. Symonds. His Animi Figura catches me by surprise. J.A. Symonds has already had his say, and more, in the three volumes of The Letters of John Addington Symonds behind the downstairs desk. Animi Figura, where did you come from? And what are you?

  viii

  Animi Figura is a slight, dark grey book, its dark green grey is almost black. The thin red rectangle near the edges on Its cover is an incised border. Its title is in gold and sinks into the cover, like a hidden treasure. As for the contents, nothing but unreadable sonnets, with titles like Mystery of Mysteries and On The Sacro Monte. The answer to the mystery of why Animi Figura is on my shelf is found inside. It is one of the gifts from Bill Gilliland, who also provided the note on the 3 x 5 card under its cover. “I left the price in,” Bill writes, “not to show my generosity but Larry’s pricing.” He means Larry McMurtry. On the reverse of the card, this printed message: “Books to be signed by Mr. McMurtry should be sent with return postage and mailing envelope to 249 N. Brand Blvd., #582, Glendale, California 91203.” So, Animi Figura was stock from the days when Bill and Larry McMurtry co-owned a bookstore together. The message on the back of card continues and concludes: “Mr. McMurtry will not sign galley proofs, screenplays, posters, magazine appearances, photographs, reviews, interviews, or books or articles written about him.” It is both a warning and a rebuke.

  I see the “50” penciled in the upper corner of the page before the title page, the price of Bill’s Animi Figura by John Addington Symonds, published in 1882 by Smith, Elder & Co., 15, Waterloo Place, London. And I wonder what happened to the rest of Bill’s books after his death. They were probably scattered, not unlike his cremains.

  ix

  What am I reading these days? I am not reading the Saul Bellow novels on a shelf across from the desk downstairs, not Herzog, its sideways title appearing in blue on the silver lozenge on its blue spine, not Mr. Sammler’s Planet, its title in blue type on its white jacket. Instead, I am scrolling down the book review in my inbox this morning. It is open on the screen, its golden page as illuminated as a medieval manuscript. It is a review of a biography of Saul Bellow. In this review, Bellow is quoted saying that he has the “infinite excitement…of having appeared on this earth.” He thinks that simply being alive is “delicious, ravishing.” And that “nothing happens that is not of deepest meaning – a green plush sofa falling apart, or sawdust coming out of the sofa, or the carpet it fell on….” It is a good attitude to have, however impossible it may seem to have it. How would Robert Burton with his hundreds of pages on melancholy have responded to Saul Bellow?I think he would have agreed. He could not have sustained his hundreds of pages otherwise.

  x

  The Center for Health Statistics Vital Events Data Management Team of the Texas Department of State Health Services aggregates birth and death data for any specific year or for a range of years. They will make it available, upon request. It is not an easy process though, requesting and receiving this data. I want to verify the date of death of my former son-in-law, Eden’s husband Keith, who died, as far as I know, in June or July, 2022, either in Denton, Texas, or in Fort Worth. My understanding is that a $10 charge will be required in order to receive the index of deaths for 2022. I can see this requirement on the state’s website. There is a request form that can be sent back electronically, but there is no option for online payment. So, after attaching the completed form, I ask for clarification in an email, “If there is a $10 charge to receive this index, please let me know how to send it.”

  That email was sent in December, 2023, more than a year after the death, the presumed death, and It provokes the first in a series of responses and replies to responses, back and forth, eighteen in total, seven of them thanking me for my emails and promising replies within three to five business days.

  xi

  On the fourth shelf down, travel souvenirs, including two from Buenos Aires. A round tin with Eva Peron’s face on its lid contains a candle, and a lapel pin with the same, tinier face of Eva Peron. Also, a carved wooden bus, folk art that could have come from Mexico, but came from the Horchow store. Dolores bought it in the 1970s. There are three silver dreidels from a souk in Jerusalem, from 1998.And a pile of tickets is spread like an opened fan. There are also two books, coffee table size, below a stack of papers, letters, theater programs, and three perfect-bound Art in America magazines from the early 1970s.Dolores subscribed. The most meaningful image in these three magazines is the image she wanted of herself.

  A Day In the Life of Lon Tinkle, edited by Robert S. Sparkman, M.D., is published by The Friends of the Dallas Public Library, in an edition limited to 500 copies, “of which this is copy number 259.” This book was distributed as a gift to board members. It must have been a leftover, because I received it years after it was produced. It is a crafted production. Its photographs are tipped onto its textured and oversized pages. Dr. Sparkman wrote the foreword and the afterword and also snapped the photos at a Friends’ tribute to Lon Tinkle that was held at Margaret McDermott’s ranch in 1977.By coincidence, Dr. Sparkman and his wife Willie were my elderly next-door neighbors in the house in Greenway Parks where Dolores and I lived from 1987 until her death in 1997. I remember them. He was a martinet; he walked as though he wore a back brace. Dr. Sparkman was into his seventies when I knew him; so, my age now. Willie liked to wear a passion flower in her hair. Passiflora, beautiful and complicated, grew on the vines on her side of the wooden fence that our homes shared. Once, when Eden was eight or nine, she went down the Sparkman’s driveway and picked one of the blooms on Willie’s side. Willie came over to rebuke us all.

  I have never looked at A Day In the Life of Lon Tinkle before. In the hallway, I am inspecting the tipped-on pictures of Stanley Marcus and Jacques Barzun that Dr. Sparkman took at a tribute event. The typography and book design are by Bill Chiles, Carl Hertzog handled the printing. All of it, including the people pictured, is from a time when fonts came from typographers, not from Adobe, and design was done with handskills, using exacto knives, not software and mouse clicks.

  A second book on this shelf is a slipcased picture book of photographs of American landscapes. Like the Lon Tinkle tribute, it is a vanity publication, though it has less to be vain about. The book and its slipcase were produced for a mortgage banker operating “from sea to shining sea, with offices in thirty-eight of the fifty states,” as it announces in the gassy one-page introduction. The banker, Lomas & Nettleton, collapsed in the late 1980s, along with so many other bloated banking and real estate businesses in Texas. Holding companies, most of them. This untitled book has a 1986 copyright; so, it came out just before the fall. I have the copy because Lomas & Nettleton was a client.

  xii

  Bertha’s twenty volumes of The World’s Greatest Books take up most of the fifth shelf in the first of the hallway bookcases. Those twenty are held upright by seven oversized books lying on their sides in the remaining space.

  Austin, A.C. Greene, a slender history of the city, written in 1981, is dedicated to American National Bank, “Mercantile Texas Corporation’s flagship in Austin.” Copyright is shared by Mercantile Texas, another business that disappeared in the later eighties. Fernand Leger is the catalog for a traveling exhibit that reached Dallas in 1982. The Book of Houses, Geoffrey Hindley, yet another picture book. Inside Masks of Black Africa, Ladislas Segy, I discover a folded flyer from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Realm of Texas. It proclaims that the Knights will march in Houston on April 2, 1983, “to show contempt and total disgust for the problem of homosexuality in America.” Its text goes on like that for a page or two. “These vile faggots do not believe in family in the Christian way.” They have a disease that “a bullet in the head will cure.” It is the era of the AIDS epidemic. The Knights want their readers to know that “it won’t be a cake walk, if the queers think they are going to turn Houston into San Francisco.”Why do I have this? Why did I keep it? And what is it doing in a book about African masks? I have no idea.

  Dolores and I were in TIjuana in 1975 or 1976.We bought a Huichol “yarn painting” there, for $139. The yarn, pressed on wax, was mounted on a sheet of plywood five feet across. It is a vibrant work – greens, blacks, yellows, odd geometries, and forms like space aliens, with antennae or horns, and elongated arms, and animal heads. It is long gone, but the glossy book underneath Masks of Black Africa is Art of the Huichol Indians, introduced and edited by Kathleen Berrin. Underneath the Huichol art, Birds of North America, A Personal Selection, Eliot Porter. And at the bottom of the stack, Poetry Speaks, edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby. According to the copy on the jacket of Poetry Speaks, Walt Whitman himself is speaking on one of three CDs that are included. So is Robert Frost. So is Edna St. Vincent Millay. This pregnant hardback has poems, biographical introductions, and essays by famous poets about even more famous poets. There is a card inside from Pam, in the shape of a cut out heart. The CDs with recordings of 150 poems on them are still in their sealed packaging. An insert has a list of the voices. On Disc One, Alfred Lord Tennyson is reading from The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Robert Browning is reading How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. Is that even possible?  My car is old enough to still have the single disc CD player built into its dashboard. I may soon be listening to Philip Larkin reading The Old Fools.

  xiii

  Frank Clements built these hallway bookshelves. He is the craftsman who also made the heavy front door of the house, which is Honduran mahogany, from a tree grown on a plantation. Using a hand tool, he worked a texture into the wood, making the stained surface of the door beautifully bumpy. Frank built the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, too, the shelves, and the drawers and the hanging spaces. On his own time, he makes musical instruments – lutes, guitars – out of rosewood or maple and, sometimes, Hawaiian koa. These bookshelves are a different kind of instrument.

  xiv

  The sixth shelf from the top is the third from the bottom; so, low down. The boards of the bleached hardwood floor in the hallway are nice enough to look down at, but looking closely at the spines of books means feeling it in the knees.

  All paperbacks, snugly shelved:

  White Buildings, Hart Crane, introduction by Allen Tate. The Bridge, Hart Crane, commentary by Waldo Frank. The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932, edited by Brom Weber. Words for the Wind, Theodore Roethke. Willie Boy, A Desert Manhunt, Harry Lawton. Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison. Shorter Novels: Eighteenth Century, Everyman’s Library. Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer. The Vestal Virgin Room, C.W. Smith. The Piano Players, Anthony Burgess. The Obituary Writer, Porter Shreve. The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler. The Fermata, Nicholson Baker. The Best American Poetry 1996, edited by Adrienne Rich. The Old Patagonian Express, Paul Theroux. Darkness Visible, William Styron. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry. Timeless Healing, Herbert Benson, M.D. The Ice Age, Margaret Drabble. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy. Coming Into the Country, John McPhee. Giving Good Weight, John McPhee. La Place de la Concorde Suisse, John McPhee. The John McPhee Reader. The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman. The Unwritten Philosophy, F. M. Cornford. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Ernst Cassirer. The Blue and Brown Books, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Language Truth and Logic, A.J. Ayer. Principium Sapientiae, F.M. Cornford. The High Window, Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler. Playback, Raymond Chandler. Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg. The Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, Suzette Haden Elgin. A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart Tolle. Choice & Chance, An Introduction to Inductive Logic, Brian Skyrms. Methods of Logic, Willard Van Orman Quine. Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz. It was like a roll call of years, mostly 1969 to 1974, college, and then a bit of time travel, but no more than six or seven years further.

  Having gotten this done, and still on my knees, why not the next shelf down? All but one of these are paperbacks, too:

  The Breakthrough Imperative, Mark Gottfredson and Steve Schaubert. Trading for a Living, Dr. Alexander Elder. Winning on the Stock Market, Brian S. Millard. Rule Breakers, Rule Makers, David and Tom Gardner. No Man’s Land, Doug Tatum. The Only Three Questions That Count, Ken Fisher. Russian In Ten Minutes a Day, Kristine Kershul. The Movement Toward a New America, Michell Goodman. When You Paint, Ward Brackett. City of Night, John Rechy. The Vintage Mencken, selected by Alistair Cooke. Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, introduced by M.L. Rosenthal. Poet’s Choice, edited by Paul Engle and Joseph Langland. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashberry. The Sea, John Banville. The Last of the Just, Andre Schwarz-Bart. World’s End, T.C. Boyle. When Someone You Love is Wiccan, Carl McColman. The Secrets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz. Bullet Park, John Cheever. Another Country, James Baldwin. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry. The Resurrection, John Gardner. Nickel Mountain, John Gardner. Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed. The Bus of Dreams, Mary Morris. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, William Kennedy. Legs, William Kennedy. Ironweed, William Kennedy. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence. The Complete Short Stories, D.H. Lawrence. Short Novels of D.H. Lawrence. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence. Passions, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Paule Marshall.

  This listing of books is no more informative than those passages in the Bible where the chiefs of each of the tribes are enumerated; their names, and who they were the son of. Tradition declares that God Himself is the author of these lists that are so tedious to read and impossible to recall with any accuracy. But so be it. A listing is good enough for Him, though surely the instinct of most readers is to skip over these parts and get to the storytelling.

  xv

  The seven bookcases in the hallway are the result of both a widening and a narrowing. It was life that narrowed. Where once there were five in this house, now there is one. One plus a dog, though there was always a dog. Wife, gone; son, daughter, stepson, gone. The widening is in the hallway itself. As part of remodeling, the two bedrooms behind the hallway were combined into one, making a so-called master, for the one who is still here. And the hallway leading to this master bedroom was widened, so that seven bookcases could be built down the length of one of its walls. They rise to the ceiling, though it equally fair to say they fall to the floor. After all, the books on the seven bottom shelves are at my ankles. They are never seen, never at eye level, other than for the dog.

  The books on the eighth shelf should be those that never mattered. The pulpiest, the leftovers, the books that belong nowhere else. That is what I thought, until I got on my belly to look more closely.

  xvi

  There are classics packed on the first bottom shelf. The pages of Middlemarch are browned, as though baked. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy, sits tight against T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Next, Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley. The Ox Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence. The Plumed  Serpent, D. H. Lawrence. They are all dusty paperbacks, with bits of bugs on some of them. Corinne, who comes to clean every second Wednesday, never pushes the Swiffer duster into the open space above Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor. I see Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney. The Tennis Handsome, Barry Hannah. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Bull from the Sea, Mary Renault. Possession, A.S. Byatt. The Magus, John Fowles. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Alan Sillitoe. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Affliction, Russell Banks. Mohawk, Richard Russo. Half a Life, Jill Ciment. The Ebony Tower, John Fowles. The Collector, John Fowles. The Four-Gated City, Doris Lessing. Terms of Endearment, Larry McMurtry. Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry. The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty. White Noise, Don DeLillo. The Three Coffins, John Dickson Carr, is here too. And Isadora, Isadora Duncan. The Hippie Papers, edited by Jerry Hopkins. The Mystic Mullah, Kenneth Robeson, “A Doc Savage Adventure.” Also, The Bridge in the Jungle, B. Traven. The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry. The American Dream and The Zoo Story, Edward Albee. Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis. The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas. The Foreigner, David Plante. A Narrow Time, Michael Downing.

  Despite the dust, these titles are shimmering like speckled trout in the headwaters, except maybe for The Mystic Mullah, a bottom-feeder.

  xvii

  Mika wanders over to see what I am doing so close to the floor. The smell of the hallway books holds no interest for her. She is limping a little The vet has said Mika might have torn a cruciate ligament in her left hind leg. I will need the Oxford English Dictionary down the hall to trace the relationship of “hind” to “behind.” How Mika happened to limp is unknown. She cannot say. She likes to run in orbits on the acre of back yard between the back deck and the creek. She may have made too sudden or sharp a turn in the spotty St. Augustine grass, or through the Asian jasmine that creeps along the slabs of stone walkway. She might have been charging after one of the squirrels darting between tree trunks. Mika is a sprinter but has no warm up routine, and harms can come to any athlete. I am feeding her chewable carprofen for pain and inflammation daily. If nothing changes, she will go back to the vet for radiography. And then, depending on the verdict, though that verdict is foretold, surgery.

  Chapter Nine
  VITAL STATISTICS

  The day I heard the news that my daughter’s husband had shot himself in the head, the news was second hand. My son called. His sister had left him a phone message about the suicide, which had happened some undefined day in the past. A week before. It could have been two weeks before. Ben called to tell me as soon as he picked up her message.

  I have not seen or spoken to Eden in years, but I will look at her LinkedIn profile from time to time. And I did make an effort the first year or two after she announced she did not want to see me or talk to me. I sent emails and birthday gifts. There was no response. In her silence there was also a residue of relief, of what I could call “counting my blessings.” It is a balance, the hostility of a child on one side of the scale, my obligation as a parent on the other. After so many years of her disdain and unpleasantness, my desire to overcome her rejection of me was weaker than my conclusion that it is easier, if not better, to do nothing about it.

  Someone, I do not remember who, told me Eden had set up a GoFundMe to help pay for the funeral. So I contributed to it. And although my contribution was not anonymous, there was no acknowledgment. Neither was there any funeral as far as I know. No obituary notice, either. I sent a condolence note to her dead husband’s parents, or to the address that I have for them. That, too, was met with silence. The note did not come back to me, as it might have for an addressee unknown.

  The GoFundMe was successful. When the specific amount initially requested was easily exceeded, Eden raised the request. She raised something like $9,000 to fund the funeral and, as she wrote on the site, “other expenses.”

  That was two years ago, in the summer of 2022. In early 2023, I emailed the State of Texas to request an index of all deaths that had occurred in the prior year. For reasons that do not speak well of anyone involved, I was curious and wanted confirmation that Eden’s dead husband was in fact on the list of the dead.

  The initial email received an automated response. It stated that the actual response would be forthcoming within 3 business days. When that email arrived, it said that the “digital death index” for 2022 would not be available for another year. Also, there is a form available online to fill out and submit, along with a fee of ten dollars.

  ii

  Eleven months later, last December, I emailed again:

  “Am wanting to verify a date of death for a deceased son-in-law,” I wrote. “He died in June or July, 2022.”I gave his name and provided the name of the city where he and my daughter lived, half an hour north, traffic depending. “Also,” I added, “please let me know how to send the $10 fee to receive this index of deaths in 2022, because I do not see an option for payment online.” After the “response within 3 days” reply, I received an email from a Data Request Coordinator, who thanked me for contacting the Center for Health Statistics Vital Events Data Management Team. With “Kind regards,” a digital death index for 2022 would not be available to order until January, 2024. I should please follow up in the next month.

  iii

  On January 7, I emailed the Data Management Team. “Following up, as you suggested. Is the digital death index for 2022 available to order now?” I received the reply that I would receive a reply.

  On January 15, I forwarded for the second time the filled-in Digital Vital Event Index Request Form that I initially sent in December.

  On January 18, I received this:

  Hello,

  Thank you for contacting the Center for Health Statistics Vital Events Data Management Team.

  We received your request for the 2022 death digital index(es) and prepared the attached invoice #100529. Please send a copy of this invoice and your payment to the address listed at the top of the invoice.

  Now I knew to whom all checks or money orders should be payable and that each index is prepared “by the order and subjected to an approval process.” Also, I should please be advised that once the Team received confirmation of my payment, “the expected processing time is 20-30 business days.”

  The Team also asked me to verify that what I was requesting would satisfy my intended use, which was to find my former son-in-law’s name on an index prepared by the year, alphabetized by name, and containing county of event, date of event, and sex. And I should feel free to contact them when I send payment or if I had any further questions.

  I wrote the check as instructed and mailed it to the right address.

  iv

  On February 29, 2024, I sent another email to the Team:

  “Can you please tell me what the status is of my request for the 2022 digital death index? I mailed the completed form with my $10 payment to the required address more than thirty days ago.”

  Within three business days, Kristin, a Data Request Coordinator, responded. She thanked me for bringing this to the Team’s attention. She asked if my check had been cashed and, if so, could I please provide a six-digit number stamped on the front of the check, and the check number as well.

  March 6. I emailed Kristin. Yes, the check was cashed. Bank of America does not return cancelled checks to me, so, no, I have not seen a six-digit number on the cancelled check. Since I do not do online banking, I apologized as well. I said I would need to drive over to Bank of America, sit in one of the padded arm chairs in the lobby, wait my turn, and ask to view an image of the cancelled check and its six-digit number. I told Kristin it might be faster to just mail another check.

  Kristin responded on March 7.“Thank you for providing that information,” she emailed. “We have reached to our payment team and will follow up with you with confirmation of your payment.”

  On March 12, I wrote again to Kristin. I told her that I did go to Bank of America and I now had a xerox of the check that the Department of Vital Statistics cashed. So, I can provide her the so-called DLN number, stamped on the cashed check by the Texas State Comptroller of Public Accounts.

  Kristin responded the next day: “Good morning,” she wrote, setting a new tone. “Thank you for providing the stamped 6-digit number. We have forwarded this information to our payment team. They will help us locate the payment.”

  Then there was no further response. It is now April, so I emailed Kristin again. “What would you suggest as a next step?” I asked her. “Should I call the Texas State Auditor’s Office hotline to report the theft of my $10 fee by DSHS VSTAT, since my check was cashed in January, and I provided the requested six-digit number, but I have not received the requested document? What if I drive four hours to your office, from Dallas to Austin, with $10 in cash, might this be resolved immediately while I wait there? My experience seems emblematic of something, though of what I am not sure.”

  Kristin responded within three business days. “We confirmed your payment and are currently preparing your index. We will do our best to expedite delivery of your index and provide it within 5-10 business days.”

  So, as long as two weeks, to send an email with an attachment. I thanked her.

  When the file is at last received, I understand the delay. There are so many deaths in the state of Texas in a single year. Just the dead Garcias alone number in the thousands. It was probably a matter of volume. Thousands of requests for records, and Kristin, all by herself, doing the best she can.

  Keith Henson, my daughter’s second husband, is indeed on the list. Male, Denton County, July 22, 2022. Cause of death not provided.

  Chapter Ten
  A LETTER FROM MY FATHER

  On another shelf, The Jerusalem Bible, in Hebrew and English, English text revised and edited by Harold Fisch, has a recipe between the Hebrew and English pages in my daughter’s pre-teen handwriting: ¼ cup rolled oats, ½ cup raisins, yeast, 4-5 cups all-purpose flour. As a teenager, Eden declared herself to be a Wiccan. But even at 11 or 12, she was preparing to live by bread alone. Pentateuch & Haftorahs, edited by Dr. J.H. Hertz, whose Book of Jewish Thoughts is dedicated to those who fell in the Great War, belongs to my son. Its Hebrew text and English translation were used in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. That event fell in June of 1997, on a cloudless Saturday. Dolores, who who die the next month, attended. She sat toward the back in the rented wheelchair, her left hand holding the morphine pump attached to the tube leading into the port in her chest. That day turned out to be her last day out of the house. In Pentateuch & Haftorahs, a yellow Post-it is bookmarking the story of Samson, from the days of the Judges.

  This top shelf of the second hallway bookcase seems to be dedicated to prayer and prophesy. Next, New American Bible, a jacketless brown book. It is an illustrated St. Joseph Medium Size Edition and has Ben’s name on its inside front cover. I would not think there was much risk of theft at the Jesuit high school he attended, but Ben also wrote his name on the book’s top edge, using black ink on the gold tips of the pages. The labeled illustrations on the inside front cover of New American Bible depict the tellers of the old testimonies — Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Drawings of a generic Saint, Bishop, Pope, and Priest, Mary Mother of God and Jesus Christ take over on the inside back cover.

  A hardbound Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, does not fit the pattern. It fits in-between New American Bible and Talmud Bavli, Tractate Sanhedrin, the Schottenstein Daf Yomi edition. Two books over, On The Doorposts of Your House, Central Conference of American Rabbis. Next, The Union Prayerbook for Jewish Worship, a gift from Dolores “with love, October 6, 1979.”Gates of Prayer has Eden’s name debossed in gold on its bright blue cover. Many of the bibles and prayerbooks are gifts to Ben or Eden on the occasion of some milestone – the thirteenth birthday, a graduation from confirmation class — though both of them left any interest in religion behind, along with these books on the hallway shelf. Gates of Repentance has Ben’s name debossed in gold on a deep red cover. Mishkan HaNefesh, Machzor for the Days of Awe, is stuffed with the perforated stubs of admission tickets and “books of remembrance” pamphlets that provide mourners with lists of the names of the dead.

  The rest of the shelf is a mixed lot. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume I, M.H. Abrams, General Editor. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume II. A Revenger’s Comedy, Derwent May. Inter Views, James Hillman. Inside Texas, Cactus Pryor, signed by Cactus Pryor, 11/5/82, “To Dolores who Done Good In Dallas!” A second hardback of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellion, Gloria Steinem, is also signed “To Dolores” by its author. Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead, Molly Ivins, signed, is Dolores’s as well. Moving Beyond Words, Gloria Steinem, is unsigned. It is inscribed to Dolores, though; a birthday gift in 1994 from my parents.

  France on Foot, Bruce LeFavour hides a bookmark from a garden shop in Berkeley, and a newspaper article from 1997. The article is about Montolieu, the village in France that “devotes itself to books.” In the village of Montolieu, the narrow streets have “one bakery, one grocery, one butcher, one bistro and 12 bookstores.” There are an estimated 250,000 books for sale there. Next book, Italian Days, Barbara Gruizzuti Harrison. Then, Crazy, Pete Earley, subtitled “A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness.” An event program from the 2007 Prism Awards of the Mental Health Association pokes out of its pages. Pete Earley is the guest speaker at the event. He, too, has signed his book. Next, The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal, Julia Cameron. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards. The College Survey of English Literature, Volume One, edited by B.J. Whiting, published in 1949. Volume One covers The Early Period through The Eighteenth Century. On the title page, someone with Sunshine as his nickname wrote “Property of Harry W. ‘Sunshine’ Kelley, Jr.” The College Survey of English Literature, Volume Two, is the last book on this shelf. It includes The Romantic Period, The Victorian Period, and The Contemporary Period, although “contemporary” is a slippery concept. Volume Two ends with Stephen Spender and that poem that begins, “I think continually of those who were truly great.”

  ii

  Second bookcase, second shelf:

  Collected Poems, Philip Larkin. The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, Stephen Potter. Spring Shade, Robert Fitzgerald. Seascape: Needle’s Eye, George Oppen. Collected Poems, George Oppen. Then, Martial Epigrams II, The Loeb Classical Library, edited by T.E. Page, a little red book, but not Mao’s. It has Latin on one page and English on the facing page. Its pages also have my penciled scan marks and translations. Miraris veteres, acerra, solos/nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas. Ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti/non est, ut placeam tibi, perire. “Your pardon”, pray, Vacerra: It is not worth my while, merely to please you, “to die.” Next, Tape for the Turn of the Year, A.R. Ammons. It is a birthday gift from a college classmate, who writes on the flysheet, “Let not vicissitudes bend friend from friend.” Is this a quote, or did he talk that way? I also find a souvenir postcard, Orphee, A. Rodin, and a green card with GRE scores. My math score is two hundred points lower than the verbal. Next book, The Sum, Alan Stephens, is published by Alan Swallow, Denver. Then, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, Thomas Parkinson. Skip To My Lou, William Martin Camp, was rescued from a bin at a public library booksale. Psychochemotherapy, Edmund Remmen, M.D., Sidney Cohen, M.D., Keith S. Ditman, M.D, and John Russell Frantz, M.D, is a book presented to Dolores “compliments of Roche Laboratories.” So it says, on its bookplate. The Best-Known Works of Voltaire is another book from my parents’ house. It is one of the Walter J. Black Co. Blue Ribbon Books, copyright 1927. Then, Poema del Cante Jondo, Romancero gitano, Federico Garcia Lorca, next to Proceso a una madre lesbiana, Gifford Guy Gibson. Both are paperbacks from a sidewalk bookstand in Mexico City, circa the late seventies.

  A Personal Anthology, Jorge Luis Borges is next to Greek-English Lexicon, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, and The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, is in front of Poetry of the English Renaissance 1509-1660, selected and edited by J. William Hebel and Hoyt H. Hudson. Then, Passions and Ancient Days, C.P. Cavafy, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis. Elogio de la Sombra, JorgeLuis Borges. And El Aleph, Jorge

  Luis Borges. Canasta de Cuentos Mexicanos, B. Traven, is a slender black paperback with bold yellow type on its cover. Inside, a business card from Hotel Los Amates, Actores No. 112, Cuernavaca, Morelia, Mexico. Then, a catalog, 1979 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of Art, and Master Paintings from The Phillips Collection, Eleanor Green.

  Books that belong with their Spanish Southwest amigos opposite the downstairs desk fill the rest of this hallway shelf. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds, Elizabeth A.H. John, has more than 800 pages on confrontations between Indians and Europeans, from 1540 to 1795. Vol 1, No 3 of Go Ahead! Davy Crockett’s 1837 Almanack of Wild Sports In The West, reproduces “in facsimile” a novelty housed in the Huntington Library. It claims that the text was written by Colonel Crockett, but offers no credit to the illustrator of the woodcut drawings of Colonel Crockett shooting a wild boar, shooting a grizzly bear, and shooting a catamount. Next, With The Makers of San Antonio, Frederick C. Chabot. Apache Chronicle, John Upton Terrell. A Distant Trumpet, Paul Horgan. And Great River, Paul Horgan. The spine of History of New Mexico, Gaspar Perez de Villagra, translated by Gilberto Espinosa, is the color of dried blood. This book is a publication of the Quivira Society. So is The Frontiers of New Spain, Nicolas de Lafora’s descriptions, 1766-1768, translated by Lawrence Kinnard. So is History of Texas 1673–1779, Fray Juan Agustin Morfi, translated by Carlos Eduardo Castaneda, the last book on this second shelf.

  iii

  A letter and a postcard from Robert Fitzgerald are stored between pages of his book of poems, Spring Shade. Neither one is personal. The postcard has this handwritten instruction: “Notebooks & Papers of G.M. Hopkins is in the poetry room of the Lamont.” The small, elegant handwriting is not unlike the man himself, on a street in Cambridge in 1974, wearing a Harris tweed jacket with elbow patches, a black beret on his head. His letter is a typed sheet of corrections on Notes on Sound & Form in Modern Poetry, by Harvey Gross, one of the books that he had assigned in his poetry class. For the correction on page 5, he wrote, “The third line of Pound is best heard as a hexameter.”

  iv

  There is another letter inside Spring Shade, too. This one is from my father, and his letter also touches on the subject of poetry. He writes it on the notepaper no larger than an index card that was kept next to the rotary phone on the rolltop desk, in a dim corner of the “family room” on Belton Drive in Los Angeles. He writes in block print. And in every sentence, he capitalizes random words. “It is Rainy here today,” his writes, “so having not much Else to do I thought I’d give you a Chance to answer a trivia question, whose answer You should know.” His letter is dated at the top, December 11, 1993. “Who wrote the Following poem?” my father asks. Then he copies the poem down. He adds the word “over” in parentheses at the bottom of the notepaper, because it continues on the back:

  In sunburnt parks where Sundays lie,
  Or the wide wastes beyond the cities,
  Teams deploy through sunlight.

  Talk it up, boys, a little practice.
  Coming in stubby and fast, the baseman
  Gathers a grounder in fat green grass.
  Picks it up stinging and clipped as wit
  Into the leather: a swinging step
  Wings it deadeye down to first.
  Smack. Oh, attaboy, attyoldboy.
  Catcher reverses his cap, pulls down
  Sweaty casque, and squats in the dust:
  Pitcher rubs new ball on his pants,
  Chewing, puts a jet behind him;
  Nods past batter, taking his time.
  Batter settles, tugs at his cap:
  A spinning ball; step and swing to it,
  Caught like a cheek before it ducks
  By shivery hickory: socko, baby:
  Cleats dig into dust.
  Outfielder,
  On his own way, looking over shoulder,
  Makes it a triple. A long peg home.

  Innings and afternoons. Fly lost in sunset.
  Throwing arm gone bad. There’s your old ball game.
  Cool reek of the field. Reek of companions.

  “Love, Dad,” he writes. And, under that, “Know the Answer? Write me.”

  My father is one of those people that I love more openly after their death more than I did during their lives. His love was baseball. I wonder, where did he find this Robert Fitzgerald poem? It must have appeared in the sports section of the Los Angeles Times.

  v

  Seascape: Needle’s Eye, George Oppen, is another book of memories. There is the ticket inside that seems to be permission to use a chair. It says, Fauteuil, F. Lallemand, Concessionnaire. Location de chaises toute quantites. My French is rusty, and the English translation on the reverse side is unclear. “Seat hiring fee available for whole day,” it says. Seascape: Needle’s Eye also safeguards a postcard that I sent in November 1974 to Asphodel Books, 306 Superior Ave, Cleveland, Ohio. “Sir,” I wrote, “I want to buy books of George Oppen’s poetry. Please send me the titles and cost, or ship the books, and I will send you a check.” This postcard came back with a Returned to Sender No Such Number stamp on it. It also successfully brings back a memory of an afternoon in March, 1973, at George Oppen’s apartment in San Francisco. I am sitting on a folding chair at the kitchen table with the poet and his wife, Mary. I had met his niece, Mari, in Berkeley, and she brought me there. When I tell him that I know one of his poems, he seems somewhere between indifferent and pleased. That is the entire memory.

  vi

  Two other postcards are inside Greek-English Lexicon, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott. These are not souvenirs. They were mailed in 1971. On one, from Mexico, the entire message is a quote from Ulysses: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: colored signs. Limits of the diaphane.” It is signed “Roger.” I have no idea who that was. The front of the card is a tinted photo of a mother and child, with a large Mil Feliciades in script across their faces. The other postcard comes from Cali, Columbia. It is signed “Z.T.”I squint at it in the hallway, I try to remember, as if effort can make a difference. I did have a college sophomore roommate Zachary Taylor from Mississippi. He was The Third. It could be him, though we were never friends. “Good work on the rug,” Z.T. writes. His phrase is like the puzzle piece that fits nowhere, even though it comes from the puzzle box and must belong. “Jackson got boring so I headed South.” That helps. Zachary Taylor III was from Jackson, Mississippi. Z.T. is probably him.

  vii

  Second bookcase, third shelf:

  Growing Up Free, Letty Cottin Pogrebin. The subtitle is “Raising Your Child in the 80’s.” On the flyleaf, Letty Pogrebin writes, “To Dolores, Best wishes.” The 538 pages of Dictionary of Antiques, George Savage, might also be Dolores’s, or Pam’s. Handbook of Rational-Emotive Therapy, Albert Ellis and Russsell Grieger, belonged to Leonard Kirby, whose name is on the inside cover. Bald, stocky Leonard shared an office suite with Dolores, where he practiced biofeedback therapy. For reasons I do not remember or never knew, Marshall McLuhan visited the office on Fairmont Street that Leonard and Dolores shared, while I was visiting Dolores for lunch. During the visit, Leonard wanted to hook McLuhan up to a biofeedback machine. Raising both eyebrows, McLuhan refuses. He wants to know how it works, but not how it works on him. In One Man’s Meat, E.B. White, I discover one of my favorite quotes. It is handwritten on a tear-off sheet from a Kwik-Kopy notepad. “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said has come to pass.”It is Lord Melbourne’s comment after he tried to soothe the Irish with Catholic emancipation, and then found them “more pestilent than ever.”

  Next, Man & Woman Boy & Girl, John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt. Regression in Group Therapy, A Negative View, Myron Weiner, M.D. Introduction to Psychiatry, O. Spurgeon English, M.D. and Stuart M. Finch, M.D., has purple rivers of wavy underlining.

  The core text of Aeneid, Books I-VI, Virgil, with introduction, notes, vocabulary and appendix by Clyde Pharr, is in Latin. On an enclosed class handout, Anchises is in the underworld, pointing out Rome’s glory in English: “Some will hammer quivering bronze with more grace, I know so, or lead the living face from marble, argue their causes better, and mark pathways of heaven with circles, naming stars as they rise. Remember, rule nations by your sway, Romans. This is your art, and impose the use of your peace. Spare those you vanquish, and battle the proud down.”

  Writings From The New Yorker 1927 – 1976, E. B. White. The Pit, Frank Norris. Stopping on the spread of pages 96 and 97 by chance, I read, “in the Pit….the insignificant Grossmann, a Jew who wore a flannel shirt and to whose outcries no one ever paid the leastattention…. Grossman, the little Jew of the grimy flannel shirt, perspired in the stress of the suspense, all but powerless to maintain silence till the signal should be given….” Then, Greek Lyric Poetry, selected by David A. Campbell. The text is in Greek, though many of its 450 pages are notes and translations. Its bookmark is a pink ticket to the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture, Leonard Bernstein, Harvard Square Theatre, Admit One, October 16, 1973.

  Horace, Satires and Epistles, with introduction and notes by Edward P. Morris. De Re Medica, Eli Lilly and Company. The Arrow of Gold, Joseph Conrad, published by Doubleday, Page & Company, 1919. Its hard cover is separating. Webbing and bits of cloth are exposed in the seam. Between pages, a ticket to a TUT exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, an index card with panem et circenses written on it, and a bright red business card for Betsy Berkhemer & Associates, Glendon Avenue, Los Angeles. The name rings a bell, but too faintly, and there is no one to answer the bell.

  More books. Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z. Hobson. Simon and Schuster, 1947. The Black Arrow, Robert Louis Stevenson, a Registered Editions Guild books, Art-Type Edition. The “editor’s note” comments: “The work is dedicated to Stevenson’s wife, yet she never read the book.” The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, illustrations by John Tenniel. Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen, from Blue Ribbon Books. The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, introduction by John Szarkowski. There is a handwritten message on the title page, from December 25, 1977. “The last edition to complete your collection,” it says, “with love and affection, Sandy.” So, a Christmas gift from Sandy, but do I know any Sandys? Did I, in 1977?Sandy’s gift feels untouched, brand new. The Call of the South, Robert Lee Durham, copyright 1908, L.C. Page & Company, has thick dust on the tops of its pages. Next, DelCorso’s Gallery, Philip Caputo. The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch. In this book about the science of parallel universes, I got no further than Chapter 2, “Shadows.” I saved an article from the New Yorker between its pages. The article quotes a scientist named Ekert. “Of all the weird theories out there,” Ekert declares, “I would say ‘Many Worlds’ is the least weird.”

  Abba Eban’s An Autobiography comes from my parents’ bookshelf. The 1,042 pages of War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk, are also from my parents’ house. Wouk’s book has a tapered bookmark a few chapters in, with a children’s poem on it. “Hello book,” the poem begins. “What are you up to? Keeping yourself to yourself, shut in between your covers, a prisoner high on a shelf?” Then, The Devil Tree, Jerzy Kosinski. And Ten Little New Yorkers, Kinky Friedman, autographed on the title page. And The Butterfly Hunter, Chris Ballard. And then, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, G. Legman, whose last name is almost a joke. His “G” stands for Gershon.

  viii

  Loose, xeroxed pages are sleeping under the front cover of Rational Emotive Therapy, Albert Ellis. The xerox has faded. Titled “Seven Stages of Process,” it dates from Dolores’s school days, when she was on her way to becoming a therapist. So, from fifty years ago. It outlines a process developed by Carl Rogers for the person who is remote from his own experience, as he moves “toward a new way of being” in therapy. In On Becoming A Person, 1961, Rogers posits that Individuals in therapy move not from a fixed notion of themselves through change to another, better fixed notion, but “from fixity to flow, from stasis to ongoing process.” In Stage 1, the person does not have a clear sense of his own feelings and blames others for his troubles. According to Rogers, nobody at this stage comes in for counseling. In Stage 2, there is less rigidity, but only a little less. The Stage 3 person begins to accept some responsibility for how he feels, though he generalizes and focuses on the past. That is the stage when people are open to therapy. Stage 4, the person can admit how he feels but is ashamed of having these feelings. In Stage 5, things start to change. You see things more clearly, you take some ownership, you think about taking action. Stage 6, you accept yourself. Stage 7, you are “a fluid, self-accepting person who is open to the changes that life presents.”

  There are bullet points that mark the characteristics for each stage. Stage 1, an unwillingness to communicate except about externals, no desire to change, no problems recognized. Next, problems are noticed but they are all external. Then, Stage 3, an emerging sense of feelings but little acceptance of any weaknesses, because “feelings are all about the past.” The Stage 4 bullet points are pivot points. You occasionally accept your feelings; you have some sense of self-responsibility, but not enough. Stage 5, feelings “seep through” despite your fear and distrust, and there is more acceptance of responsibility. Then, at Stage 6, the flows of feeling are experienced, and “the self is no longer an object.” By the seventh stage, you are “accepting ownership of your changing feelings,” and, whatever the situation, you experience it “in its newness,” and not as the past.

  I spend half an hour in the hallway reading and re-reading these bullet points, trying to make sense of them, and trying to find myself in one stage or another.

  The self is no longer an object? I could be Stage 3.

  ix

  The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal with my handwriting on page after page. I even signed my name on page xi, signing not once but in both of two blank spaces in the “contract,” to affirm my commitment to “the daily process” and to acknowledge that I “further understand working with these tools may create deep change, some of it turbulent.” The Morning Pages offers this explanation: As a mark of commitment to yourself and your process, we ask you to sign a contract acknowledging your intent to undertake a creative recovery. The signature appears on a line above a second line, labeled “date.”

  What was I thinking, that December day in 1998? Or on the days following, since I have to acknowledge that I am one who filled in all these pages? As it turns out, I broke the contract, stopping at entry 139. The rest of the book is blank. Nothing there, other than the printed prompts that Julia Cameron provides. The last of the prompts is on page 250. Do not let anyone, it advises, “throw cold water in your direction.”

  x

  An excerpt from The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal, from 1998:

  It is cold and dark when we all get out of bed these December mornings. Outside, It must be in the mid-20s, and our breaths are visible. “Need a jacket,” I tell my son, who is fourteen. He is heading out the kitchen door, wearing only a thin cotton shirt. “No,” he says. I laugh, but not because he is funny. Valeria Adams, a teacher at his school, is in our driveway picking him up for honor choir. I think she does this kindness because now he is a motherless child. He leaves with no goodbye. He goes, carrying his bookbag and, I imagine, my disapproval with him.

  The sun is out now, suddenly. And why not? Who knows when a new day is about to begin?

  My hand moves down this page the way my feet do on a treadmill, without worrying about where I am going. I move as though I am going forward, but only to stay in place.

  xi

  Hard rains yesterday. Not yesterday, but on a Saturday in December in 1998, according to this Julia Cameron journal. A dark grey all day. I am writing about my physical decay at 47. Ten pounds overweight. Blurred vision. Vision closing with a crust of plaque that a daily dose of Zocor is not preventing. I mention that I am going on a trip with my two children, who are twelve and thirteen. I write that I have called my mother to give her the name of the hotel where we will be staying. I write that she tells me there is no need to give her my hotel name or phone number, because she will not be calling. I ask her what if my father has a heart attack while I am gone, will I only learn about his death until ten days later, after I return? I write that it is my impression my mother wants to get off the phone. That she will tell me that she wants to talk, but it does not seem like it. The people I am reading about are not alive now. My father has been dead for fourteen years, my mother for six years. The 47-year-old is not around now either.

  Even if I do not see how the dead can be embarrassed, Morning Pages is nothing that some stranger needs to discover on a future morning after I am gone. Even worse if it is not a stranger. So, I toss Morning Pages in the trash. This may prove that I am at one of the earliest stages of the Seven Stages of Process in the Carl Rogers schema. I have not advanced beyond Stage 3, if I am even that far. I am the person who begins to describe his present feelings but is ashamed of having these feelings.

  rr

  This listing of the books on my shelves is leading to no conclusions. Like the bodhisattva ideal in Alan Watt’s The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, it is acting with no attachment to the fruits of the action. The task itself will conclude. There are only so many shelves left in the hallway.

  The Watt’s book is in the second bookcase in the hallway, fourth shelf down.

  Its bookmark is a scrap with a poem by Yechuda Amichai, translated by Robert Alter: God’s fate now is like the fate of trees and stones, sun and moon, when people stopped believing in them and began to believe in Him.

  On the same fourth shelf, six tall books are lying on their sides. Top of the stack, Gustav Klimt, Nina Kransel, a souvenir from the giftshop at Neue Gallerie. A note on its title page says “Valentine’s Day 2008 with Debra.” Debra, a girlfriend. A Passion for Collecting: The Eye of Stanley Marcus is the Sotheby’s catalog picked up on an earlier trip to New York, also with Debra, this time in 2002. Turning its pages reveals the Eastern Zambian Mask ($3,000- 4,000) and Ellsworth Kelly’s Colored Paper Image XVIII, “colored, pressed paper pulp, with hand-coloring on handmade paper, signed Kelly in pencil lower right and numbered 9/22 lower left.” The only purchase at this Sotheby’s sale is this catalog. Next, The Governor’s Mansion of Texas, published and edited by Friends of the Governor’s Mansion, 1983. It has a message from Linda Gale White, the governor’s wife, to Dolores, “with appreciation for your support!” Then, a perfect-bound Pictorial History of the Capitol and of the Congress, 8th Edition. “Best wishes, Lloyd Bentsen” is scribbled on the table of contents. At the bottom of the stack, two worms in the soil, The Book of Garden Design, John Brooks, and Neil Sperry’s Complete Guide to Texas Gardening.

  xiii

  The Humbling, Philip Roth, is upright, like a metal edging alongside the two gardening books. Next to it, Tosca, a small red book with the libretto co-written by Luigi Illica. Then, The Yosemite, John Muir. And then, in a greatest hits sequence, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, The Portable Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, This Gun for Hire, The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case, and The Quiet American. This second copy of The Quiet American is a duplicate of the Viking Press paperback ahead of it in line. I went through a Graham Greene phrase at the end of the 1970s. As often than not, I agreed with the Boston Transcript blurb on the cover of This Gun for Hire: “We challenge anyone to read the first seven pages and stop.” Last book in this streak of Greene, the one I did not read, the hardback Travels With My Aunt, in its bright pink jacket.

  xiv

  When I was eighteen, I wanted to be a poet, a kind of writer. But what is a writer? Donald Barthelme answered it this way: “A writer is someone who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.”

  This not-knowing-what-to-do describes what I am doing, making lists of books on shelves, calling up an associated memory, reading a penciled note, dislodging a postcard or a ticket stub or a bookmark. Even more, it describes how I have come to think about life generally. It has been a task embarked on, not knowing what to do.

  xv

  The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts, is a slender container for other thinning memories. It has a drugstore-developed color photograph of my son, the high-schooler in 2001, slight, even bony. Blue jeans, curly red hair. He stands beside a boxy black Volvo, which was his new, used car. Within the month, heading south on Inwood Road and then turning east at Mockingbird in front of the car speeding north, he totaled this Volvo. Somehow no one was hurt, though the other driver, a lawyer, sued.

  Also stuck inside, along with Alan Watts’ wisdoms, are movie ticket stubs for Event Horizon at the AMC Grand 24, August 23, 1997.When Ben was over the house yesterday, I asked him if he could recall going. “Remember Event Horizon?” He does. He said it was the creepiest movie he has ever seen. I remember standing outside the theater after we ran from our seats, because we could not watch it. Ben was thirteen, Eden eleven, when I took them both to see it, five weeks after their mother died of colon cancer at two in the morning in the bedroom down the hall from where they were sleeping. Event Horizon is about a rescue mission. A spaceship, the Event Horizon, disappears while on a mission. When it mysteriously reappears, orbiting around Neptune, it is 2047. A distress signal is heard. This signal is nothing but the sounds of screams. And when the rescue crew arrives and boards, it discovers a massacre. And the rescuers begin to hallucinate, and in those hallucinations they see all of their fears and sorrows.

  xvi

  I have never read The Histories, Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, although I took it from the library of John Winthrop House in 1974. It still has the library’s bookplate, with its lion rampant. Standing in the hallway, I am taking in the first sentence of its four-page Introduction: “Hardly anything is known of Herodotus’ life.” And then skipping to the last sentence: “Men differ, Herodotus implies, but let us be grateful for the difference; for in spite of it they are all dominated by the same unsearchable Fate, which even the gods themselves cannot escape.”

  Abraham Lincoln Selected Speeches, Messages, and Letters, edited by T. Harry Williams, is one of the Rinehart Editions paperbacks. Inside Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, another paperback translated by Stephen Mitchell, I find a drugstore-developed photo of my son in his dorm room at the University of Kansas. Ben has a new moustache and a sparse goatee. His billed cap is on backwards, so the Jayhawk sits on his brow. This was on freshman Move-In Day. Moving out day was coming soon, by the same unsearchable Fate that even the gods cannot escape.

  Next, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell. La Chute, Albert Camus, published by Gallimard, 5, rue Sebastien-Bottin, Paris VII. The Great English and American Essays, edited by Douglass S. Mead, another Rinehart Editions paperback. The selected essays ramble all the way from Francis Bacon to Lewis Mumford. On page 95, in front of Henry David Thoreau’s Life Without Principle, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863, I find a letter from 1972. The letter is on the letterhead of Rabbi Mordecai I. Soloff, 8333 Airport Boulevard, Los Angeles. “Dear Mark,” Rabbi Soloff writes, “I am delighted to observe that you are prepared to address the congregation on Friday, December 22nd. I trust the announcement of your appearance will add to the size of the college audience. Please indicate the approximate time you expect your sermonette to consume. If possible, provide me with a title that I can announce in advance.” Did this happen? What was the title announced in advance? Did it add to the size of the college audience? All those answers are under a rock that is too heavy to be lifted, despite being weightless.

  Then, Poems, Wallace Stevens, selected and with an introduction by Samuel French Morse. Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Bob W. Law and Walter W. Timmerman. This is a nature trail guide, more booklet than book. The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, is a picture book of pontifications. Quentin Fiore, the graphic designer, well deserves his co-credit. War and Peace in the Global Village, Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, has lost its paper cover, and its exposed spine is yellowed. Then, Le Cimetiere Marin, Paul Valery. Music & Imagination, Aaron Copland. The Children of Dynmouth, William Trevor. And another Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury; either I am counting this Fahrenheit 451 twice, or there are two hardbound and jacketed copies. The Life of a Useless Man, Maxim Gorki, translated by Moura Budberg. Penny Candy, Jonathan Norton. One Hundred Saturdays, Michael Frank. I only made it to page 32, where the bookmark is a souvenir postcard picture of Siegfried and Roy, a tiger and a disco ball. The two Superstars of Magic are appearing in Beyond Belief, an Amazing Spectacle, produced by Irwin Feld and Kenneth Feld at the Frontier Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1983.

  To the end of the shelf: Ask The Dust, John Fante. A Short History of the Movies, Gerald Mast. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans. Flipping through the pages does not dislodge the heavy dark dust, or change the orange discoloration on the pages, as though this silver paperback had survived a fire. Agee on Film, a book of five scripts, has a foreword by John Huston. A business card from Zeitlin & Ver Brugge Booksellers has been holding my place at the beginning of The Night of the Hunter for fifty years. If I ever visited Zeitlin & Ver Brugge on N. La Cienega in Los Angeles, the memory has vanished, as has this bookstore. It became part of a mini-mall in 1988, after its owner’s death. A desiccated brown leaf, wrinkled, its edges sawtoothed, falls from between pages 72 and 73 of Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot. A hundred pages deeper in, and in the middle of an essay on underground film by Manny Farber, a membership card from the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen. It certifies “the below named individual is a registered Competing Oarsman in good standing for the year.” October 17, 1973 to Oct 16, 1974 is stamped in a faded red. Last on this shelf, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather. This is a withdrawn library book. It has the library standard monochrome pale green cover. The title and the author’s last name are pressed into its spine in black.

  xvii

  Memories are linked. They might be in a chain, one pulling the next into consciousness. Or they can flow from one into another, a moving stream. Sometimes, though, there is no connectivity, just an image, a face, an isolated object. It can seem as though this object from the past has broken free from its chain. Or it has caught in brush by the side of the stream, like a plastic bag or a discarded Styrofoam cup.

  xviii

  “For an interesting view of Mexico, try Graham Greene’s Lawless Roads.” Peter Whaley offers this advice on a yellow index card that he mailed to me in 1977.It has stayed between two pages of A Burnt-Out Case ever since. Peter was a graduate student in California in 1972, when I first met him. Then the Stegner Fellow at Stanford, then a custodian back home on the East Coast, and then “the career” in the Foreign Service–in Haiti, Ruanda, Zaire, where he was taking calls at three in the morning from Joseph Kabila. We were mostly out of touch during those years. After he came home again, if Washington, D.C. was ever home, we talked once, and he mentioned his broken marriage and a custody fight. By the time of pancreatic cancer and his early death, we were again out of touch. I learned about it because of the obituary his life merited in the Times. I knew Peter best at twenty-one or twenty-two, walking up and down hills in San Francisco, both of us lost and pretending not to be, literally in those days, and metaphorically, too.

  xix

  “At the end the drops of life evaporate, and the light begins to disappear. It is night—where is hope now? But death is a night that lies between two days—the day of “already was’ and the day of “not yet.’ The ultimate hope in the darkness is the birthing of a new dawn.” These lines appear without attribution, written on the piece of lined notepaper that falls out of the Willa Cather book, the one with the pale green cover that was once in a public library, was stamped Withdrawn, and then found itself discarded into the bin at a used book sale. Maybe this message was left by the last of its readers, although it also sounds like something an archbishop would say.

  xx

  On a notecard beneath the back cover of Philip Roth’s The Humbling: “The reason some readers are hostile to e-books is that they still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.” Also saved in The Humbling, a printout of Derek Walcott’s Love After Love:

  The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

  The letters I am taking down “from the bookshelf” are not love letters, the notes are not all that desperate, the photographs are mostly on souvenir postcards. As for the meal I am having, I would not call it a feast. Still, Walcott seems to understand what I am doing. There is a need for nourishment, and for a meeting with that stranger who has loved me all my life.

  xxi

  Memory is in the hard drive, and it is in the cloud as well. It is inside, and behind, and as stubborn as a stump on the way ahead. It is neighborly and in dreamland, too. As close as breathing, it says in Gates of Prayer, first shelf, second bookcase, and farther than the farthermost star.

  xxii

  “Life is freedom from passion.” My sister was the same distance from 18 as she is now from 80 when she wrote this in pencil on page 853 of Poetry of the English Renaissance, Hebel and Hudson, second bookcase, second shelf. It Is her notes in the margin off to the right of Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.” She probably took down whatever the professor said, as she sat in a theater seat in the vast lecture hall at the University of California in Westwood. She was an English major.

  She was still living at home then. Ninteen or twenty, a sophomore or junior. On page 853 of Poetry of the English Renaissance, she pencils a bracket beside a Marvell couplet:

  No white nor red was ever seen So am’rous as this lovely green. Above the words “white nor red” she writes the word “women.”

  xxiii

  There is nothing natural about gardening. It is a tussle with nature rather than part of it. Especially here in Texas, where most of what is natural either stings or sticks or stinks. Still, compared to cultivating human relationships, plants can be more amenable. Less trouble, most of the time. Three shelves below Poetry of the English Renaissance, memories lie domant in Neil Sperry’s Complete Guide to Texas Gardening and in The Book of Garden Design. Both of these overgrown picture books are weedy with newspaper articles, handwritten lists of flowers and shrubs, plots of backyards, precise measurements, and multiple shopping lists with the names of the plants and their quantities. These books are an account of decades in the company of wives who garden, one of them professionally. As it turned out, Pam was not a perennial. Dolores, a psychotherapist, gardened as part of homemaking. The Neil Sperry book is hers.

  Under its front cover I find her instructions for the house we lived in from 1987 until her death ten years later. There are headings for Front Yard, Planters, Summer Planting, Vines, Side of Garage, Back Yard, Around Fence, Back Corner Right, and Back Corner Left. The trees, shrubs, and flowers are named and counted. Banana plants for the pool pots, white caladiums out front, more caladiums in pink for the back, and flats of impatiens, four Burford hollies, five Savannah hollies, two dogwoods, one Bradford pear, five spirea. Gravel is needed from Lewis Fields, along with six yards of landscape fabric. We are buying sandy loam, fescue, Bermuda, and 17 yards of organic compost. Also bronze leaf begonias, dark purple petunias, moon vine and morning glory seeds. And red tip photinias, spiral cut juniper, sweetgums, lady banksia roses, crepe myrtles, monkey grass, Asian jasmine, and Boston ivy. Dolores drew outlines of the exterior lengths of the house and labeled them with instructions. There are notes about connections to down spouts and the black corrugated drainage pipe. Index cards have counts of plants by season, the numbers depending on the spacing. She circles “Carnation for Feb-Mar” and “Daisy for Jan-Mar” on a Flower Planting Guide from a local nursery. She underlines phlox and statice, a plant I have never heard of. Also, whether the flower is sun, sun and semi-shade, sun to partial shade, or full shade. Then there are the newspaper clippings, and pages from magazines, and the circled or underlined captions. She is reminding someone – herself – that “white and yellow flowers ‘pop’ out of the garden and are excellent choices of colors for gardens that will be viewed from the street.”

  Surely none of these plants are alive, thirty years after her death. Maybe that is their glory. Part of the profundity of gardening is its mixture of the unnatural and the deeply human. Our thoughts about living are reproduced in the Asian jasmine creeping as ground cover, and the fig ivy climbing for however many seasons up a brick wall. We share exposure to the seasons with the hydrangea and the dogwood. As the poet writes over and over in Poetry of the English Renaissance, our blooming is temporary, delightful and even surprising, just like the appearance of the daffodil or the flowering of a Lady Banksia rose on a side of the garage.

  xxiv

  An 8 x 10 photograph hidden inside The Book of Garden Design comes as a surprise. I know the two people in it. We look as if we were happy, as we might have been in our forties, though the photograph is streaked and both of us are dressed in chemical stripes. Printed on a sheet of Fujifilm paper, the film was bathed by my daughter in a dark room for her high school photography class. Pam and I are photographed standing in front of a bench. There is a tower viewer on a platform, blurry purple flowers in the foreground, a sward of grass further on, a lake, trees and hills, distantly. Also, in focus, a gold watchband on Pam’s slender wrist. Back it goes into The Book of Garden Design, where it can stay for another twenty years. This reminder does not belong on the shelf. It does not belong anywhere. It can stay between the pages, along with the unopened package of Forget-Me-Not (cynoglossum amabile) sent by a heating and air conditioning company that is offering a Spring Service Call Special. Also, some newspaper clippings about clay soils and how to use filed-down boulders as creative outdoor seating. These are all vintage 2002, as is John Brooks’ book. Tips for creating a secret garden, options for areas with dappled sunlight, sunny spots for a birdbath and the plants to surround it — native foxglove, blue fax, and Aster Frikartii. I am tossing the articles, they hold no interest, and leaving the Forget-Me-Not packaging.

  xxv

  Leaving is in this context an odd word. Leaving, meaning to let go of. Leaving, meaning to keep something where it was.

  xxvi

  Fifth shelf, second hallway bookcase:

  The Sweet Cheat Gone, Marcel Proust. This pale lavender paperback is the sixth in the series of seven titles of Remembrance of Things Past. Five of them are as far away from being read as the horizon from Combray. The first two books are on the desk upstairs, or maybe only book two, Within A Budding Grove. Two or three pages of its labyrinthine sentences in C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation are the most that I could digest at one sitting. As a result, I stopped Within A Budding Grove only a dozen pages in. Swann’s Way, the one I did finish, is somewhere else. It belongs back in the hallway, in the double space ahead of The Sweet Cheat Gone, which is out of order, beside the pink cover of Cities of the Plain, the fourth in the series. Next in the row, the tinted orange of number three, The Guermantes Way, and then the olive brown cover of book five, The Captive. Last, The Past Recaptured, its pale tan cover as faded and unattainable as a dream, “newly translated” by Andreas Mayor. Next, Paul Valery Prose et Vers, presente par Henri Peyre. Then 12 Spanish American Poets, translations, notes and introduction by H.R. Hays. Le Petit Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery, introduction, vocabulary, and bibliography by John Richardson Miller. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald, one of the World’s Popular Classics, Art Type Edition, published by Books, Inc. Its biographical preface by Michael Kerney is dated 1887. Its introduction to Omar Khayyam, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia, is by Edward FitzGerald and dated 1868.

  The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets, compiled by J.C. Squire, is another gift from Peter Whaley. “Mark Perkins, his book,” he wrote on the flyleaf. Peter liked old books and, even more, the notion of “lesser poets.” A postcard from the Huntington Library – once again a reproduction of Pinkie (Sarah Barrett Moulton), by Sir Thomas Lawrence — sticks between pages 356 and 357, behind Charles Wolfe’s poem To Mary and in front of John Clare’s I Am (Written in Northampton County Asylum). Folded under the back cover, a forgotten, undated letter from Peter. This letter is on the letterhead of the Embassy of the United States of America. He writes that the book is a birthday present he bought for me “a long time ago.” And he has news. His next assignment is to Kinshasa, Zaire. He goes there in September, after 24 weeks of French training. It is not his first choice, but he wants the Department to teach him French, and he gets both 20 percent hardship pay and 25 percent cost of living pay on top of his salary. He adds that his work is boring. And he shares that he had lunch with Doris Lessing “a couple of weeks ago.” He obtained a visa for her and so she took him out “to this literary restaurant in Soho.” He tells me he has a girlfriend, too, “another vice counsel,” and although he doesn’t like the idea of seeing someone in the office, “the loneliness is very bitter.” Also, he has written some short stories, but not many.

  xxvii

  The Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by John Butt, a Yale Paperbound, is only $4.95 for its 850 pages. The 450 pages in Francis Bacon, A Selection of His Work, edited by Sidney Warhaft, are followed by nine blank pages that I filled with quoted lines from the essays. There must be sixty or more of these lines copied down. Some of them in Latin. Did I think they might come in handy on a trip to the grocery store? The Identity of Man, J. Bronowski, is stamped Jesuit College Preparatory Student Library. My son attended Jesuit Prep, so this might be a book borrowed and never returned. It is an unlikely text for him to be reading. Still, a few sentences in Chapter One, A Machine or a Self, are heavily underlined. Next, The Swimming Pool Season, Rose Tremain. Then Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal, presente par Roger Nimier. When I skim through its pages to test what if anything I have remembered from high school French, it produces an uprising of dust. The Plays of Anton Tchekov, translated by Constance Garnet, preface by Eva Le Gallienne. Sleeping Beauty, Ross Macdonald. Serenade, James M. Cain. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Philip Roth. I have no mental picture of the trip that the picture postcard of wildflowers and windmills from Solvang, California commemorates. This souvenir bookmarks my place in Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews.”

  The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and The Complete Poetry of William Blake, with an introduction by Robert Silliman Hillyer. Its 1,043 pages are part of The Modern Library. Then, The Atomic Nucleus, M. Korsunsky, translated from the Russian by G. Yankovsky. The note on public television stationery inside Counterblast, Marshall McLuhan, came “from the desk of Robert A. Wilson.” It says, “For your McLuhan guest.” It was not meant for me, unlike Waterland, Graham Swift, another gift from my mother. She writes Mom after from and my name after to and May 1988 on the first page, which is odd. Not a November birthday gift. No memory of the giving. If ever read Waterland, that memory, too, has evaporated.

  More on this shelf: Selected Poems, James Schuyler. A Night At The Movies, Robert Coover. Dubliners, James Joyce. The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka. Berlitz Self-Teacher Hebrew, from Berlitz Schools of Languages under the direction of Robert Strumpen-Darrie and Charles F. Berlitz. Modern Hebrew Reader and Grammar, Part One, Reuben Wallenrod, Ph.D., was published in 1942. The Portable Darwin, edited by Duncan M. Porter and Peter W. Graham, carries a Star Wars Trilogy Super Wide Movie Card and a newspaper clipping of an article on echinacea Also, a bookmark in a clear plastic sleeve. The three Chinese characters on this bookmark have Faith Hope Love written underneath, which may be the translation. A tiny paper doll is pasted on the bookmark as well. The doll wears a brightly patterned Chinese coat. A thin yellow ribbon is threaded through a punched hole. And at the bottom: To Dolores, From John and Esther 1997 Malaysia.

  John and Esther, former visitors in Dallas when John was studying Christian theology at Southern Methodist University, were Ben and Eden’s favorite babysitters. Dolores reached out to them after her cancer diagnosis in February, 1997. She sent the news in May, when the outcome was certain.

  xxviii

  “How do like retirement?” This is a question that I am asked, sometime with this variation: “What are you doing these days?” If I answer that I am writing a lot, it begins a predictable sequence. “What are you writing?” Things go off track when I say that I am writing about the books I may or may not have read, naming the titles of books on every shelf, desk and table in my house. That I am looking through their pages at postcards and ticket stubs and whatnot. And I leave it for others to take it seriously or not.

  I know this project makes no sense and no difference. There is no rising action to encourage the reader. Do I have to pretend that what I am doing matters? Every thinking person comes to doubt that at some point. Some doubt it more secretly than others.

  So, I am working my way through the shelves, just as I have been working my way through every year, and hour.

  I might say more about the vanished daughter, the troubled son, a dead first wife, the second wife who left. I did not know what to do with them in life. I do not know what to do with them in this recounting either. Old friends? Girlfriends, past or current? Minor characters, too minor to matter or mention other than in passing. There is the dog, the dog does matter, the dog is here, sleeping on a low black couch, its head cradled on its spotted forelegs.

  xxix

  The tops of the books on this fifth shelf are over 40 inches from the ground. Still, the dust has managed to collect between the ridges of their covers. Dust does get around. We may be made of it, we may return to it one day. Like us, it rises before it settles.

  xxx

  Two couplets by George Crabbe are inside The Atomic Nucleus, on a sheet of paper folded and inserted between pages 111 and 112.

  I was a college student majoring in English and American Literature and Language. Serious about it, too. I might have been writing a paper on George Crabbe, there is no other explanation for why these couplets are here.

  A poem by William Butler Yeats has also been hiding for the past fifty years in The Atomic Nucleus. This poem is its own lesson in the physics of living. The typing of “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” on the empty sheet is so error-free, it must have been a class handout, although there are none of the indicators of being assigned, no junior class number, no professor’s name. In my seventies, I am the senior ready to read the lines I mouthed at twenty.

  “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” was published six years before Yeats’ death in 1939. The verses alternate like a dialogue. The soul asks the self to look into the sky and be free “from the crime of death and birth.” But the poet, the self, chooses life, even knowing the distress, the clumsiness, the defiling.

  I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch, A blind man battering blind men… In the hallway, I am reading as if for the first time. It ends: I am content to follow to its source, Every event in action or in thought. Measure the lot, forgive myself the lot; When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest. I could take down every Tao Te Ching, all the Dalai Lama, every Alan Watts from the hallway shelves and find no secret better than this. Cast out remorse, it says, if you can. I am not there yet.

  xxxi

  Next shelf, the sixth down:

  LIFE, The “60s, introduction by Tom Brokaw. And then, The New Yorker Album of Drawings 1925-1975. A direct mail letter from Antony Norvell, “famous psychic investigator,” has been dropped between two of the New Yorker cartoons. “Now – In Just 30 Seconds,” it begins, “These Metaphysical Commands Can Help You.” They will help the initiated take astral journeys outside the body and into the dimensions of past, present, and future. They will help rejuvenate the cells, win control over other people, and attract lots of money – “and that’s just the beginning!” The pitch is four full pages. Two sheets of paper are covered front and back with different promises and the same offer. It is a proven direct mail format.

  Next, Who’s Who in the South and Southwest, 18th edition 1982-1983. This South and Southwest edition covers not just the states; it includes Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and even Mexico. Dolores Dyer, psychologist, has her entry on page 212, between Robert Glinn Duval, accountant, and Henry Lee Dyson, confectioner.

  xxxii

  Two ticket stubs for Germaine Greer, “Politics of Fertility,” First Unitarian Church of Dallas, October 4, `1981, are buried in the 720 pages of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Next, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated and with a preface by Walter Kaufmann. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. The Portable Nietzsche, newly translated, edited, and with a critical introduction and notes by Walter Kaufmann. I was pretending to read these Nietzsches in high school. Seven different pages numbers are written down on the inside cover of The Portable Nietzsche, with a star beside 479.When I turn to that page, a dash in the margin is marking a sentence from Twilight of the Idols, Or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer. “To have to fight the instincts – that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.” It must have appealed to me as a teenager, although I have no instincts, not then and not now.

  xxxiii

  Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse, introduction by Joseph Mileck, is another book from those teen years. Next, The War Game, Peter Watkins. The Voyeur, Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard. On Reading, Marcel Proust, translated and edited by Jean Autret and William Burford, has both French and English, on facing pages. Never read it. I probably stopped after its first sentence: “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.” Or, on the same page, after the smug sentence that starts, “Who does not remember, as I do…” Then, Candide, Voltaire, with an appreciation by Andre Maurois and “a sparkling, modern translation” by Lowell Bair. The ABC of Relativity, Bertrand Russell, a Mentor Book, price 50c. Age, which removes it from human beings, gives even the cheapest books more dignity. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, is a yellowed Penguin paperback that seems as ancient and precious as papyrus.

  The Wisdom of the Fathers, selected and translated with an essay by Judah Golden, holds a ticket to Rigoletto at Fair Park inside, from Saturday, February 4, 1995. The interior pages of The Prince and The Discourses, Niccolo Machiavelli, introduction by Max Lerner, have turned yellow, as have so many of these oldest paperbacks. The sun never touched them, but they did not escape aging. Next, The Waste Land And Other Poems, T.S. Eliot. Then, French Symbolist Poetry, translated by C.F. MacIntyre. And then, Aristote Poetique, texte etabli et traduit par J. Hardy, in French and in Greek. Some of the pages are uncut. When I was nineteen, I wanted this unreadable book. No memory of where or how I put my hands on it. I can only try to reimagine what the desire was, what deficiency I was making up for. The same with Aristophane Les Guepes – La Paix, texte etabli par Victor Coulon et traduit par Hilaire Van Daele.

  xxxiv

  House of Corrections, Doug Swanson is A Jack Flippo Mystery. So is Umbrella Man, Doug Swanson. Next on the shelf, The Hotel, Elizabeth Bowen, copyright 1928, The Dial Press. Unclouded Summer, Alec Waugh. And then, The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, David N. Holvey, M.D., Editor. It is the Twelfth Edition. An open, empty matchbook from a La Quinta hotel separates page 673, section 7, Gastrointestinal Disorders, from the start of Abdominal Pain on page 674. Next, The Handy Home Medical Adviser and Concise Medical Encyclopedia, Morris Fishbein, M.D. And I’m OK – You’re OK, Thomas A. Harris, M.D. There is a tissue marking Chapter 8, Marriage. And the chapter heading epigram is colored over. It is one of La Rochefoucauld’s: We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears. At the end of the shelf, Inside South America, John Gunther. It comes from my parent’s house and is A Book of the Month Club Selection.

  xxxv

  The seventh shelf in the second bookcases in the hallway holds nothing but bony paperbacks. Most are old timers, holding each other up for support. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding. Jews, God and History, Max I. Dimont. Walden or Life in the Woods, Henry D. Thoreau, a Doubleday Dolphin Book, with lots of check marks in its margins. Hotel Du Lac, Anita Brookner. Tucked between pages 160 and 161, This Is My God, Herman Wouk, has a postcard from Eye-40 Motel & Restaurant, Dickson, Tennessee. The postcard is from friends who are iced in, spending “a swinging N.Y. Eve” at the motel and wishing us “all good things in 1977.”Next, Julian, Gore Vidal. And then Messiah, Gore Vidal. When The Troubled Meet, Cornelius Beukenkamp, Jr. M.D., “stories by a Certified Psychoanalyst” of people in group therapy. Then, Go Tell it On The Mountain, James Baldwin. And Blues for Mister Charlie, James Baldwin. And The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin. And Another Country, James Baldwin. Dolores’s name is on the inside front cover of Another Country. The cover has nearly separated, the binding is dissolving. “The great nation-wide bestseller at $5.95, now 75c” is falling apart.

  Next, Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson. And A Room With A View, E. M. Forster. And then, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson. Between pages 6 and 7, I discover a flattened Abba-Zaba wrapper. It is a keepsake, the iconic black type, the yellow rectangle, the checkerboard of black and yellow, the yellow that is almost orange. It is an invocation in the hallway of corn syrup, sugar, peanut better, and dextrose, of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut, palm kernel, palm, soyabean, cotton seed), the lecithin, the salt, the mono and diglycerides. These are ingredients that belong to a potion. They meet at an intersection of the chemical and alchemical. Palm kernel and palm, a conjuration of Arabian deserts, of Abbas and Zabas.

  xxxvi

  How many helpings of Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., do I have on these shelves? At least two have been seen in passing. I have tasted neither of them. They were Ben’s or Eden’s assigned high school reading. Next, The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike. Then, Assorted Prose, John Updike. Then, The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by A.H. Gross. Enemies, A Love Story, Isaac Bashevis Singer carries a lined notecard with Richard and Roma Hoffman printed on it. The home address is Roxbury, New Jersey. Also printed on the card, Richard Hoffman’s work address at Exxon in Florham Park. Last in touch with Roma or Richard? Forty years ago. The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer, holds on to the pink receipt from Neiman Marcus for will call, alterations, Klein suit, houndstooth, 8/29/85.

  The 610 pages of Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prose, Samuel Johnson, edited by Bertrand H. Bronson, have a fade like a suntan around their edges. Next in line, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe. Then, Bussy D’Ambois, George Chapman, edited by Maurice Evans. The Africans, David Lamb. Reflections of a Public Man, Jim Wright. The Thirties And After, Stephen Spender. His Natural Life, Marcus Clarke, edited with an Introduction by Stephen Murray-Smith. Stephen Murray-Smith explains in his introduction that His Natural Life was written in monthly instalments over a period of two years by a young English expatriate in Melbourne, with the first installment appearing in March 1870, in the Australian Journal. Dolores has written her name on the inside cover of this 927-page paperback. Was this endless book required reading? After her death, I found a love letter that Dolores had saved, from a man in Australia, a boyfriend, lover or former lover, though married. Maybe he had recommended His Natural Life. She had saved his letter in a sealed manila envelope. Next, Readings In Philosophy, edited by John Herman Randall, Jr., Justus Buchler, and Evelyn Urban Shirk. Existential Psychology, edited by Rollo May. And Love and Will, Rollo May. The author has signed Love and Will. Either that, or somebody had simply enjoyed writing “Rollo” on the title page.

  Memory is not arbitrary, but it is unpredictable. I have forgotten every word that Michael J. Arlen wrote in his essays about television in The Living Room War, but not John Updike’s blurb on the book’s back cover. “Michael Arlen writes like a water bug skates.” Next, The Odyssey, Homer, translated by E.V. Rieu. October Light, John Gardner. The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner, uses an art card reproduction of The Vision After the Sermon, Paul Gauguin, as a bookmark. It is a wild, vivid scene. In the hallway, the sunlight indirect from either end, Jacob is wrestling with an angel, and the women watching are wearing white bonnets. Then, The Summer Before the Dark, Doris Lessing. A Man and Two Women, Doris Lessing. Daniel Martin, John Fowles. The Car Thief, Theodore Weesner. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster. The Deer Park, Norman Mailer. I never opened and never even heard of Mama Makes Up Her Mind, and Other Dangers of Southern Living, Bailey White, which is “Delightfully eccentric…” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Even so, page 135 is dogeared. Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein, squeezes onto the shelf near the end of the row of paperbacks, announcing “February 22, 1981” on its flyleaf. Last, Love’s Executioner, Irvin D. Yalom, M.D. Folded up inside, a color crayon drawing of a porpoise breaking the surface of the waves, child artist unknown.

  xxxvii

  The Gauguin painting The Vision After the Sermon hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland. It says so on the card tucked into John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. This is enough, in the indirect hallway light, dotted and carrying motes, to raise indirectly a memory of Scotland. I am twenty when I am invited to visit Edinburgh from Christmas to New Year’s in 1971. So odd, remembering the name of the family that I stay with that week, the Drummond Youngs. And also recalling that they ask me to be first over their threshold in the New Year, because my hair is black then, and a dark-haired man is good luck. So, like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day here in the South, in Scotland, they explain, the tradition has to do with Vikings and their bad blonde hair and raids and rapings. With a little tug on the thinnest line of memories, fishing, fishing, I am able to come up with James Drummond Young, a goofy friend of a college classmate, who invited me to Edinburgh that winter break in 1971. In the photograph I am seeing this morning on Wikipedia, he is the Right Honorable Lord Drummond Young, the retired Senator of the College of Justice, bald, eyeglasses, and with wisps of grey hair that touch the tops of his ears.

  xxxviii

  Towers of babbling phrasebooks, pocket dictionaries and teach-yourself-a-foreign-language manuals rise from the bottom shelf of this second bookcase down the hallway. Some are from school days. Other books in the stacks are for tourists, for learning to say “excuse me” and other phrases that will only be needed for ten days to two weeks.

  There is Pan-American Spanish Self-Taught, Francisco Ibarra. Then Dictionnaire Larousse, French English, English French. Portuguese is a Rough Guide phrasebook. French Stories and Tales, edited by Stanley Geist. Collins Latin-English English-Latin Dictionary. Follett Vest-Pocket Dictionary – French. And then A New Introduction to Greek, Alton Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips, Jr. Material Auxiliar, CIDOC Idioma, Cuernavaca Language School, was used during on-site study three weeks in 1977. I found Carcel de Mujeres, a comic book no bigger than a business card, on the street in Cuernavaca.

  Chinese At A Glance is Barron’s Phrase Book and Dictionary for Travelers. The ticket stubs to gardens and shrines left inside it are all in Chinese, so color pictures of bridges, pagodas, green water and rock gardens on these tickets bring nothing to mind. On a business card, a native speaker writes Mi Bei Yan under three printed Chinese characters. It could be a transliteration, how to say the name of a restaurant. Or it could mean “Please help me.”

  The Italian Travel Mate is “An A to Z Phrasebook,” compiled by Lexus with Annelisa Franchini. Dizionario Tascabile Mondadori, is Italian-English, English-Italian. German Phrasebook, from Lonely Planet, has the business cards inside for Minotel Suisse, Livio Tuena-Triacca, Poschiavo, and for Cantinetta Antinori, Augustinergasse 25, Zurich. Each one evokes a memory of Pam, but nothing specific, more the idea of her. Italian In Three Months, Milena Reynolds, Hugo’s Simplified System, is dogeared at page 81. It looks like I worked my way through to Dimmi la verita on page 80. On earlier pages I copied down phrases, such as E la loro specialita!, and conjugations as well – vai va andiamo andate vanno. Next, Diccionario, another Spanish-English English-Spanish dictionary, this one from The University of Chicago. Then, Putnam’s Contemporary German Dictionary. And College Yiddish, Uriel Weinreich, preface by Roman Jakobson. Basic Italian, Charles Speroni and Carlo L. Golino. And Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, the abridged version.

  The cover has separated from Frederic M. Wheelock’s Latin, An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors. Most of the pages are scribbled on. Each chapter in this school book has its Sententiae Antiquae, with my asterisks and underlining on formerly famous phrases. 201 Italian Verbs, Vincent Luciani. Berlitz Basic German Dictionary. Spanish In Three Months, Isabel Cisneros, another example of Hugo’s Simplified System. The cover is gone from Follett’s Vest-Pocket Spanish Dictionary. Cassell’s Latin-English Dictionary, the last of these language books, has my son’s name on its inside cover. Jesuit Prep must have encouraged Ben to study Latin. Or he may have preferred it to required Spanish or French alternatives. He left a small square of paper in the middle of this Latin dictionary. His blocky printing is on it, some Latin along with the translation. “To the gate Publius and Furianus, slaves in the carriage,” he writes. “Four horses pulled, dragged and ascended. Mother and sister cried and said ‘Goodbye!’”

  xxxix

  Foreign phrases stronger than “where is the drugstore” are needed for my legs and stiffening back as I sit cross legged on the hardwood in the hallway. There are no more dictionaries or phrasebooks on this shelf. Instead, An Innocent Millionaire, Stephen Vizinczey, follows Cassell’s Latin-English Dictionary. Stephen Vizinczey, the author also of In Praise of Older Women, a book that Penny Borax used to carry around with her at Westchester High School in 1967; olive-complected Penny Borax, who rejected my valentine in 2nd grade at Kentwood Elementary in 1957.Memories are echoing, as if Stephen Vizinczey has shouted from the shelf into the canyon of the hallway.

  xl

  Next, Growing Young, Ashley Montagu; probably Dolores’s, since the author has signed the flyleaf. Then, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, William A. Rossi. New Stories from The South, edited by Shannon Ravenel. Selected Poetry and Letters, Byron, introduction by Edward E. Bostetter. And Discovering the Laws of Life, John Marks Templeton, foreword by Norman Vincent Peale.

  Their Mothers’ Sons, Edward A. Strecker, A.M., M.D., Sc.D. Litt.D., LL.D., copyright 1946, J.B. Lippincott Company, is subtitled The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem. On page 205, Dr. Strecker asks, “What about you? Do you have momistic tendencies?” Then, The Southland Columbiad and Other Poems, Hon. William Allen, 1897, Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Barbee & Smith, Agents. Then, Fundamentals of Play Directing, Alexander Dean and Lawrence Carra. Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, Jonathan Swift, edited by Louis A. Landa, has a note on a business card from The Jamison Galleries, 111 East San Francisco, Santa Fe. The Earl Biss lithograph “Mirror Pass,” part of an edition of 100, costs $300. Next, The Sufferings of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, edited by Harry Steinhauer. Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe. Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, introduction by Alfred Kazin. And, end of the row, Tennyson’s Poetry, selected and edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr.

  xli

  Tennyson’s Poetry is a light in the depths of this bottom shelf. The sketch by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, “Tennyson Reading Maud,” decorates its bright green jacket. A future reader can read the penciled notes in the margins of the introduction to these 681 pages, the underlined remark of Edward Bulwar Lytton, who wrote of Tennyson, “outbabying Wordsworth, outglittering Keats.” For that same unlikely reader, I tucked into Tennyson’s Poetry the torn ticket from the Cinematheque in the Palais de Chaillot at the corner of Avenue President Wilson and Avenue Albert de Mun (metro: Trocadero), and the brown band that encircled a folded Le Monde delivered to the Demongeot apartment at 62 Rue Du Cardinal Lemoine 75005 Paris, in May, 1973. An ugly postcard is hidden here, too. “You don’t know BEANS til you’ve been to Boston”, it screams, over a collage of sailboats and Beacon Hill and a giant mug of baked beans on a checked tablecloth. With this postcard, 1971 arrives in the hallway. It is sent by Jerry Reneau, an older student, meaning twenty-four or twenty-five. Are you still alive, Jerry? You were worldly, when I was twenty. The card sends me back. Then back it goes, between pages 118 and 119, marking the start of In Memoriam.

  Chapter Eleven
  TALKING TO MYSELF

  For centuries, some say until the tenth century, most of the reading that went on was done aloud. That breach in the silence must have been annoying, but also entertaining, and a bond between reader and listener. Reading silently? Not for our ancestors.

  ii

  The plans I make for my unemployed son are not his plans. I have made lists of possible employers, of openings for jobs, names of staffing agencies, and the names of career consultants. I copy links to testimonials from smiling, attractive individuals who became healthcare technicians or aviation mechanics after signing up for the for-profit degree program. To make a to-do list is to talk to yourself. To make one for someone else, that is an act of hallucinatory imagination.

  Usually, these to-do lists are in late-night emails I send to myself, print out, and then hide in the pages of books on the hallway shelves. They are in English but might as well be in an invisible ink or a secret code. I write down solutions, next steps, further steps. On the page, I speak directly to my beloved son, who lives alone in his unkempt condominium in a leafy neighborhood fifteen minutes away. He is a man in his forties, leaning back on the broken sofa

  in front of the huge television downstairs in his living room, or leaning forward in front of the computer monitor on a desk in his bedroom upstairs.

  One of these lists is hiding in The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, third hallway bookcase, the top shelf. It provides four numbered options. Number one is the status quo. I continue to support Ben at the current level, adjusted for inflation, for the rest of his life. Number two, he looks for whatever work a high school graduate can get, “despite your weight and age.” Three, a subset of number two, he goes to an employment agency. Number four, Ben commits to something that requires job training and begins the training. “Maybe something healthcare related,” I pretend to tell him, “a home health care assistant, a pharmacy tech.” And I add, “or it can be something related to computers.” I am talking to myself. His number one option for now is option number one. For now, I tell myself.

  iii

  Third hallway bookcase, top shelf:

  The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell, is the first book on the top shelf of the third bookcase down the hallway. Joseph Campbell casts his eyes downward in the author’s photo on the back flap of the book jacket. His head tilts soulfully to the left, and the right side of his face is bathed in shadow. Photo by Philippe Halsman. This is the photographer who helped mythologize Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dali as well. Einstein, too. The front flap of the jacket still has the price sticker on it, from the Students’ Store, No Exchanges or Refunds If this Label is Removed. Next, The Iliad, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, with drawings by Hans Erni. This book wearing a glossy orange jacket feels as new as a sunrise over the Aegean. Then Critical Affairs, Ned Rorem. And Living The Mindful Life, Charles T. Tart, foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche. And Finding God, Rifat Sonsino and Daniel B. Syme. No author is named for The Teaching of Buddha. It says on its very first page any part of this book may be quoted without permission. “We only ask that Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai be credited.”

  Next, Taoism, The Parting of the Way, Holmes Welch. This is Joseph P. Walcott’s book that I never returned. Inside, a printed thank you note from Fred and Melinda Shapiro, blank aside from the pre-printed message. “Fred and Melinda Shapiro thank you for your thoughtful expression of sympathy and kindness during this difficult time.” The note is from 1988. It came after Fred’s wife died, and their child, Melinda, was still a teenager. Melinda had already been diagnosed by then with the brain tumor that led to her blindness and other incapacities. She died in her early forties. Selected Writings on Nature and Liberty, Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Oscar Cargill, for the American Heritage Series, has Dolores’s name inside. It includes Thoreau’s poems, letters, essays, and a selection from Walden. It must have been assigned. All of her underlining in blue pen is in two essays, Walking and Civil Disobedience.

  Next, Lupercal, Ted Hughes. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce. Poems 1950-1966, A Selection, Thom Gunn. Desperate Pleasures, A Monograph, Dennis Carlyle Darling. What is a monograph, exactly? I slide out this book of photographs. Desperate Pleasures was an entry in a graphic design competition in Austin, where I was an invited judge, in the late 1980s. There is a letter inside on the letterhead of the Department of Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin. “I heard you liked the book. I think you should have one. Thanks for your interest.” It makes me laugh, this letter. It is the only one on these shelves, or that I ever received, signed “Darling.”

  An Age Like This, 1920-1940, is the first of four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Volume 2, My Country Right or Life, 1940-1943, is bookmarked with an out-of-fashion business card from Williams Western Tailors, 123 W. Exchange, Fort Worth, Texas. As I Please, 1943-1945, George Orwell, is Volume 3, and In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, George Orwell, Volume 4. Then, another series, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, Kevin Starr. Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era, Kevin Starr. And Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s, Kevin Starr. Not a page has been read, but I remember Kevin Starr. He is teaching the survey course in American literature at Harvard in 1971, lecturing while I sit doodling in my distant seat, listening to the pop and burble in the iron radiators along the back of the lecture hall.

  Between two pages of Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche, I discover a xeroxed newspaper column by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Her column on “the four R’s that make up repentance” is pressed against a lost photograph of Pam and me, all smiles, cheek to cheek, both of us in sunglasses. On the book jacket, it says that Sogyal Rinpoche was born in Tibet “and raised by one of the most revered spiritual masters of this century,” which was last century.

  Another souvenir postcard is inside New Selected Poems, Philip Levine, this one “Study for a Portrait,” Francis Bacon, from The Hess Collection Winery in Napa. Then, The Art of War, Sun Tzu, translated by Thomas Cleary. Lincoln: A Photobiography, Russell Freedman. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, foreword by Ellen Shapiro, illustrated by Noel Pocock. Edgar Allan Poe Reader includes essays by George Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. A used, never-opened copy of The World of Pooh, A.A. Milne, is resting on this shelf from whatever winding road brought it here. Its flyleaf is inscribed: “To Larry from Mother and Dad, Christmas 1958.”

  The Structure of Magic, Richard Bandler and John Grinder. The Structure of Magic II, John Grinder and Richard Bandler. These two books have nothing to do with card tricks or rabbits in hats. Instead, they “distill and formalize the patterns of therapeutic interaction common to psychotherapy.” Prose and Poetry of America, edited by H. Ward McGraw, A.M., is another book Dolores left behind. She also left a Kleenex on page 411, marking “When Frost is On The Pumpkin,” James Whitcomb Riley. Another tissue is holding her place at “An April Morning” by Bliss Carmen. A third, last tissue has stopped for at least sixty years at page 463, alongside “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Only two more books on this first shelf, third hallway bookcase: Therapeutic Metaphors, David Gordon, dedicated “To Richard Bandler and John Grinder,” and Great Experiments in Psychology, Henry E. Garret. Dolores has written one of her married names, from one of her prior marriages, on the flysheet of Great Experiments. Her name at the time, from before my time.

  iv

  The Art of War and The World of Pooh are books of uncertain origins. So are dozens of others that have landed on a shelf, a desk, a tabletop. They have prior owners, they belonged elsewhere. I have only guesses for how they happen to be here.

  v

  There are two thousand pages of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters in the four volumes on the first shelf, third bookcase. I have read the first seven pages of Volume 1, “Why I Write.” It was originally published in 1946 in the summer issue of Gangrel, a “short-lived quarterly literary magazine” that was based in London and only lasted four issues. Orwell’s essay appeared in the final issue. In it, Orwell says he knew from the age of five that he “should be a writer.” He says it is a compensation for being lonely, disagreeable, and unpopular. He writes poems to start with, and “a whole rhyming play” when he is fourteen. He begins to create narrations of his own activities, no matter how ordinary those are. Words thrill him, even the sounds of them, especially their sounds, for no reason he can explain.

  vi

  Second shelf, third bookcase down the hallway:

  The Spanish Frontier in North America, David J. Weber. A newspaper clipping, August 23, 2010, is buried under the front cover. “Distinguished professor and historian dies.” No mention in the article of David’s advisory role on the scriptwriting project that died in 1978. Foreigners in their Native Land, edited by David J. Weber, is a collection of source material subtitled Historical roots of the Mexican Americans. Next, Faces of the Borderlands, Monograph Number 52, Southwestern Studies, The University of Texas at El Paso. This book of twenty-one drawings by Jose Cisneros has text by the artist. The handwriting on the flyleaf is like calligraphy. For Mark Perkins, it says, with great respect and admiration. Cordially, Jose Cisneros. His drawings are pen and ink studies, with lots of crosshatching, two in color and the rest black and white. He does Conquistador, Viceroy, Spanish Pioneer Woman, Spanish Frontier Officer, Mission Indian Boy, Mexican Muleteer, Desperado, Vaquero, Queen of the Fiesta, Cowhand, and Stagecoach Driver. If I ever met Jose Cisneros, I do not remember him, or how his signed book came cordially to be here.

  Next, Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in California, Rose Hollenbaugh Avina. And Mexicans in California After the U.S. Conquest, with an introduction by Carlos E. Cortes. And The Little Lion of the Southwest, Marc Simmons, which is also inscribed. For Mark Perkins, after your visit to my camp in the Cerrillos Badlands, with warmest regards, Marc Simmons, Oct. 1978. Then, Dichos – Spanish Sayings from the Southwest, Judy Peterson. The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century, Richard E. Greenleaf. Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West, C.L. Sonnichsen. All these books are from the months of script research in 1978. They have separated from their compadres on the shelf across from the downstairs desk. Next, The Enlightened: The Writings of Luis de Carvajal, El Mozo, translated, edited, and with an introduction and epilogue by Seymour B. Liebman. It is the story of a converso, one of the secret Jews caught by the Inquisition in New Spain. If I had taken on Carvajal for my script series, instead of Chavez, maybe the Endowment for the Humanities would have gone for it.

  The Pueblo Indians of North America, Edward P. Dozier, has margin notes and underlines, brackets and asterisks on pages about San Felipe Pueblo and the katchina cults. Then, On The Border: Portraits of America’s Southwestern Frontier, Tom Miller. And then The Man Who Killed The Deer, Frank Waters. New Mexico Village Arts, Roland F. Dickey, has a bookmark from Villagra Book Shop, Santa Fe.

  In The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, introduction by J.M. Cohen, J. M. Cohen writes that “Bernal Diaz del Castillo, last survivor of the Conquerors of Mexico, died on his estates in Guatemala at the age of eighty-nine, as poor as he had lived.” Historia de la Conquista de Nueva Espana, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, is the original Spanish version. I found it at a libreria in Mexico City, San Juan de Letran, No. 5. A Visitante sticker from Industrial Minera Mexico, Unidad de Taxco, is affixed to its back cover. Memories, too, are submerged in the hallway near this paperback. No fault of the dim sunlight in the hallway, but I can barely see the disappearing, reappearing faces of classmates from the Spanish language school in Cuernavaca in 1978. Their laughter is like ripples on a lake. There is a car trip into Taxco, the tolerant Mexican who escorts us into a defunct silver mine. It all seems unlikely now. I am trying to fish an image of the rental car from the same watery pool, but it must be far deeper down.

  vii

  These hallway shelves are aligned toward the south, in the direction of the far garden and the creek. The books on the rest of this second row are all over the map. Lytton Strachey The Unknown Years 1880-1910 is Volume I of Michael Holroyd’s two volume set. It shares its dusty, discolored slipcase with Lytton Strachey The Years of Achievement 1910-1932. In a faded yellow jacket, Quest for Reality is a hardbound Swallow Press anthology of short poems selected by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields. My notes are penciled in the margins of Charles Churchill’s “The Dedication to the Sermon.” Two index cards under the back cover are filled with more notes on this same poem. Was I writing a term paper? This afternoon, these notes read like mutterings. They seem detached from reality, and far from any quest for it. Next, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright 1964, Ernest Hemingway Ltd. Its pretty jacket reproduces an oil painting of Pont Neuf by Hildegard Rath. The book has a $1 purchase price stamp on its olive gray flysheet. Next, Gimpel the Fool, Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Saul Bellow and others. Then Philosophic Classics, Thales to Ockham, texts selected and edited with prefaces by Walter Kaufmann.

  The WPA Guide to New York City, with a new introduction by William H. Whyte, holds a business card from New York Bound Bookshop, 43 West 54th Street. Pages of the guide are blotched, as though its age were a rash. On the last page of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, I wrote “p. 226” and circled it. There must be something on page 226, some passage or phrase of interest, but whatever it was is no longer there.

  A Cab at The Door, V.S. Pritchett, is a partial memory, as many memories are. A gift from a friend, but not from the friend I thought it was from. A letter dated November 1972 is folded up in the middle this $1.95 paperback. It begins, “I am not inscribing the book itself in case you want to exchange it for another.” Next, Reading Poems, Wright Thomas and Stuart Gerry Brown. Then, Carmina, C. Valerii Catulli, R.A.B. Mynors. Other than the word “Appendix,” and some footnotes in Greek, every word in this slim blue book is in Latin. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats has an ex-libris sticker from John Winthrop House. Its inside back cover has the Winthrop House Library sticker, with due dates stamped in it. The twelve due dates start on May 3, 1965.February 3, 1969 was the very last time this book in its blue library binding has ever been due. Next, Outerbridge Reach, Robert Stone. And The Force of Reason, Oriana Fallaci. And Damascus Gate, Robert Stone. An article from London Review of Books under its cover begins, “Robert Stone was the feral child of American literature.” Bear and His Daughter, Robert Stone, hides another article. This one, from Men’s Health, March 1998, touts “27 fun fitness goals that’ll get you in shape.”

  Zen Gardens: Kyoto’s Nature Enclosed, Tom Wright and Mizuno Katsuhiko. Pam writes on the flysheet: “July 27, 2003, Kyoto, Japan. We walked all over and rode the subway and bus.” By that summer of 2003, she was only three years from walking out. I don’t recall taking the subway in Kyoto, if there is one. And maybe we were also on a bus. Modes of transportation are very rarely memorable. There is the Orient Express, the Titanic, the dog sled in a Jack London tale, the elephants in the Carthaginian wars. But I cannot catch a bus in Kyoto in my memory. Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Tahir Shah, is next in this row. Then, Learning Theory and Behavior, O. Hobart Mowrer. Dolores writes on the inside cover: “If lost, please return at once to…” She underlines “at once” and provides an address from years ago. Her book is littered with underlines, margin notes, and “Read!” commands. So, a school book.

  It occurs to me, never again will I read a book I will be tested on.

  viii

  Admittance to Dodger Stadium, August 1, 1971, Sunday afternoon, 1:00 P.M. The green ticket is inside The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, the blue bound book that I never returned to the wood-paneled library at John Winthrop House. In smaller print, it elaborates that admittance is to The Los Angeles Times – Dodgers Straight “A” Student game, a seat at the Green Level, 1st Base Side. And it bookmarks the page with “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” which is as timeless as a baseball diamond:

  I think it better in times like these

  “A poet’s mouth….”
  “We have no…”
  “He has had…”
  “A young girl…”
  “Or an old…”

  A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

  By 1971, I no longer need a student deferment. Vietnam is not my worry. A draft lottery number in the high two hundreds keeps me safe enough.

  ix

  Another category to consider for a reorganization of these shelves: Books I have pretended to understand even when I did not. Too many of the books squeezed onto a shelf will fit comfortably into that category. I was a university student, or still unmarried, or not yet widowed, or not yet handling motherless teenagers when I first read them. I went through motions. I mouthed words on a page, breathing into them whatever life I gave them. Then they were shelved and forgotten. If I open the same books now, the same misunderstood words emerge. But now they are vibrating, and making noises, like the cicadas that appear once every thirteen or seventeen years, rising into the trees, singing and mating.

  x

  Third hallway bookcase, third shelf down:

  Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. On a bookmark, a printed quote from Hermann Hesse: “Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot. A man can find it, he can live it, he can be filled and sustained by it, but he cannot utter or teach it.” Next, New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, with an introduction by Nathan Englander. Structural Integrity, Loren Mozley, an exhibit catalog. Jim Thompson The House on the Klong, text by William Warren, photography by Luca Tettoni. And two “art books,” The Meadows Museum, William B. Jordan, and Visions: James Surls, 1974-1984, Sue Graze, foreword Harry S. Parker, Jr.

  The art books on this third shelf are mostly exhibit catalogs from museums. In a stack, El Greco of Toledo, December 1982- February 1983. And The Shogun Age Exhibition, March 1984. And Gerald Murphy, An American Painter in Paris, February – April 1986. And Visions of the West, September – November 1986.Pompeii A.D. 79, Volume I and Pompeii A.D. 79, Volume II, are perfect-bound catalogs from one forgotten exhibition. And, like children on a father’s shoulders, the entire stack of catalogs sits on the supine H. W. Janson’s History of Art. When Aunt Bertha had a hunger for culture, she sought it in literature. She placed The World’s Greatest Books on a shelf in the poorest apartment. But we are part of an icon-driven culture these days. If not as peasantry, then as patrons. For the wealthiest, the visual arts are the ticket to higher culture, and a good investment, too.

  xi

  The correspondence on the flysheet of One Day’s Perfect Weather, Daniel Stern, goes back and forth between me and my mother. I go first: “August 2007. Dear Mom, I hope you enjoy reading this book. It is yours for your 87th birthday. How about giving it back to me in November for my 56th? Let’s do that, back and forth for the next ten years!” Sometime later, it could have been that November as requested, this message appears below mine: “I was 86 not 87 on August 13, 2007. Also, I want this book back.” One Day’s Perfect Weather is praised on its jacket by Cynthia Ozick, Frank Kermode, and Harold Bloom. I never read it, never mind a bookmark on page 67, the business card from an okonomiyaki restaurant in Tokyo.

  Next, Body Work, Melissa Febos. On the cover, Cheryl Strayed calls it “an instant classic.” It is anything but that. Whitman, selected by Robert Creeley. This black Penguin “Poet to Poet” paperback is a book of memories from 1973. There are fourteen stickers saying Maroc on its cover. I can see the moment it came into my hand. An American, straight brown hair falling past his shoulders, same age as I am, or so I am reporting to the memory police, hands this book to me in passing as he is leaving the Metro in Paris. No reason, he just does. Unremembered, which stop, or whether I am leaving, too. Over the next weeks, I apply the stickers to the Whitman cover. These stickers are peeled off the oranges that I am buying day by day from a cart on Rue Mouffetard. On the inside back cover and written upside down as though Whitman had been offered to her across a café table, Jocelyne, whoever she is, writes her name and address: Jocelyne, 80 Boulevard de Menilmontant, 75020 – Paris. Then, in a section of “Song of Myself,” I find a greeting card. It is a cartoonish illustration. A whimsical slot machine, with 1 Mai 73 in the slot machine windows. Three birds in a nest, caterpillars, a spider’s web, and unruly spiraling vegetation. A Marc, it says inside the card, bien amicalement, G. Schrieber. Schreiber, the illustrator, and a friend of his stopped to pick me up when I was hitchhiking out of Paris one morning. I was trying to get to Chartres. I am by myself in the back seat listening to them. His friend is telling him about the American girl he slept with the night before, une negre, tres jolie…

  These memories are not stories. They have no beginning or end, only middles.

  xii

  Next, The Land of Mild Light, Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas, edited by Nidia Hernandez. Harvard College Class of 1974 Fifth Anniversary Report. And then, Invisible Storytellers, Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film, Sarah Kozloff. The author dedicates her book “To my brother, Daniel Kozloff, who used to read me stories and take me to the movies.” Between pages 82 and 83, another appreciation from Sarah Kozloff, this one on a postcard she sent to my parents: “Once again,” she writes, “we wish to thank you for your hospitality. We enjoyed the visit very much….” Sarah is Dan’s younger sister. The two of them visited Los Angeles the last summer I was still living at home. They came down from Berkeley, where Dan was about to drop out of school. Only one clear memory from that visit. A Filipina girl, cute as a button, climbing on top of me. She was a friend, just friends, but when she saw that high-school senior Sarah had come to visit, she became a girlfriend.

  Then, four copies of Southwest Review, Winter 1978.An MLA Style Sheet, compiled by William Riley Parker. Five issues of Poetry magazine, from 1970 and 1971.Two issues of The Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 1987 and Spring 1988. On the rest of this shelf: Frank Lloyd Wright Mid-Century Modern, photographs by Alan Weintraub, text by Alan Hess. A discolored Air The Trees, Larry Eigner, illustrated by Bobbie Creeley, Black Sparrow Press, 1968. Almost all the books now in the hallway were in storage during my second marriage, in a room off the garage. Their shadows and discolorations are from that time. The Arts of the French Book – 1900 – 1965, Eleanor M. Garvey and Peter A. Wick. Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 Fifteenth Anniversary Report. Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1974 Twentieth Anniversary Report. Next, 956 crisp, unread pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, Modern Library, Volume I, 180 A.D. – 395 A.D. Then, 923 more pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, Volume II, 395 A.D – 1185 A.D. Wild Fruits, Henry David Thoreau, edited and introduced by Bradley P. Dean, is “Thoreau’s rediscovered last manuscript,” according to the book jacket. Then, a bright blue Gates of Prayer, For Weekdays, Sabbaths, and Festivals. Next to it, the dull red cover of Gates of Repentance For The Days of Awe. Its title page is covered with crayon scribbles and drawings of flowers, and “To Mom from Ben Eden Daddy, Mother’s Day 1990.”The words are different colors. The “o” in “Mom” is shaped like a heart.

  Then, Old Love, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Him With His Foot In His Mouth, Saul Bellow. See Jane Win, Dr. Sylvia Rimm. Psychology of Learning and Behavior, Barry Schwartz, comes last in this row. Notes are penciled all over the margins of its pages. The handwriting looks like mine, but the book looks unreadable, with confusing diagrams, equations, and 400 pages of peak shift, stimulus control, and competence versus performance.

  xiii

  A printout of a passage from a commentary on Leviticus falls out of the pages of Wild Fruits. Leviticus 7:15 instructs that the “flesh of the thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being” must be eaten on the day that it is offered. No leftovers allowed. And why is this? The paragraph that has been stored inside Thoreau’s “last manuscript” offers the reasoning of a fifteenth century commentator. He argues that the thanksgiving sacrifice is a miracle. You leave none of it for tomorrow precisely because of your faith in a new miracle tomorrow. Each day is its own miracle.

  xiv

  A printout left in Louise Gluck’s Poems 1962 – 2012 says that a library in the Egypt of the Pharaohs had the inscription “House of Healing” carved into its stone façade. Is this an allusion to the health benefits of reading? There have been such claims, many have said that reading has medicinal properties. Reading will keep you sharp, it keeps the mind alive, it can lower the blood pressure. It may even prolong life. This may be especially true for the compulsive, who must finish whatever they start. It will take more years than I have to finish the two volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Not to mention The Letters of John Addington Symonds, all three of those thick volumes in their forest green jackets. Or the one stuffed volume of Louise Gluck.

  xv

  Fourth shelf, third bookcase down the hallway:

  Exit Ghost, Philip Roth, another gift from Bill Gilliland. The small bookstore Bill and Larry McMurtry co-owned in the “80s was at 2611 Worthington in Dallas. Lavish Organic Nail Spa has the space these days. Funeral Rites, Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman. For mysterious reasons, the title of this novel is only on the back of the book jacket. The cover is all Brassai, his photo of a small man who is losing his hair. Genet’s sleeves are rolled up to his biceps, his shirt opened at the neck. Next, Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet. Then, English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Howard Mumford Jones. The inscription on the flyleaf: “To John Joseph, for the wonderful hours of reading I had in 1968 as the result of your suggestions and books – Merry Christmas – Patricia.”

  xvi

  There was no binge watching in the 1970s, no streaming an entire season or multiple seasons of Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. There was binge reading. One Graham Greene after another, seasons of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or, on this fourth shelf, Nabokov. Notes on Prosody and Abram Gannibal, Vladimir Nabokov, is followed by Nabokov’s Congeries, selected and with a critical introduction by Page Stegner. Then, Glory, Vladimir Nabokov. And King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov. The glossy jacket of Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov, is on backwards. When I flip it around, out falls a note on an index card from Danny Kozloff, Sarah’s big brother. He says he has just mailed me this book as a gift. “I saw LaVoa yesterday,” he writes, “grey-skinned as ever.” Fifty years later I have no clue who LaVoa was in 1971. The red stamped “For Deposit Only” on the flysheet of Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov, is another mystery. Next, The Gift, Vladimir Nabokov. Then, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, with its glossary pages recalling that Zembla was “a distant northern country.” Ada, the last of these Nabokov hardbacks, has an obituary, “Lolita author dies,” buried under its back flap. Its jacket is torn. On the flysheet, most of the notes I made of pages and phrases from the novel are short, only a word or two. For example, “pudibund swoon, p. 443.”On a torn scrap left between page 4 and page 5, someone writes Blaha, 29 Rue de Grenelle, Paris 75007, avant 21.00. But nothing can bring Blaha back, not even Google Street View, which can show me the two wooden doors, blood red, on the stone façade of 29 Rue de Grenelle, and the windows on the ground floor that are framed in pale green wood and crisscrossed with metal bars.

  And then, between 261 and 262 of Ada, a lock of hair, as fragile as a butterfly. Light brown, tied with a pale green thread, but also loose and fluttering in memory, avoiding the net. Stranded, these strands of hair. And how is it possible to not remember whose? Next, Mary, Vladimir Nabokov, holds other keepsakes, a street map of Paris, two metro tickets, a receipt from Credit Commercial de France, and a folded sheet of waxy pink paper from Yves Thomas Boulanger Patissier Glacier 4 Rue St. Maurice Chartres. In 1973, it wrapped a flan. I can google the same address this morning, and 4 Rue St. Maurice is still almost what it was. Not Yves Thomas any longer, but Boulangerie St. Maurice, in Chartres. For some mysteries, the solution is unimportant. It is only the clues that matter. The solution is unavailable. Surely this is true for the greatest mysteries.

  xvii

  The Lyric Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Ernest Rhys, printed in 1885, is dainty little book, only three inches by five inches. A kind of pocketbook. It may have been pocketed in 1972 from the Harvard College Library. Or borrowed and not returned. Either way, this would not have been the first time it went missing. “Substituted for a copy lost” is written in pencil on page 4, below a stamped date, Dec 20 1897. Next, The Social Contract and Discourses, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Then, another “how-did-it-get-here” book, English 3 Selected Readings and Exercises, Volume II, The University of Chicago Twelfth Edition, November 1947. In its first section, titled “Nature and Function of Assumptions,” it offers excerpts from Aristotle, Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Egon Friedell, Vincent Scramuzza, and Robert Graves. Then, The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, edited by Agnes Latham, from The Muses Library. Then, The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe: with His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by His Son, In Eight Volumes, London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. MDCCCXXXIV.I have Volume 1.Did I take this book, too, from one of the Harvard libraries? Volume 1 has a loose cover. As I fumble with it, its cover detaches entirely. Maybe because this book is a son’s labor on behalf of his father, or because I want to go where no other readers will go, I open The Poetical Works and land on the rambling heading to Chapter IV. It is 1781. “Mr. Crabbe’s Letter to Burke,” it begins, “and Its Consequences –The Publication of “The Library.’ – He is Domesticated at Beaconsfield. – Takes Orders. – Is Appointed Curate at Aldborough.”

  xviii

  In 1973, Catherine Demongeot’s apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine has a single wooden bookcase. I borrowed the paperback Oeuvres Poetiques D’Arthur Rimbaud from it, and brought it home with me from Paris. Where Le Bateau Ivre begins, between pages 88 and 89, I placed a torn review of a different book about Arthur Rimbaud. The reviewer writes that Rimbaud is “only 16 when he created arguably the single greatest French lyric poem of the 19th century.” No one can argue with “arguably.” I was already twenty-one when I wrote a cringeworthy entry on a blank page opposite the inside back cover of Ouevres Poetiques. I am confessing that I am taking Catherine Demongeot’s Rimbaud with me when I leave Paris. Then I quote a stanza of il pleure dans mon coeur.

  What now? Do I tear out this embarrassing page and throw it in a white wastebasket under the desk downstairs? Or do I leave it in Oeuvres Poetiques D’Arthur Rimbaud, fourth shelf, third bookcase down the hallway? To trash it or leave it is less concerning than the illusion that someone will see this page one day in the future, and the even more magical belief that I will be around to care.

  xix

  I left college in 1972, a year before graduation. Then I returned, limping to the finish line two years later. The year in between, 1973, is a fiction. Most of the years that followed seem undifferentiated by comparison. 1973 is like the stack of clear plastic sleeves between the covers of a leather photo album, each sleeve filled with photographs, six on one side, six on the other. Here are some snapshots:

  Berkeley, California, January.

  My father visits me on Ward Street. May comes over while he is there. “Your taste is in your mouth,” he says, after she leaves.

  My roommate Lew goes to see my girlfriend May and does not return for three or four days. I write about it on an inside back page of Ada, the Nabokov hardback.

  With Joe Walcott, one of Lew’s friends, in the coffee house we go to on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Its name is the same as the poem – Le Bateau Ivre.

  Bill Stixrude teaches me Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, a week before he drops out of sight, going home to Washington State. Bill, with his thin reddish beard, is an apple falling from the tree.

  Laura, last name unremembered, rides with me from San Rafael, on a drive cross country. Her sister Marci has a place to leave my car in Maryland, before I take the Air Icelandic flight to Paris. The car is a 1966 wine-colored Mustang. It stays in the weeds on a farm property owned by the Shrivers, until I return for it months later, when it starts right up, as though I had never been gone.

  Laura and I are sleeping in my car at the rim of the Grand Canyon, its depth a few feet from the hood. I wake up and find ice on the windshield.

  Laura sings in the car: Dites moi, pourquoi La vie est belle Dites moi, pourquoi La vie est gai.

  She says her father is retired CIA. Her ex-boyfriend, or one of them, lives in Albuquerque. We stop there, and he asks can she please stay longer.

  On the way to Maryland, stopping at a house in Boulder where Rise Goren lives. Rise, with an umlaut over the “e”. Danny Kozloff told me I will fall in love with her, and I do, though only for two days.

  Waiting for Rise on the stairs. A sweet smell in the stairway, as if it were a bakery. It turns out to be the odor of English Leather cologne. The street name and number of the house that I would never forget? Forgotten.

  A bee stings Laura’s eye on Marci’s farm in Maryland. Her fat face swells up like a gourd from the garden. When she does her sit-ups, I hold her ankles down. She is sweating and cheerful.

  Arrival in Paris by train at night, in the Spring. Then, sitting in a cafe for hours in the afternoon, with an Italian dictionary, reading Dante.

  In the Luxembourg Gardens, an Arab pesters a nun. A small ticket entitles me to a folding chair nearby. When the Arab finally gives up, the nun rolls her eyes.

  I buy oranges daily in Rue Mouffetard and collect the little black labels that say Maroc.

  Catherine Demongeot is off at university studying political science. At 10 or 11, she had been Zazie dans le Metro in the Louis Malle film of Queneau’s novel. Her mother shows me her picture on the cover of a Paris Match in her apartment on the Rue Cardinal Lemoine.

  One evening in Paris, I see a panther in a nightclub near La Place de L’Opera. Later that evening, Michelle Elizabeth Strelin and her friend walk home in the dark with me. The three of us see under a streetlamp a bum with white hair and white moustache, perfectly groomed. “Ah, regard le clochard, come il est digne!” her friend says. I cannot remember her friend’s name or forget her phrase. In her apartment a small sign over the sink said tout va bien.

  Because I want to see Chartres, I hitch a ride with two strangers, Gerard and Philippe. In a car half a day outside the city Philippe brags to his friend about the girl who had stayed the night with him, une noire Americaine tres jolie. Another evening out. I meet a fat Frenchman who asks where was I from. “Oof, John Wayne!” he says in response, and in admiration of America.

  I go to Straw Dogs at the Cinematheque. It is called Chiens de Paille. Dustin Hoffman speaks English, and I read the French subtitles.

  I am an unkempt tourist without a camera on the streets. A flic stops to question me.

  I am also reading the slogans on the sides of stone buildings, A bas la loi Debre! And on newsstands, the headline L’Affaire Watergate.

  One morning, on a train out of Paris to Charleville. There is green grass everywhere – at the race track, and at a chateau open to the public, where an Ingres painting hangs over a mantel. Rimbaud had gone the other way, into Paris on the train from Charleville, a rube from the country, a strange boy, as odd as the mauves of Puvis de Chauvanne in another room of the chateau.

  An American student in the Metro hands me a paperback of Whitman’s poetry as he exits. Like a prisoner keeping count on the wall of a cell, I apply the black stickers that say Maroc to the Whitman cover.

  Driving back to California from Maryland after two months and some days in Paris. Passing yellow undeveloped fields. And on the radio, the George Harrison melody My Sweet Lord.

  In Winslow, Arizona, under a blue sky, an unexpected patch of snow on the highway. My car slides away from me and jumps the median and is caught on a tree stump. A cowboy in a pickup, scarecrow thin, his mouth a rictus, laughs as he drives past.

  Back in Los Angeles for the summer, I am a meter reader for the Department of Water and Power, on foot, admiring the stucco houses, the arroyos descending to the Pacific, the peeling eucalyptus, the dry sunsets. Also, the freeways at the end of night, when the coastal dew of salt and oleander falls on them, and the beaches at dawn, and the water rising under the early surfers, who wait as though this will always go on.

  On a hill behind Chavez Ravine, on the way home from a Dodgers game, my father is having his first heart attack. Or, the first I know about.

  I am reading the meters in the canyons above Mulholland. And in the backyards of the clapboard houses in Watts. The hair is bristling on a bad dog’s back. Some mean mother has chained a dog to the electric meter. It is tugging at its chain, its jaws snapping. I am the meter reader with my metal tool, snarling back.

  On the job, I walk into the offices of Ray and Charles Eames on Washington Blvd, to look for the electric meter in a closet or on a wall. In the entry, a traveling exhibit on Franklin and Jefferson is preparing for its trip to Paris. The text is in French. I tell Ray Eames, I am a writer, and Ray hires me to come back that afternoon, when my meter reading shift ends, to write a speech for Charles, who isn’t there.

  Working afternoons in the Eames office for a week. One of the staff tells me she lives in Venice, Italy, half the year. We are in Venice, California. She says that the speech is for the National Academy of Sciences. Ray keeps the television on in the office all the time I am there. The Watergate hearings are droning, Sam Ervin, and all the rest of them.

  I audition for a part in the Kentwood Players summer production of Camelot. I am one of the lesser knights who doesn’t sing or speak, but I do meet Dolly, who is similarly cast. An older cast member describes her as “cute as a button,” which she is. She is a small Filipina. Even in the front seat of a compact car, she can fit herself on top of me.

  September 1973, back in school, and hitchhiking to New York City on weekends, just to be there. One Saturday I am dropped off downtown, way downtown, at two in the morning. I am not sure where I am. A cab pulls up alongside me. “You can’t be here,” the cab driver screams. He has rolled the passenger window down and is leaning toward me. He tells me I should go to the YMCA for the night. “It’s no problem,” he says, “other than the fags.” I spend the night in a room at the Y.

  Hitchhiking back from New York to Cambridge. An attorney pulls off to the side of I-90 West. He is as driving a white Cadillac convertible with the top down at night. He says he is representing the Mark Rothko estate, or the children who are suing it.

  Returning in the dark that night, in the early morning. Climbing the stairs to my apartment, I smell ash, but I am too tired to understand it. When I get to the top of the stairs, my door is charred. There has been a fire. The smell will never come out of the forest green sweater I left in the apartment.

  Winter of 1973, I am back in school. Laura sends me a postcard of a giant watermelon from her father’s home in San Rafael.

  Lew Porter moves back to New York City from the Bay Area. I am waiting for my spring graduation ceremony, still months away in 1974, so I move there, too, into the rooms at 111 West 92nd Street.

  Five floors up, the water runs orange with rust. Four of us sleep on mattresses. Lew, his pianist friend from the San Fernando Valley who plays rehearsals at the Joffrey, and Jacqueline Coral, a ballet dancer I fumblingly make a pass at and am shyly refused. One Eleven West Ninety Second is not far from the Natural History Museum. There is the police station across the street. Also, a rumor that Fidel Castro had lived in our building, as a young man temporarily in New York City, preparing for his future.

  xx

  Is this the nature of memory? The things that stick are no more important than what is forgotten. To ask why they are there, lodged, freeloading in a way, is no different than to ask why I am here.

  In 1973, I left the country to write poetry in Paris. This is the envoi I completed for the poems I never wrote:

  Go, little ones, go. You’re late. Go now that there’s no hurry.

  Chapter Twelve
  BACK ON THE SHELF

  One Hundred Poems From The Chinese, Kenneth Rexroth, has Joseph Walcott’s address on Grove St. in Berkeley on its inside cover, and two bookmarks further in. One is a lime green ad for Eric Rohmer’s “Chloe in the Afternoon” playing at the Los Feliz in Los Angeles, June 20 to July 3. The other is a blue Welcome To Wells, Nevada, broadsheet, compliments of The Wagon Wheel on U.S. Highway 40, which urges Try Our Dining Room. A Good Place To Eat. It is something that was picked up on the drive back to Los Angeles from Maryland in the 1966 wine-colored Mustang. So, ephemera, and evidence, too. Next, The Exclusions of a Rhyme, J.V. Cunningham. Then, Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht, the unabridged English version by Eric Bentley. Collected Poems, Patrick Kavanagh, has an uncredited photo on its green cover. Turning her back to the photographer, a woman in a shawl is walking on a dirt road. Neither old nor young, she has a basket in her hand, and her skirt descends to her shoes. Then, Blue Nights, Joan Didion. And A Time to Heal, Mendel Kalmenson. Last on this shelf, Commodore Hornblower, C.S. Forester. This is a used book, with a past owner’s name written in it. Caroline E. Jones signed on the flyleaf, October, 1945.

  Stacks of publications fill the rest of this fourth shelf. Some are perfect bound — Communication Arts magazines. There is a brochure of Russian paintings from a museum visited in Moscow in 2018. I can decipher the Cyrillic for Moscow on its spine, but nothing else, despite the phrasebooks and the Russian dictionary nearby.

  ii

  Nabokov writes of “the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal.” I found this quote on a sheet of paper rescued from Pale Fire, the tattered Berkley paperback on the fourth shelf of the third bookcase in the hallway. The printout was an email that came into my inbox with Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings newsletter in 2018 on the twelfth of December. I printed it out that day, at twelve minutes after the noon hour, according to its header. So, at twelve twelve on twelve twelve.

  iii

  Rescued? Another way of saying found. A sheet of paper is inserted, buried, hiding. It is unfolded. A scrap of paper between two pages of a forgotten novel bookmarks, as if during the passive years of the past it has always been active. It is tiresome, describing book after book paragraph after paragraph. There are only so many ways to say flyleaf or flap of the jacket. Luckily, there will be an end to all these books and their bookmarked pages. Only four shelves to go on this third bookcase, and only four more bookcases down the hall.

  Looked at another way, each of these books is like a day in a lifetime of days, and not a general day, but one with details. A day with a diamond to sell, or with a son to make plans for, or a daughter to make amends to, somehow.

  Some say that there is no free will because the next thing we do is determined by whatever we just did; and so, every moment follows inevitably from the moment before. That cannot be true. Anything can happen next.

  iv

  On another torn page, provenance uncertain, a column is circled in blue ink. “This and similar passages remind one of something that Mann wrote during the First World War, after reading an essay on Theodor Storm by Georg Lukacs, in which the Hungarian critic spoke of the combination of Aesthetismus and Burgerlichkeit in Storm’s writing and its high ethical content. Mann seized upon this comment and wrote that it applied equally to himself. For him, he wrote, what he was writing was not as important as the effect of the process of writing upon his life. ‘Life is not the means for the achievement of an aesthetic ideal of perfection, but work is an ethical symbol of life. The goal is not some kind of objective perfection, but the subjective awareness that I couldn’t have done it any better than I have.’”

  I am tucking this torn page back between the pages of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

  v

  Fifth shelf down, third bookcase in the hallway:

  The Essays, Or, Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Bacon. Including also his Apophthegms, Elegant Sentences, and Wisdom of the Ancients, A. L. Burt Company. This book has a soft, skin-like covering, and, written by hand on its inside cover, “Paul H. Buck Straus Hall Cambridge 24 April 1927.” Next, What A Young Man Ought to Know, Sylvanus Stall. This is the “new, up-to-date” edition, from 1925. Its 170 pages, bound in blue, are part of the “Self and Sex Series.” The book begins with a dedication, “For The Young Man Whose Aim Is To Be Clean And Strong.” Next, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, introduction by Katherine Lee Bates, Professor of English Literature in Wellesley College, copyright 1902, Thomas Y. Crowell and Company. Both front and back covers of The Scarlet Letter are missing. Then, Sexual Signatures, John Money and Patricia Tucker. And then, Descartes Selections, edited by Ralph M. Eaton. And Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes.

  Writings On The East is a book of essays on Eastern Europe, most of them focused on Poland and Hungary, from The New York Review of Books. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume, edited and with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith, is next to An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume, edited and with an introduction by Charles W. Hendel. The dust on The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke, edited and with an introduction by Thomas P. Peardon, is as bulky as lint. The Aristos, John Fowles, unread, has my own to-do list inside it. The list is numbered: 1. Radio Shack 2. laundry 3. clean whole house 4. exercise 7. adoption 8. firewood. Number seven is the only one not crossed out. Red Ribbon on a White Horse, Anzia Yezierska, introduction by W. H. Auden. My mother’s name is on the flysheet. Also, her telephone number – no area code in front of its seven digits. Next, Journeys, Jan Morris. Then, Selections, a selection of essays from issues of The New York Review of Books. Inside, symphony ticket stubs from 1995.

  I find a postcard from Malaysia and a photograph on page 15 of Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing, Soren Kierkegaard, translated from the Danish and with an introductory essay by Douglas V. Steere. The postcard is from John and Esther, our go-to babysitters. By 1989, they had returned to Kuala Lumpur. Dolores sends them gifts, because they have had their first child and named her Eden after our daughter. “We have received your parcel last week,” Esther writes. “Those dresses are very beautiful, I’m sure she can wear them very soon….”The photograph is one Dolores took of the patio at our house on Wenonah Drive. I am sitting on one of the Woodard chairs at the wrought iron Woodward table and reading a newspaper. Ben is in my lap. Eden sits on top of the table. Ben’s bare legs extend to the tabletop, where the soles of his feet meet his sister’s. So, they are touching and also keeping each other apart. They are five and four years old. I am removing this photo from Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, with its daunting subtitle Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession. It has slept between the pages of Kierkegaard long enough. For thirty, nearly forty years. I want it on the desk downstairs in front of me now. It can make its confession there.

  Next, Lectures on Ethics, Immanuel Kant, translated by Louis Infield. Then, The Crucible, Arthur Miller. And Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein. Stories by Frank O’Connor is A Vintage Book paperback, cover photograph by Elliott Erwitt and design by Harry Ford. In 1974, I met Harry Ford, for “career advice,” in his office in Manhattan. He was a friend of one of my college professors, the novelist Monroe Engel. When I was despairing about earning a living, Monroe Engel arranged a job interview for me in New York. This meeting with Harry Ford has left nothing behind but a mental snapshot of Harry Ford behind his desk in an office in Manhattan. Although I am willing to testify that his office was at Viking, Stories is a Vintage Book, a division of Random House, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. No history is less accurate than personal history.

  Next, Tales from the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, edited and with an introduction by Herbert Alexander, illustrations by Mac Harshberger, copyright 1948. This is one more book that will never be read but has found its way onto the fifth shelf of the fourth bookcase in the hallway. A grey insert from a cosmetics package has been left at page 182. It has a tale of its own, which begins, “Richard Hudnut presents with pride a distinguished new line of Men’s Toiletries.” Richard Alexander Hudnut, American businessman, deserves his own Boccaccio. Born in 1855, Hudnut is the first American to achieve international success in cosmetics manufacturing, turning a family drugstore into a showroom for fragrances, and distributing worldwide. He sells the business and retires to the south of France, where he buys a chateau. He becomes the fourth husband of a woman whose daughter marries Rudolph Valentino. And after all that, he is buried in the Bronx.

  Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, translated by D. C. Lau, is Joe Walcott’s Tao Te Ching. I am noticing the underlines. Joe also adds exclamation points, and he writes “Great” on page 67, alongside Thirty spokes/Share one hub. Next, Basic Judaism, Milton Steinberg. Then, The Sense of Beauty, George Santayana. The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton. Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, Donald Kagan. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, S. H. Butcher. And The Verbal Icon, W. K. Wimsatt. A purple mimeographed handout between pages 168 and 169 of Dictionary of World Literature, edited by Joseph T. Shipley, retains the feintest odor from 1969. This purple list of sixty-five words and phrases has blue check marks on every line -– objective correlative, trope, caesura, truth in art, acatalectic, and so on. The blank pages opposite front and back covers of Surprised by Sin, Stanley E. Fish, are inky with quotes and comments. Same with the inside of The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis. One of many quotes: “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.” I am bringing this slim book over to the downstairs desk, as if I intended to read it again.

  The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, R. S. Crane. Myths of the Greeks and Romans, Michael Grant. The Arts of the French Book 1900-1965, Eleanor M. Garvey and Peter A. Wick, is a second gift copy of the same book on another shelf. Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is a souvenir from my second marriage, a memory like a fragrance, with hints of Ivy on the Beach and The Getty.

  The last books on this shelf are “who-was-it-bought-for” mysteries. News of the Past Volume One, In the Days of the Bible, Dr. Israel Eldad and Moshe Aumann, is a three-volume series of fake, four-page newspapers. “The story of the Bible,” it shouts, “in the form of a daily newspaper.” Volume One covers Abraham to Ezra, 1726 – 444 BCE. Sample headlines: We Quit Egypt Today and Moses Dead. Then, News of the Past Volume Two goes from “the Maccabees to the Golden Age in Spain,” 165 BCE – 1038 CE. The third volume, The Dawn of Redemption, ends with Theodore Herzl. Dawn comes on Sunday, September 3, 1897, the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

  No one has ever opened or unfolded these clever tabloid-sized pages. Very likely they will never be opened again. Aside from this moment in the hallway, when would I see these pretend reports? Why would I ever read Sight of Golden Calf Stuns Leader? This is for children, there are no children here.

  vi

  Emerson wrote that he could not remember the books he had read any more than the meals he had eaten, but that both his food and his books formed him. If you are what you eat, then are you also what you have read? Probably not. A better case could be made that you are what you remember.

  Most of the used Riverside Editions paperbacks on the sixth shelf down, third bookcase, have underlines and margin notes from prior owners, other students, some of them probably college seniors then and now real seniors, collecting Social Security checks, revising estate plans, and second-guessing their lives. There is Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by A. Dwight Culler. Then, Selected Poems and Letters John Keats, edited by Douglas Bush. There was a time when that is who I wanted to be. Not Matthew Arnold or John Keats, but A. Dwight Culler or Douglas Bush. A professor, a scholar. The postcard that falls out of the Keats book is from my parents, from Mexico. “Hello Amigo,” it begins. The front is velvety-textured, a bright serape and black sombrero. A forgotten letter between pages of “Endymion” is still in its envelope. It is a letter from Jan Bedell, House Secretary, John Winthrop House, Harvard University, August 21, 1972. “I am sorry not to have answered your letter sooner,” Jan Bedell types. “You should write to Tom Connolly, now our Senior Tutor, in D-11. He will put your name before the Board, which will formally approve your Leave of Absence.” She also informs me “Donald Misch is already rooming with Zach Taylor in G-21, so I will find another roommate for Roger.” This Roger would be the unknown Roger who sent me a postcard with nothing on it but the passage from James Joyce. Jan Bedell concludes: “For readmission, you should notify Tom Connolly of your intention to return. Also, you would write to me so that I can assign you to a room. If you write to me by February 1st, you can be included in the lottery for the next year. This would be a wise move to insure a decent suite.” Jan Bedell is all business.

  If I wrote her back, my letter is not stuck inside any book on Jan Bedell’s shelf.

  I did write, however, on the back of Jan’s grey personal stationery. I copied down a passage from a religious text: “Among the questions to ask,” I wrote, “did you fulfil your duty with respect to establishing a family? Did you hope for the salvation of the Messiah? Did you search for wisdom? Did you try to deduce one thing from another in study? Even should all of these questions be answered affirmatively, only if ’the fear of the Lord is his treasure’ (Is xxx.iii 6) will it avail; otherwise, it will not (Shab. 31a).”Why I copied down this passage I can only guess. It may have seemed exotic, a curiosity, something to collect back then, like a shard of broken pottery. Reading it today in the hallway, it sounds more like the heart of wisdom, and something I should have taken to heart in 1972.There is one other leftover in the Rinehart Keats, this one between pages 314 and 315.I kept a pink index card that is stamped February 11, 1971, and is otherwise blank.

  vii

  The next three books, Riverside Editions paperbacks, have the repeating pattern on their covers of Arion riding a dolphin and blowing pipes or a horn. First, Poems of Robert Browning, edited by Donald Smalley. Then The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Harry Levin. And then, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Stephen E. Whicher. It is possible that the poet Arion, thrown overboard into the sea, charmed a dolphin with otherworldly music, and the dolphin then carried him on its back to Corinth, where he invented the dithyramb. But do dolphins belong beside a river?

  Next, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, selected and edited by Hugh Maclean, from Norton. Then, Contemporary American Poetry, selected and introduced by Donald Hall. The Practice of Criticism, D.H. Rawlinson. Selected Works of John Dryden, introduction by William Frost. The Best Times, John Dos Passos. The paperback cover is detached from The Inferno, Dante Alighieri, “a new translation by John Ciardi.” Same with The Purgatorio, which has a broken, separated spine; the halves of this book are held together by a rubber band. When I slide The Purgatorio forward, even the rubber band is rotted, and it breaks. The Paradiso, Dante Alighieri, the third “new translation by John Ciardi”, is in a better condition.

  The Eighteen Absent Years of Jesus Christ, Lloyd Kenyon Jones, is a booklet someone gave Dolores seventy years ago. It reminds me of the book that my neighbor Kathy across the street put in my tin mailbox last year. It was a book Kathy wrote and self-published, about the relatively recent creation of the world.

  This shelf is as congested as a rush hour roadway, where nothing is moving. L’Homme Revolte, Albert Camus, is bumper to bumper with Essays on Elizabethan Drama, T.S. Eliot. Next, The Age of Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre. L’Exil et le Royaume, Albert Camus, Le Livre de Poche. And The Comedy of Dante Alighieri The Florentine, Cantica I, Hell, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Like so many of the books that were left out in the garage before the remodeling that built in these hallway shelves, the Sayers book has feathery stains and discolorations on its pages. How does the light get in, inside a closed garage, and the book is closed? Age happens is not bumper sticker, but it should be. And more amazing, the talents of Dorothy Sayers, English crime novelist who also translates Dante. She has a child out of wedlock and adopts him – in essence, she adopts her own child — after marrying a man who is not the child’s father. And five of her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels are turned into a TV series by the BBC. She is the second most famous Sayers, after Gale.

  Next, two books under one cover, Cheri and The Last of Cheri, Colette. Madame Colette wrote 80 books, according to her brief bio on the first page. Then, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The famous novel of flaming youth,” according to its cover. And then, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, with a preface by Ernest Hemingway. The bookmark is one more postcard souvenir, this one from the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois. The Art Book is “An A to Z guide of 500 great painters,” with one great painter and one painting per page. It starts with “The Nubian Giraffe,” Jacques-Laurent Agasse. Then, The Aeneid of Virgil, a verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum. Think on These Things, J. Krishnamurti, edited by D. Rajagopal. Tender is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  In 1997, between February and July, in the middle of the five and a half months while Dolores was dying of colon cancer, I ordered The Cure for All Cancers, Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D. Hulda Clark’s 500-page book insists that cancer is caused by parasites and can be “zapped,” as she puts it, by electricity. Also, Hulda Clark says that every cancer of any type can be cured by herbs. In the index, wormwood is mentioned in twenty separate entries.

  Surviving Schizophrenia, E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., is signed on the flysheet “To Dolores, with best wishes, E. Fuller Torrey.” “You can call me E,” he said never. Next, The English Language, Robert Burchfield. Identity Youth and Crisis, Erik H. Erikson. We Must March My Darlings, Diana Trilling. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion. 100 Great Operas And Their Stories, Henry W. Simon. Opera Once Over Lightly, Reuben A. Bradford. The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck. The Pearl & The Red Pony, John Steinbeck, a Penguin paperback, boasts on the cover that it is “Two Books in One.” It has drawings by Jose Clemente Orozco in The Pearl and Illustrations by Wesley Dennis in The Red Pony. East of Eden, John Steinbeck, is “Now an ABC Motion Picture for Television.” The Bell in the Fog, Gertrude Atherton, copyright 1905, Harper Brothers, is the odd hardbound book on this shelf. Gertrude Atherton stands in profile in the frontispiece photo. Her hair is “up,” there are flowers pinned in the tresses. As if she were veiled, a piece of tissue protects the photo. She dedicates her book “To The Master Henry James.” But what seems even more dated than that is the penmanship of the name signed on this book’s flysheet, Moulton Baker, the original reader of The Bell in the Fog. When I google Moulton Baker, a shop called The Pickled Baker, in Moulton, Texas, is first in the search results. Further down there is also an Instagram page for Pebbles Moulton Baker (@pebbles718). Pebbles must surely somehow be a relative. Her page describes her as a “Mental Health Advocate.”

  At the very end of this shelf, three last books. Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver. The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley. And Russia under the Old Regime, Richard Pipes. A memory rises from the first line on the first page of Russia under the Old Regime, from the author’s brief bio. “Richard Pipes is Professor Emeritus of Russian History at Harvard University.” I know that already, because I was a renter in a room in the basement of Professor Pipes’s house in Cambridge for one month in 1974, after the year that Jan Bedell called my “Leave of Absence.” I had come back to college and managed to last all the way to the graduation in May or June. It must have been near the end, May or June, when the weather is warmer. I shared the dim basement with a mentally disturbed adult who never bathed. I would also see him around Cambridge, wearing a heavy coat no matter how warm it was becoming as summer came closer. The entire basement smelled of his odor. One afternoon, near the very end, a stranger who turned out to be Dr. Pipes’ son Daniel, who is himself in his seventies these days and the distinguished President of the Middle East Forum, writing mostly about “radical Islam,” came into the basement as I was leaving my room. “It isn’t me,” I said, as I passed by him.

  viii

  Seventh shelf, third bookcase down the hallway:

  20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne. It was assigned to Ben in middle school. So was Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater. Ben prints his name on the inside covers of both books. Under the front cover of Stones for Ibarra, Harriet Doerr, a birthday card “from your Mom and Dad,” addressed to me, dated 1985. Also inside this unread gift, a deposit slip from one of banks Bank of America consumed in the late 1980s.“Laverne IOU” is written on the slip. Also, “300 less 85 payment made last week, 215 owed.” Laverne, the nanny and housekeeper, was a sweet, heavy woman from the piney woods in East Texas who died of breast cancer at fifty-one, four years after Dolores. The deposit is made August 22, 1985. Ben is fourteen months old on that sweltering day, and Eden only three weeks from being born. Whatever money Laverne has, Dolores and I are paying her. That pay is market wage. It is a salary that leaves her a minor car repair away from debt, and borrowing from us. At the time, it does not seem inappropriate or wrong. The Big Bounce, Elmore Leonard. A Flag on the Island, V.S. Naipaul. Random Acts of Kindness, the editors of Conari Press, foreword by Daphne Rose Kingma. Outwitting Our Nerves, Josephine A. Jackson, M.D. and Helen M. Salisbury, copyright 1921.The subtitle, “A Primer of Psychotherapy” was added in 1944, for the second edition. The Big Knockover, Dashiell Hammett, edited with an introduction by Lillian Hellman. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner. The Reivers, William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner. My copy of The Sound and the Fury is used; or, “pre-owned,” as car dealers say. Inside, there is a penned inscription from “Louanne” on the page facing the front cover. Louanne writes, “Remember me in 30 or 40 or 50 years, however far away you may be!” I have the pleas of a stranger on a shelf in my hallway.

  All the Little Live Things, Wallace Stegner. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger. Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger. When Nietzsche Wept, Irwin D. Yalom. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates. The business card of the Texas Chrysanthemum Society is planted between the pages of Revolutionary Road. It says that meetings are on second Mondays at 7:00 p.m. And it provides an address, but no answer to the mystery of how it got to Revolutionary Road. Next, The Iliad of Homer, translated and with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore. Then, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, Herman Melville. Fragile Glory, Richard Bernstein, holds onto an October 15, 1993 torn ticket for Pilobolus at McFarlin Auditorium and an April 21, 1994 ticket stub from Southwest Airlines. Elizabethan Prose Fiction, edited by Merritt Lawlis, uses the metal foil of a chewing gum wrapper as a bookmark on page 278, at Rosalind – Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell at Silexedra, by Thomas Lodge. There are notes in the margins, and on page 113, too, at Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, by John Lyly. They are my notes, but none of them raises even the ghost of a memory. Next, Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway. In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway, is someone else’s schoolbook; a stranger’s pen is circling page numbers and bracketing patches of curt dialogue.

  The “infographic” tucked behind the back cover of The Sun Also Rises comes from The New York Times, Sunday, March 14, 1971, and is titled “U.S. Bombing Tonnage in Three Wars.” It compares the 2,057,244 tons of U.S. bombs dropped between 1941 and 1945 to the 635,000 tons of the Korean War and the 5,693,382 tons dropped, so far, 1965 to 1971, in what it calls the Indochina War. The figures are credited to Massachusetts Political Action for Peace. Lost for a generation, a photo of Ben and me is also inside Hemingway. Ben wears the blue and red knitted cap of the University of Kansas, and I am in a Jayhawks t-shirt.

  A Hall of Mirrors, Robert Stone, “Now the major Paramount picture WUSA,” hides a scrap of lined yellow paper with a list of names — White Marsh, Sakura, Low Vision Clinic. I know exactly what these are, or were, in 1981. But think about the grave robber, or the archeologist, who finds a coin layers down in the dust, or bits of parchment, and how the guesses that a stranger makes about the past are always wild guesses.

  ix

  Fat City, Leonard Gardner. According to the “About The Author” at the end of this short novel, Leonard Gardner, born in Stockton, California, is a Guggenheim Fellow. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Southwest Review and other magazines. His screen adaptation of Fat City was made into a film directed by John Huston. And he “presently lives in Mill Valley, California,” which is a paradise. Next, Look Back In Anger, John Osborne. Then, The Professor’s House, Willa Cather. Burmese Days, George Orwell. An Introduction to Sigmund Freud, M.D., and Psychoanalysis, Paul Freeman. The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud, translated by Joan Riviere. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey. And The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud, a small paperback, with cover illustration by Leonard Baskin and its typography by Edward Gorey.

  Next, What Is Hypnosis, Andrew Salter. Then, The Fixer, Bernard Malamud. Foundation And Empire, Isaac Asimov. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver. The Transitive Vampire, Karen Elizabeth Gordon. The Honorary Consul, Graham Greene. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a paperback with a cover illustration by Seymour Chwast, and, inside, a ticket stub from the TUT exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. And then, Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin. The Ultimate Good Luck, Richard Ford. Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem. Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell. An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, the James Strachey translation. Sigmund Freud Early Psychoanalytic Writings, edited by Philip Rieff.

  All the Freud books are Dolores’s. Most have her underlining of sentences, sometimes of whole paragraphs, and she writes comments, too. On page 100 of The Future of an Illusion, Dolores writes sideways in the margin, “Let’s stick to what we can do and quit worrying about whether there are angels, etc.!!!” And underneath this she adds, “Amen.” It has been nearly thirty years since the last time I heard Dolores’s voice. Her comment seems to imply that I should not expect to hear it again.

  x

  The 752 pages of The Marquis de Sade, compiled and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, includes three complete novels. What is not included is an explanation for the name Austryn. Who names their child that?“Austryn Wainhouse: The Anonymous translator of O; dead, September 2014,” according to the article appearing in the glow of a MacBook on my desk downstairs this evening. Austryn, who attended Exeter and Harvard, worked for Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press in Paris, and “sometimes used the pseudonym Pieralessandro Casavini.”It all sounds very upper end, but there is no mention in this article of his parents or why they named their child Austryn. There is, however, a Wikipedia entry for Harry Austryn Wolfson, American scholar, who was the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center in the United States. He was born to Sarah Savitsky and Max Mendel Wolfson in Astryna, Vilna Governate, in present day Belarus, 427 kilometers from the birthplace of one of my own grandfathers.

  xi

  Xeroxed, an excerpt from Lawrence Kushner’s Honey From The Rock is hidden inside Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah. “Each lifetime has the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” Kushner writes. “For some there are more pieces. For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.”

  At first, this analogy is a puzzle itself. Which is more difficult, or more frustrating, the life that has fallen into 500 pieces, or the jigsaw life with one crucial missing piece?

  xii

  The Future of an Illusion has been lingering for years on this seventh shelf, third bookcase down the hallway. It has Dolores’s name on its inside cover, her pen underlinings, her thoughts on angels and their insignificance. It reminds me of Dolores when she was a student, working her way toward the life she wanted, even though I never knew her then, as if memory and imagination are ripples in the same pond.

  xiii

  This classic question is asked by late night TV show hosts and in online forums:

  “What would you take with you to a deserted island?”

  What tool, an ax, a spoon, fishing gear. Maybe toilet paper. Your pet Pomeranian. If music, what music. Which song, if you had to choose. It is a way of asking what is most useful, what do you value, what can you learn from, and what makes you happiest.

  To the deserted island of old age, since that is my situation, which of these books should I take? Which one do I need to read over and over.

  xiv

  When is it time to stop caring, to stop trying? Estranged daughter, troubled son, departed wives, former friends. When it is time to stop looking through the pages of books on shelves for memories. I will know when, but I may not know how. Knowing how to stop. That is the project I am undertaking without knowing it.

  xv

  The dust is thickest on the eighth shelf, closest to the floor. These are the books no one can see without bending over, or getting on hands and knees. They are books at the bottom.

  Leadership at the Top is the title the Harvard Business Review picked for its collection of essays. Next to it, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. The Source, James A. Michener, is the source of a Bazooka Joe comic that was packaged decades ago with a pink chunk of bubble gum. “Joe is a space cop,” one of its panels declares. This waxy rectangle was saved at page 310. The narrative in The Source is revealed as if through levels of an archeological excavation at a site in western Galilee. The story goes from the deepest level, Level XV, and flints that were deposited there “during the summer of 9811 B.C.E.” The book’s 1,076 pages have the depth to store plenty of deposits of mine. Between pages 434 and 435, which is Level IX, going all the way up to 4 B.C.E., I discover the ticket stub from “David Copperfield, Music Hall at Fair Park, Thu, April 16, 1998, 8:00PM.” A tear-off from a notepad branded Sheraton Marrakesh Avenue de la Menara is unearthed between other pages. I find a review from The New Yorker of the film “Shakespeare in Love,” screenplay by Tom Stoppard. “Like Shakespeare himself,” the reviewer sniffs, Stoppard is not very good at creating original plots.

  The Aeneid, Virgil, is edited by Wendell Clausen. The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy, has suffered a torn spine, loosening its first few pages. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl, someone left bits of paper no bigger than fingernails to mark specific pages. Next, The Chosen, Chaim Potok. Then, The Bhagavad-Gita, translated and with an introduction and afterword by Barbara Stoler Miller. Catch-22, Joseph Heller. Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder, translated by Paulette Moller. Beowulf, translated and with an introduction by Burton Raffel, is my daughter’s book. Her name is alongside a stamp from her middle school on an inside page. In those middle school years, Eden declared herself to be a Wiccan, and may still be one. Then, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien. The Three Theban Plays, Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. This may be another one of Eden’s schoolbooks. Its three plays are Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus.

  If it is Eden’s, then she is the one writing in large print on a blank page at the very end, “For life to have any meaning there must be torment.” “Meaning” and “torment” are both underlined. Or this could be my son’s schoolbook. After all, Ben attended a Jesuit high school. He could have been the one required to read Oedipus the King, and then underlining “the dark wings beating around him shrieking doom.” And “It’s all chance, chance rules our lives.” And “Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark.” The shepherd’s “I wish to god I’d died that day” is also underlined. So is “The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all,” which is spoken by the Messenger. And, by Oedipus himself, “Oblivion – what a blessing…for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.” Underline, underline.

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, is definitely Ben’s book. I know because there is a sports card marking his place in the story of Huck and Jim. This Kellogg’s-branded card for Hakeem Olajuwon, 1992 College Basketball Greats, University of Houston, came out of a box of Raisin Bran. Stories, T.C. Boyle, has a photo of Eden when she was a teenager. She is on her bed, wearing jeans and a black shirt that says “Good Witch” across her chest. If I try, I can make out, tacked or taped or hung on the walls behind her, the feathery dream catcher, a mirror in a gilded oval frame, and a photograph of the moon rising over mountains. This room is no longer real. It is a ghost room in this house, a room behind the hallway before the remodeling, and before there were hallway bookcases. Eden’s old room is gone. She cannot return to it, not that she would want to.

  The Most Important Thing I Know is a small book of “life lessons” from Colin Powell, Maya Angelou, and “Other Eminent Individuals,” compiled by Lorne A. Adrain. Every other page is a reproduction of a handwritten, signed note from an eminent individual. The note on the flysheet is a “from Dad” to my seventeen-year-old son in 2001.It is as original and maybe more authentic than the handwritten note from Florence Griffith Joyner, Olympic Gold Medalist, Fastest Woman in the World, who claims in her signed note, “I cried every day for a new pair of shoes until I saw the man with no feet.” Next, Fences, August Wilson. Poetics, Aristotle, unabridged. And The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck, M.D.

  Beowulf, translated by Ruth P.M. Lehmann. This copy has Ben’s name on the inside front cover and a printed list of assignments on a sheet of green paper. The first assignment: “Look for examples in the text for the following terms and ideas: Kleos, Aresteia, Commitatus, Kairos, Chronos.” The Oedipus Cycle, Sophocles, English versions of Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus At Colonus, Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Since my son’s name is on the inside front cover, the “torment” and the underlined sufferings in the other Sophocles must have been Eden’s. In Ben’s version, it is Antigone that has the underlines. Even here, the lines getting underlined are more about virtue than despair. “There is no guilt in reverence for the dead” is underlined. And, “You have no right to trample on God’s right.” Next, More Than Houses, Millard Fuller. Then, What Is A Jew? Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer. Mythology, Edith Hamilton. Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. And then Lord of the Flies, William Golding.

  The majority of the books on this bottom shelf seem to be my son’s. His name is on inside covers, flysheets, and sometimes across the tops of bundled pages. Ben is someone who never reads anymore. Still, here they are, the old “required reading” at his schools. Here is the expected To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, next to My Brother Sam Is Dead, James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, A Newberry Honor Book. And then Storm Rising, Mercedes Lackey. Ben prints his name on the title page of The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart, introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. Below his name, he draws a picture of himself. His drawing is in the style of The Simpson’s. Facing it, the black and white of Otto Frank from 1939, captioned “Daddy’s nicest photograph.”

  Then, Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, based on Beatrix Potter, adapted by David Hately. Poetry, A Longman Pocket Anthology, R.S. Gwynn. The Odyssey, Homer, translated by W.H.D. Rouse. Under its cover, Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, has a pink, hole-punched paper titled Spring Semester Final Exam English III. Unfolded, it is dated May 29, 2002. It has great expectations, too. “Directions: You will write an essay with an introduction, multiple body paragraphs, and a conclusion that illustrates…”The outline of the essay is expected in advance, and a sentence in all caps warns the student not to just drop off the outline on the teacher’s desk. “The teacher must be present.” Skinny, dusty paperback after paperback squeezes into the space remaining on the row. The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton. The Pearl, John Steinbeck. Hoops, Walter Dean Myers. Richard the Third, William Shakespeare. Tex, S.E. Hinton. Hamlet, edited and rendered into modern English by Alan Durband. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende. Then, a much thicker The 120 Days of Sodom, Marquis de Sade, Introduction by Hilary E. Hold, Ph.D. This is not a school book. Then, Six Centuries of Great Poetry, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine. And, last, The Crucible, Arthur Miller. Ben’s name is on the inside cover of this one, too. It is school reading, at Jesuit Prep. Under his name, he writes “The Elect” and, under that “1. lives Godly life 2. prospers materially 3. conversion.”

  xvi

  In The Bhagavad-Gita on this eighth shelf, on the page before its sacred text begins, Barbara Stoler Miller provides a quote from T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets:

  This is the use of memory:
  For liberation –not less of love but expanding,
  Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
  From the future as well as the past.

  It sounds grand in the hallway and seems to make sense, even if just barely. This can also be the project underway, using memory for liberation.

  Chapter Thirteen
  ALL WORK AND NO PLAY

  Many different translations of Homer are turning up on this odyssey through the hallway shelves. I never noticed them before. And the sea is “wine-dark” in all of them. It must be a formulaic phrase, a translation of the Greek that works as useful filler in the dactylic hexameter of the original.

  Never noticed is my wine-dark sea. For one thing, I never noticed the top three shelves in these hallway bookcases, how they are not all the same height. The top shelf of the first four bookcases is eleven inches tall. On the last three bookcases, fifteen inches. Shelves four through eight on all seven bookcases in the hallway are nine inches from top to bottom. But the second shelves down on the first three bookcases are eleven inches. The second shelf o the fourth bookcase is thirteen inches tall. But on bookcases five through seven, the second shelves are only nine inches. The third shelves down vary, too. First three bookcases, the height of the third shelves is eleven inches. Bookcases four through seven, nine inches.

  So what? It is better to notice the variability of the world. Instead, I flatten it out, make things that are different the same and group them into categories, where they lose their distinction and no small part of their beauty.

  ii

  Sixty years after reading no further than the “all our love always” note from my parents on its flysheet, I have gotten all the way to page 20 of In Search of the Miraculous, where the narrator has one of his tedious talks with the spiritual master “G”: “In the course of one of our talks, I asked G., “Is it useful to read what is called mystical literature?’ “Yes,’ said G. “A great deal can be found by reading. You might already know a great deal, if you knew how to read. I mean, if you understood everything you have read in your life.’”

  Exactly. If only everything read was also understood. On this trek through the books on my shelves, I am several switchbacks down the mountain from understanding. Mostly, at the rest stop of naming and listing. Without question, my reading In Search of the Miraculous is without understanding. As its sentences unspool down the page, I am thinking about my mother giving me this book as a present for my sixteenth birthday. I do not understand why she did that. What I can understand is that I can no longer ask her.

  iii

  Fourth bookcase, first shelf.

  Dolores’s “tools of the trade” books are on this shelf. First in line, three book-sized boxes, one labeled Rorschach Psychodiagnostic Plates, published by Western Psychological Services. The labels on the other two boxes are in German: Psychodiagnostik Taflen, published by Hans Huber in Bern. Each box contains the same ten thick cardboard cards with the images on them. Some of the blots are black and white, others are in color, and most of them look to me like smashed bats. Not baseball bats, but mammals, with wings outspread. After the three boxes, I inspect a spiral-bound Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale booklet, and a page of simple line drawings — bird, rooster, duck — and then another page of geometric shapes – triangle, square, circle, ellipse, rectangle, and one I am not sure what to call. It may be a trapezoid. Parallelogram? Then another page, this one with a line drawing of a story. In the drawing, a man from the days when men wore fedoras is walking toward a sun that is either rising or setting on a horizon that is inches away. Even though the sun is ahead of him, so is his shadow, which does not seem intelligent. Maybe that is the point. The psychologist will ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Next, a blue spiral-bound WISC Manual, with tables of Scaled Score Equivalents for Raw Scores of those taking the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. A green spiral-bound manual for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale gives the directions for administering tests of Similarities, Digits Backward, Vocabulary, Picture Completion, Block Design, and Object Assembly. For Object Assembly, the tester is instructed to “present the Manikin, Profile, Hand, and Elephant in that order.” I am guessing these are puzzle pieces. For the Manikin and the Profile, the time limit is 120 seconds. Hand and Elephant allows 180 seconds. “Bonuses are given for rapid performances.” Just as Professor Montague said in 1969 in a classroom in Los Angeles, other things being equal, speed is a virtue.

  iv

  The rest of this top shelf:

  Sweat Your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice, Gabrielle Roth. Classical Gods and Heroes, translated and introduced by Rhoda A. Hendriks. Greek Myths, Illustrated Edition, Robert Graves. These last two are Eden’s books, left behind tales of gods left behind. Let Me Tell You A Story, Red Auerbach & John Feinstein, is a gift Eden gave her brother in 2004. It was left behind by both of them. Then, The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho. Bali, Knopf Guides. Empire of the Soul, Paul William Roberts. My handwritten Greek, words and their translations, are penciled in the margins of A New Introduction To Greek, Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips, Jr. Though I took a semester of Greek, maybe two, I no longer understand even the English of the heading on page 141, which announces the section on Irregular Second Aorists.

  Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, Jenny Randles and Peter Hough. It lists crop circles, ball lightning, alien abductions, unidentified flying objects, time slips, spontaneous human combustion, psychic detectives, thoughtography, the Men in Black, and the Loch Ness monster on its cover. The Complete Rhyming Dictionary Revised, edited by Clement Wood. A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein. As the Future Catches You, Juan Enriquez. Inside, a 2008 receipt from Aetna RX Home Delivery for Levothyroxine tabs, and a March 2008 article from Parade Magazine on “The Lessons I’m Leaving Behind,” and a printout from a March 2008 article from O, The Oprah Magazine about “Five Things Happy People Do”, and a March 2008 email from my sister Patti. Subject: David wrote this poem. David is her older son. In his twenties, my nephew was diagnosed with tongue cancer, and three-fourths of his tongue was removed. Now David runs a one-man music publishing and promotions business out of Pittsburgh, for death metal bands. In the two dozen short lines of his poem, nearly every word is capitalized. Its title, “Inside the Oral Graveyard.”

  Next, The Rake’s Progress, libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Collected Poems, Yvor Winters. Becoming a Person, Carl R. Rogers, is only a pamphlet. Then, Tales of the Alhambra, Washington Irving. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tarzan and The Ant Men, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, Copyright, 1924, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. This Tarzan is a hardback. I slide it from the shelf. Chapter 1 begins, “In the filth of a dark hut, in the village of Obebe the cannibal, upon the banks of the Ugogo, Esteban Miranda squatted upon his haunches and gnawed upon the remnants of a half-cooked fish.” Then, back it goes, in its place between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward FitzGerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, this copy with illustrations by Edmond J. Sullivan.

  Selected Poems, Robert Lowell, hides an index card with two quotes on it; one, from Henry Miller, “We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the company at all costs,” and the other from George Bernard Shaw’s diaries, “Stayed until 1. Vein of conversation distinctly gallant.” Next, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, William Carlos Williams. Then, New Stories from The South, edited by Shannon Ravenel. Collected Longer Poems, W.H. Auden. Prater Violet, Christopher Isherwood. Tradition and Poetic Structure, J.V. Cunningham. And then, the plain red binding of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon, published by Coward-McCann, Inc., 1929. This unread book is a “happy, happy birthday” gift from Peter Whaley in 1978, given “prematurely,” as he writes on the first page .In 1978, Peter was back in Somerville, or already in the foreign service. The folded letter that I left inside is dated 9/28/78 and explains that he is sending a birthday book now, because he is moving soon and worries that he might misplace it. He wishes me “the best year yet.” And then, “P.S. The book isn’t valuable or anything, but it is hard to find when you need one.” It is piquant, Peter imagining a time will come when I would need one, or that there ever was such a time. New Collected Poems, Robert Graves, uses a Milton Glaser illustration on a postcard from the famous Russian Tea Room as its bookmark. The bookmark in Selected Poems, Robert Lowell, is a business card from a less storied restaurant, Leonard’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, 3524 Inwood Road. Its local address on Inwood is a block north of Lemmon Avenue, an intersection I have passed a thousand times. Still, I have no memory of Leonard’s. Not of the name, not the place. When Google Street View lets me take a look at 3524 Inwood Road, I know the place that has replaced Leonard’s. It is Discount Tire.

  iv

  A class handout stuffed into Collected Poems 1909-1962, T.S. Eliot, provides examples of “rhetorical trios” in Dryden and Pope. Next, The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, introduction by W.H. Auden. Then, To The Air, Thom Gunn, David R. Godine Publisher, copyright 1974 Thom Gunn. Jack Straw’s Castle and Other Poems, Thom Gunn. Moly and My Sad Captains, Thom Gunn, is bookmarked with a postcard souvenir from the Huntington Library in San Marino. It shows an illustrated page from the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A telephone number is penciled on the back. No area code, so no idea where 498-3271 is from. The 213? The 617? The 415?Like so much in memory, all I know is that I know this number. Then, Selected Writings, Charles Olson, edited, with an introduction by Robert Creeley. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound is a New Directions “paperbook.” The Back Country, Gary Snyder, offers comments from one of its prior owners. “He is in the city,” she writes in one margin. Elsewhere, she points out an object that is “sacred in Japan.” Another line “describes working as a cook.” Then, Turtle Island, Gary Snyder. After the Gary Snyder books, a copy of Evergreen Review, No. 22. Jan-Feb 1962.It, too, pushes me to wonder how it got here. I was ten years old in 1962, and not reading Evergreen Review when “new work” from Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs appeared on its pages. Also, Evgeny Evtushenko’s poem Babii Yar. On the “Contributors” page, it announces that “Pablo Neruda is fast becoming known,” and Evtushenko is a “a young Soviet poet going to Cuba shortly to work on a film.” On the back pages, there is a small ad for a book by Delmore Schwartz and a larger one for The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz’s new book.

  At the end of this top shelf, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller, preface by Anais Nin. Its paper cover doubles as its book jacket, with flaps. The price on the front flap, 60 Frs. On the title page, The Obelisk Press, 16 Place Vendome. I might have found this book in a Paris bookstall but cannot recall. The cover says this is its fourth printing, June 1938. Also on the cover, two quotes, a dull one from T.S. Eliot, and then this, from Ezra Pound: “At last an unprintable book that is fit to read.” Even blurbing, Pound is il miglior fabbro.

  iv

  If the brain is a recording device, as some have posited, then everything is in there – whatever has been seen or heard, maybe even what was felt. The fact that there is no proof of life for most of what is lost in those internal tunnels baffles me. I do find shards, however. I can speculate. In Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, there is a note from Jerry Renaud in 1974, with his list of the Williams Carlos Williams poems that he is recommending. A memory pressed between two pages begins to rise. It is an image of a street in Cambridge, night time, two people are walking together. I am one, Jerry is the other. And it is sticky, this memory. Even if the darkness, the street, the streetlamp, what we are wearing, all that detail, what Jerry Reneau says – all of that barely exists. Coats, winter. Then, hurrying away, or a feeling of hurrying, of getting away from him.

  v

  Tradition and Poetic Structure, J.V. Cunningham, reminds me of a day I rode a bicycle from Cambridge to Waltham, Massachusetts, using I-90 part of the way. It seems unlikely that this happened, riding a bike on the interstate. It was not a long trip, but too long ago to recall anything further. If I sat in on a class with J.V. Cunningham at Brandeis, the other students, our desks, if there were desks – all that is gone. To The Air, Thom Gunn, is the same. It is a reminder of sunny mornings in Berkeley. On one of them, I sneak into a classroom where Thom Gunn is teaching. He asks all of us to introduce ourselves. He is annoyed when I admit I am not a registered student. Nothing else remains from that morning, other than his comment that no literary criticism is worth reading.

  vi

  The second shelf in this fourth bookcase holds the taller books. Usually, the taller the book, the more likely it is to be full of pictures. This general rule does not apply to the two towering volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary on this second shelf. Or to Family Interaction Research – A Methodological Study Utilizing the Family Interaction Q-Sort, one of the hardbound copies of Dolores’s dissertation. Its tall white spine is next to the thick blue spine of Physicians Desk Reference, 47th Edition. Next, How To Write and Sell Your First Novel, Oscar Collier with Frances Spatz Leighton. Frances Spatz Leighton “earned the nickname Queen of Female Ghosts,” according to Wikipedia. She ghostwrote over thirty books, including My Life with Jackie Kennedy. Next, Take Care of Yourself – The Consumer’s Guide to Medical Care, Donald M. Vickery, M.D. and James F. Fries, M.D. It is “The 3-Million-Copy Bestseller in an All New, Completely Revised, Updated 1986 Version.”

  Aside from the OED, most of the tall books on this shelf are not mine, other than under a law of abandoned property. The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy 1931-1951, Chester Gould, conforms to the taller book picture book rule. So does Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits, G.B. Trudeau, with its “overture” by William F. Buckley, Jr. So does Tolkien’s Ring, David Ray, illustrations by Alan Lee. Alan Lee is also one of the various illustrators in Tolkien’s World, Paintings of Middle-earth. These Tolkien books are Eden’s. The LIFE Millennium – The 100 Most Important Events and People of the Past 1,000 Years, edited by Robert Friedman, was marketed to capitalize on the ballyhoo about Y2K. Only three books are among the most important events of the past thousand years, according to LIFE. Only one of them is on my shelves. Don Quixote, from 1605, ranks as LIFE’s number 96. LIFE lists the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 as number one, the most important event of the past thousand years. I don’t own a Gutenberg Bible. I do have several of the estimated 2,500,000,000 Bibles that the editors of LIFE say have been sold or distributed worldwide “since 1815.”The third book listed, number 83 on LIFE’s list, is The Tale of Genji, from 1008. The Tale of Genji is no part of my list, although there could be excerpts from it hiding in Bertha’s The World’s Greatest Books or in Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf.

  vii

  Alaska, Images of the Country, photographs by Galen Rowell, text by John McPhee. This book is a gift to my son. The message I wrote to Ben on the first page is the typical parent-to-child rhetoric of encouragement and lying. “Summer 1999 – It’s a wide and beautiful world out there, and it belongs to you.” He was fifteen. We had just gone to Alaska, or had just returned – Ben, Eden, Pam, and Pam’s teenage son. So, three teenagers and a woman I will marry two years later. Of those four, only Ben is still in my wide world, at least visibly.

  viii

  Then, Dream Gardens, Tania Compton and Andrew Lawson. Between its pages, a lined yellow sheet, and the names of water lilies written down on it. Five names are circled in pen — Joey Tomocik, Barbara Dobbins, Colorado, Texas Dawn, and Pickerel Rush. Below that, the names of goldfish — Shubunken, Calico, Fantail. Naming seems critical to understanding. There is something primal about it, It is a privilege given to Adam in the beginning. Next, Wisdom of the West, Bertrand Russell. Russell starts with Thales and finishes at Wittgenstein. I owned this oversized book as a teenager, and the jacket it wore then still fits. A marble bust of Epicurus dominates the oversized, glossy book jacket. Epicurus may have preached that pleasure is the highest good, but he looks grim in marble. I left two bookmarks in this book. One blue, one yellow, they are the paper bookmarks given away at the Loyola Village Branch of the Westchester Public Library, Los Angeles County. Circa 1964, a time as fixed as a marble bust. Each has the same slogan: Read More, Achieve More. Picasso: A Retrospective, edited by William Rubin, is massive and mostly pictures. It comes from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Next, The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume I, A-O, and The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume II, P-Z. Then, under the crushing waves of its neighbors, The Art of Drowning, Billy Collins. Neo Glassism, Taikoh Momoyamano-Hana, 1st Exhibition 2003, is a slim catalog of elegant, silvery glass bamboo shapes, handsome bowls, swirls of color. All the writing in it is in Japanese, except for a love note at the beginning, “For Pam, 2006.”It did not help. She left the marriage later that same year.

  ix

  Tracy Kidder wrote “Hobo Convention,” one of the articles in a hardbound Audience magazine from 1971. Even further back in time, a hardbound Horizon from November 1962 has a review by Saul Bellow of a Bunuel film, and Rene Dubos on “Can Man Keep Up with History.” Color reproductions brighten a section on “The Passion According to Rouault.” H.R. Trevor Roper, J. H. Plumb, and other highbrows using their initials are also in Horizon. Dolores brought the Audience and Horizon into the marriage. Treasures of Tutankhamen is an exhibit catalog. I might or might not have gone to see it at the New Orleans Museum of Art. I am nearly certain I saw it, or the blockbuster sequel, hosted later at the Dallas Museum of Art. Certainty and memory are points on two different axes, and there is only a broken line between them, if they connect at all.

  Next, Indoor Gardening Made Easy, Gay Hellyer. Then, Birds of the World, David Stephen, illustrations by Takio Ishida. Graphic Design America is a vanity publication, as is AIGA Graphic Design USA 5. Then, Chin Chang and the Dragon’s Dance, Ian Wallace. Eloise, Kay Thompson. Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes, Marguerite Angeli. And then, The Aesop for Children, with pictures by Milo Winter. In the hallway, I am admiring Of the Just Shaping of Letters, Albrecht Durer, for the first time. This is another book of unknown provenance. Last on this shelf of tall towers, The American Institute of Architects Guide to Dallas Architecture, edited by Larry Paul Fuller.

  x

  The plan was to write something impersonal, almost philosophic, using these books on shelves as part of an abstract argument. To compare the unread books to the tree that falls in the forest. Or to justify their neglect. To name, list, and count. To stiffen my spine against these rows of spines.

  Instead, the side stories have become the story, leading me to ramble and recount. Memories should have been a minor part of this. But these books turned into touchstones, evoking school days, marriages, parenthood, travels, work life, aspirations, and pretense.

  xi

  People ask, “What do you do?” If I answer, “I’m writing,” the next question is always the same. “What are you writing?” This is followed by, “Novel?” No, I say. “So, what then?” “I wish I knew” is my stock answer. Or I come up with a clarification that is truthful, replying that I do not know what I am writing yet, but I am working on it. The response to this is not curiosity. It is not admiration either. So sometimes I embellish. “I have written hundreds of pages of it so far though.” This is also true, and it seems to help. Subsequent responses vary. Some will tell me how they also want to write, most often memoir or “the story” of their lives. They say it is for their children. But once, I got a response to “I have written hundreds of pages” that went in a different direction.

  “Ever see The Shining?”

  A stranger at a party asked me that, after we exchanged the “what do you do” and “I am writing, I do not know what I am writing yet, and I have written hundreds of pages of it” sequence.

  “Yes,” I nod.

  “Stanley Kubrick movie. Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall.”

  There are no Stephen King books on these hallway shelves, and I have never seen The Shining. I am aware of it though. He tells me how the Jack Nicholson character, who is crazy, is also a writer and apparently hard at work at it. Moreover, what this writer is writing is also unknown, at least to his wife, the Shelley Duvall character. Then, he tells me what happens next. In The Shining, Shelley Duvall finds herself in the room where Jack Nicholson does his writing – on a typewriter – when Nicholson is not there. So she discovers what he has been writing. It is a single sentence, the same sentence, over and over and over. I tell him that I use a laptop. password protected, so that will not happen to me. Also, I am not married, and my dog shows no interest in what I am writing. And I agree that all work and no play is unhealthy.

  xii

  On the third shelf down, fourth hallway bookcase:

  The Way of Zen, Alan W. Watts. Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Insects, Dr. Ross H. Arnett, Jr. and Dr. Richard L. Jacques, Jr. Unstuck, Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro, is a book I bought for Ben in 2004, after he flunked out of college. “As you move forward, one step at a time,” I wrote on the page across from the inside cover. How To Be Happy, Dammit, Karen Salmansohn. This is not my book. Maybe Eden’s? It offers one wisdom per page, in large type. There is a yellow Post-it note flagging the bromide on page 27. ”Happiness is not about what happens to you, but how you choose to respond to what happens. That’s why it’s called happiness not happenness.” Wooden, Coach John Wooden with Steve Jamison, another gift to Ben, is also from 2004. If I had a system, a do-it-yourself Dewey system with categories, one of the largest would be “books left when son and daughter left.”

  Next, four more unread books. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles. Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean. Warrior of the Light, Paulo Coelho. And The Ramayana, A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic, Ramesh Menon. Inside the epic, a folded-up printout of “The Getting Things Done Method,” seven lengthy paragraphs. It is dated 2/13/2007. So, a day before Valentine’s. Also, the day Pam finalized our divorce. I am enjoying the Eric Hoffer quote squatting at the end of the paragraph seven. “Our greatest pretenses are built not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness,” Hoffer declares. “The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”

  xiii

  Who Knew? Things You Didn’t Know About Things You Know Well, David Hoffman, provides 196 pages of revelations, one per page. For example, there are approximately 1,750 O’s in every can of SpaghettiOs. Next, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Then, Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare. The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, edited by Irving Riber. The Stones of Venice, Mary McCarthy. Reunions: Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones, Raymond Moody, M.D. with Paul Perry. The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen. A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe, is an unread souvenir from a trip to Japan. Japan, Patrick Smith, has six colorful tickets stored between its pages. One of them admits to Nanzen-in, in Kyoto, to the garden remains from a palace built by Emperor Kameyama in 1264 and converted into a Zen Buddhist temple in 1291. “This garden should be appreciated with a calm mind,” it advises on the back of the ticket. Another ticket is from Kiyomizu Temple, also in Kyoto. “When Kamnnon-sama arises in your mind,” it says, “then you are in Oneness with Kamnnon-sama.”Kamnnon, the goddess of compassion and mercy, is popular in Japan. Slender, female, somewhat androgynous, her proper Japanese name is Kanzeon Bosatsu. She is thought to be good at answering prayers. The four other tickets have only Japanese on them and lead to forgotten places. The Tels, Paul Black, holds a free non-new release movie rental coupon from Blockbuster Video between its pages, valid from June 1, 2008 to June 30, 2008.Next, Emily Dickinson’s Poems, selected and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson. Then, The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry, edited by Perry Miller. And The Discovery of the Great West: La Salle, Francis Parkman. And Birds of Texas, Keith A. Arnold and Gregory Kennedy. Despite so many books on my shelves about plants, animals, mountains, and stars, my hours are spent indoors. Next, Hindoo Holiday, J.R. Ackerley. And Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, a souvenir from Beijing.

  This was 1999 or 2000. So, a trip that was part of the journey into a second marriage. Five of us went together, Pam and her son, and Ben and Eden, the not yet blended family that never did blend. All of us pretended to be on a family vacation. Do those middle-aged children remember Beijing and their insistence that we eat at the largest KFC restaurant on earth, and at a Subway sandwich franchise wallpapered with maps from the MTA? The “little red book,” in both English and Chinese, is for tourists. Tucked inside, a business card from the guide in Beijing who drove us to the Great Wall. I can hear an echo of his melodious name, though he said to call him Stephen. Also inserted in the little red book, a short newspaper clipping: “Mao Anquing, the only known surviving son of Mao Zedong, has died, a government news agency reported Saturday. He was 84.” This is from March 24, 2007, a month after my marriage to Pam officially ended. It is possible to pretend at the beginning, but endings are real.

  xiv

  Al Carrell, “the Super Handyman” writes “Super Best Wishes & Much Love” to Dolores on the title page of Super Handyman’s Do-It-Quick-But-Do-It-Right Home Repair Hints. Life’s Little Instruction Book, H. Jackson Brown, Jr., has 1,560 one-line wisdoms. The first four: Compliment three people every day. Have a dog. Watch a sunrise at least once a year. Remember other people’s birthdays. I am practicing only the dog one. Golgo13 Perfect Machine of Snipe, Volume 19, is a pocket book of manga cartooning, probably a souvenir from Tokyo.Next, Bagumbo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut. Then, 1,000 Places To See Before You Die, Patricia Schultz. The 10 Best of Everything, Nathaniel Lande and Andrew Lande, is “An Ultimate Guide for Travelers,” from National Geographic. None of these “1,000 Places” or “Ten Best” books are my books. Unknown, how they got here.

  Firing Line is a pamphlet, a transcript of a television program taped at WKPC in Louisville on May 16, 1973 and then broadcast on PBS. William F. Buckley, Jr. is talking to Dr. Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist, about “Drugs and Freedom.” The mailing label glued to the pamphlet is addressed to Dolores Dyer, Ph.D., at 4543 Cedar Springs, Apt. 228. So, to the Tecali Apartments. In the hallway, it takes me a beat, maybe two, before I can come up with “Tecali.” I lived at the Tecali, too, but not before 1975 or 1976.

  London, The Ultimate Key to the City, Louise Nicholson, is a “Citypack” guide, one of the Fodor’s brands. Discovery of the Yosemite in 1851, Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, M.D., Mariposa Battalion. Ninety-Two In The Shade, Thomas McGuane. Fodor’s Essential Israel. Israel, A Travel Survival Kit, Neil Tilbuy. And last, Cadogan Guides Spain, Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls. Spain is stuffed with articles torn from travel magazines. They have headlines of the “5 Perfect Days in Barcelona and Girona” kind. In the hallway, I see “What to Eat in Andalusia,” and “The Best of Madrid.” In “Love at First Bite,” a glossy picture of jamon Iberico and spreads of pictures of food, the captions “clockwise from left.”

  The books on this third shelf are like the suits and sports coats on wooden hangers in my walk-in closet. They have not been worn in years and will not be worn again. Their use is to fill the space and cover the emptiness.

  xv

  Chronology is no part of bookshelf hygiene. In archeological digs, the further down, the further back in time. On these hallway shelves, the past is uncovered with no relation to depth. Memories of the 1970s are found on a third shelf, but those of the 1980s on the shelf below. A book from my childhood in Los Angeles is alongside one of Aunt Bertha’s, from the same city but from decades before. A John Gunther hardback brought from my parents’ last house in Oceanside comes from further back in their past, but nearer in mine.

  xvi

  The house in Oceanside where my mother and father lived their last thirty years is part of a “gated community.” The homeowners are required to be over 55, though to the naked eye the average age Is be closer to 75.That number would be even higher were it not for the occasional sighting of a younger second or third wife who has inherited a home. The community was still called Leisure Village in the 1980s when my parents bought in. In a marketing move some years after, it was renamed Ocean Hills. My sister Patti and I own the house in Ocean Hills now. Since Patti lives in Pittsburgh, she and her husband take the winters. They stay most of the six months from January 1 through the end of June. I get summers, six months that begin July 1, though I seldom go. There are books there, too.

  xvii

  If only memories had their own Dewey numbers, so they could be easily retrieved. But they do not. So we may rely on others to remind and confirm, to gently correct or corroborate. My estranged daughter Eden is one of those whom I expected to be a borrower from the library of our shared memories, checking them out, then returning them to me and slowing my forgetfulness. Eden might also have discovered that the book of her life as a teenager is not the same book at forty, if only she would pick it up and read it again.

  No use lamenting. Of necessity, memories disappear. Others corrode. And some memories oxidize, developing a patina of verdigris far lovelier than how they began.

  xviii

  All books are self-help books, in a way. So much so, there are bibliotherapists, who help their patients use reading and their relationship to a chosen book’s content for healing. Some say, why keep any book, when reading is the point, and there are free public libraries. Others find comfort by possessing. Karl Lagerfeld, leaving instructions for the future of his 33,000 books, spoke of them as if they were personal friends. “They ask for nothing,” he said, “and they are silently patient, but they are always there for you.” Yes, the point is reading, but reading is evanescent, and the physical presence of the book testifies to it.

  George Perec’s essay Brief Notes On The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books was published in L’Humidite in 1978. After mentioning the problem of finding space, which must be solved before tackling the problem of order, he points out odd and obvious truth. We do not keep books in closets or, unlike pots of jam, in the pantry. We want our books to be visible. His list of ways to arrange books is hilarious. His point is that none of the ways is satisfying. Those who try to arrange their book, Perec says, in translation, “oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable.” In the end, he concludes that when it comes to books, order and disorder are the same word, “denoting pure chance.”

  Brief Notes On The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books is the title essay in a slight book of Perec’s essays on the third shelf, fourth hallway bookcase, next to Cadogan Guides Spain. It includes the essay “Some of The Things I Really Must Do Before I Die”, which is the written version of a radio broadcast Perec made on France-Culture in 1981. His number 3 of the things that he must do is “Arrange my bookshelves once and for all.” His number 2 is “Make up my mind to throw out a certain number of things that I keep without knowing why I keep them.” These two must-do’s are surely related.

  xix

  The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, drawings by Hans Erni, is the first book on the fourth shelf of the fourth bookcase in the hallway. This is my sister’s book. It has her underlines and curvy handwriting everywhere. Murphy, Samuel Beckett, Jupiter Books, uses a black and white portrait of the haunted-looking author on its cover, under a cloudy plastic wrapper that was clear when this book was new. Next, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, S.J. Perelman. Then New Arabian Nights, Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the Registered Editions Guild books, Art-Type Edition, I took from the Ocean Hills house. It is unread on this shelf, and, for all I know, never read. The “Editorial Note” on page vi describes New Arabian Nights as a collection of stories that first appeared in the English periodicals Cornhill Magazine, London, and Temple Bar. Its top edge is very dusty. Fantasia of the Unconscious, D. H. Lawrence, published in 1930 by Albert & Charles Boni, has a copyright 1922 by Thomas Seltzer Co. A picture postcard from Yosemite National Park is wedged between pages 13 and 14, at the start of Chapter II, where Lawrence writes, “We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn’t a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees…”Louis Lane, conductor of the Dallas Symphony, sent the postcard. “Greetings from a high place,” he writes to Dolores.

  xx

  Next, The Rinehart Book of Verse, edited by Alan Swallow. Scotch tape holds its paper cover together. The scotch tape is yellowing. The margins on pages 24, 246, 312 and 344 are marked

  with my handwriting. Then, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, selected and with an essay by T.S. Eliot. Baudelaire, Selected Verse, with an introduction and prose translations by Francis Scarfe. W. H. Auden, selected by the author. This Penguin Poets Auden is old enough to acquire the patina of a manuscript. There are shadows on the edges of its pages. An obituary inside announces “W. H. Auden Dies in Vienna.” Cause of death unknown. It happened on a Friday night and in a hotel. There are also three sophomoric rhyming tributes to Auden saved inside this slim paperback. “The last poet’s dead. Auden, Wystan Hugh/Let’s record the loss and give the man his due….” Each is written and signed by a college classmate. One of them is on a lined index card, and another is written on a napkin. The third, Rick Millington’s, rhymes its way down a sheet of notebook paper. If I knew Rick, I do not know that I knew him. Who is this Rick? I have no salvageable memory of him. So I google him. He is Richard Milligan, Helen and Laura Shedd Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Smith College. Bald, grey beard, bright blue eyes. No surprise, I do not recognize him.

  xxi

  Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg, introduction by William Carlos Williams. This small, square book is The Pocket Poet Series Number Four, City Lights Books, twenty-fourth printing, May 1971. Cost, $1. A gift from Leena Shaw, it casts a mind-wandering net, catching Leena, Lou Porter’s black girlfriend, and the apartment five floors up near the Natural History Museum in New York, and then Jacqueline Coral trying out for the Joffrey, and the rust brown water coming from the spigot of the sink in the bathroom. Leena Shaw, with two “e’s” in her first name, gave me this Howl in 1973. She signs her name on the blank page that follows page 44 . That page has the last poem on it. And this last poem wanders, too, from its title, In back of the real, to a railway yard in San Jose and a tank factory. It goes on like that for another twenty lines. In 1973, I thought these Alan Ginsburg poems were crap, but these days I am less firm in judgment.

  xxii

  On the title page of Howl and Other Poems, Randy Oppenheim leaves his name and address, 3971 Royal Oak Place, Encino, California. His name rings a bell, but nothing more, just a tinkling receding from 1973.Fifty years later on Redfin or Zillow I can look up the address and swipe across images of a house that was sold a year ago for three million dollars. The name of the real estate firm that made that sale? It is The Oppenheim Group, offices in Los Angeles, Newport Beach, San Diego, and Cabo. This is just coincidence. According to “About Us” on The Oppenheim Group website, the firm’s President and Founder is Jason, not Randy. Besides, I have heard of this real estate group, because it was featured in the “reality” TV series Selling Sunset. And I have heard of that through another coincidence. One of its former stars, Christine Quinn, is the daughter of a former friend. At this point, “never mind” is the best way forward, as is often the case with journeys that begin in the mind.

  xxiii

  A moment of recaptured time and wasting time are the same moment.

  So often, the attempt to recover a distant memory leads nowhere. Just as often, the place it leads is in ruins. The city of memory has been bombed. What was concrete is now fragmented, or in rubble, with the twisty arms of its rebar sticking out.

  xxiv

  If everything that happens follows in an unbreakable chain from what preceded it, then to follow from is the same as being controlled by. So the past not only matters, it is the future as well. And, therefore, free will does not exist. How can I argue with that?

  Still, coincidence is also a seductive notion, with explanatory power, as are accident, chance, and unpredictability.

  xxv

  The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, Beatrix Potter, comes after Howl. And then, The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne. And Cathedral, Raymond Carver. I find a stained napkin from The Egg Shop & Apple Press surviving in Thoughts of Kierkegaard, presented by W.H. Auden. Also in this Kierkegaard paperback, an economy boarding pass for Seat 4C on a Western Airlines flight, with the instruction “Present to Stewardess on Boarding Your Flight.” The notes on the blank endpapers of Thoughts of Kierkegaard are not my further thoughts. They are just quotes that I copied down from the text, with page references. For example, from page 146: “I cannot acquire an immediate certainty as to whether I have faith – for to believe means precisely that dialectical hovering which, although in fear and trembling, never despairs.” This is not a thought I would have on my own at age twenty-two.

  xxvi

  The cover of McLuhan: Hot & Cool promotes its collection of essays by Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, Howard Gossage, Howard Rosenberg, Tom Wolfe, and George Steiner, “with responses by Marshall McLuhan.” On the cover of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, the New York Herald Tribune touts McLuhan as “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.” Next, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett, with a foreword by Albert Einstein. Then, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse. And Demian, Hermann Hesse. Two brochures no bigger than a breast pocket are sandwiched between Einstein and Hesse. One is about Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, the other about Pinkie, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Sarah Barrett Moulton. Both are souvenirs from the Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery in San Marino. Next, Young Torless, Robert Musil. Group Portrait With Lady, Heinrich Boll. When Christians Were Jews, Paula Fredriksen. Candida, A Pleasant Play, Bernard Shaw, copyright 1905 by Brentano’s, has a bruised green cover that is held on by a rusted paper clip. Its ex libris sticker show the seal of The Library of the University of California. It is a Gift of Stanley Johnson for the English Reading Room. Wildflowers of Catalina, John Frick, is a little book overrun with color photos of the Sticky Monkey Flower, Tree Poppy, Giant Sea-Dahlia, California Bindweed, and other bewitching names.

  xxvii

  By Her Own Admission, Gifford Guy Gibson, is signed by the author. It is also signed by Mary Jo Risher and Ann Foreman, the lesbians who were at the center of the trial the book is about. Mary Jo’s former husband is suing her for custody of their children, and Dolores testifies as an expert for Mary Jo, who is her patient in counseling. It is 1977. Custody is of course awarded to the husband. By Her Own Admission is stuffed with newspaper clippings, legal documents, an uncashed check Guy wrote to Dolores, and a press release for the ABC Sunday Night Movie made about the case in 1978, A Question of Love, staring Gena Rowlands as Mary Jo. Clu Gulager is ex-husband Doug. Marlon Brando’s sister has a minor role. Gwen Arner, who went on to direct episodes of The Waltons, Dallas, Falcon Crest and Dynasty, plays Dolores.

  xxviii

  Next, When God Talks Back, T.M. Luhrmann. Be Fierce, Gretchen Carlson. Simpsons Strike Back has Matt Groening’s name on the spine, though he is not among the “contributing writers” or “contributing artists.” Crow and Weasel, Barry Lopez. The Great LIFE Photographers, the Editors of LIFE, is a 608-page book of photographs and was probably a gift. The Great Waldo Search, Martin Handford. Find Waldo Now, Martin Handford. The Quran, translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, printed in India by Goodword Books. And then, The Qur’an, translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. This second Quran, published by ASIR MEDIA, has a bright green cover and an apostrophe after the “r” in Quran.

  xxix

  Abdullah Yusef Ali, translator of Quran and Qur’an, is an Indian-British “barrister” who spoke English and Arabic fluently and, according to Wikipedia, could recite the entire Qur’an from memory. Born in Mumbai in 1872, he wins a scholarship to St. John’s College in Cambridge, marries Teresa Mary Shalders at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth in 1900, and has three sons and a daughter. Teresa also has an illegitimate child in 1910. He divorces her in 1912. His Wikipedia entry continues. He supports the British during World War I, receives the CBE in 1917, and marries for a second time in 1920, and that marriage also fails. Then the story jumps to 1953, when he is seen wandering the streets of London. He is a pauper. That November, while I am turning two in sunny Southern California, Abdullah Yusef Ali is found bewildered in a doorway in Westminster by the London police. He dies alone in a hospital. No one claims his body.

  xxx

  The Baudelaire paperback on this shelf is one of The Penguin Poets. This ragged book is the same one I worked over when I was using high school French to translate L’aube spirituelle and Je suis le pipe d’un auteur. I might still be able to recite verses from it, but I am failing to recognize the picture postcard from Taos Pueblo stuck between its pages. The card is from James, postmarked Sep. 15, 1972. “Many thanks for forwarding the letter to Galveston,” James says. “I’m now staying in Taos.” He says that he is going to New Orleans next. From there, to Cambridge, via Miami, Charleston, and Richmond. “I hope to see you,” he writes. “If not, let me know how you get on.” Despite his claim that I forwarded a letter to Galveston, I have no idea who this is. Swaths of my past are terra incognita. And not the past only. There is forgetfulness, but there is also paying no attention, and never noticing. Browsing through memories is like using a map from the Age of Exploration, where land masses are simply marked Unknown. An area of my inner world has the emptiness of an outer space.

  xxxi

  Fourth bookcase, fifth shelf:

  Dating, Mating, and Manhandling, Lauren Frances. Eden’s, maybe. Gaelic Self-Taught, James McClaren, comes from Thistles & Bluebonnets, a bookstore in Salado, off I-35 on the way to Austin. Dolores and I would stop in Salado to order tomato aspic for lunch at The Stagecoach Inn, and to visit an art gallery managed by Ancel Nunn’s former wife. Hints of those days float above the unpronounceable Gaelic on these pages. For those memories, it deserves a thank you, a go raibh maith agat. Next, Dictionary of 501 Spanish Verbs, Christopher Kendris. Then, German In Three Months, no author, Hugo’s Simplified System. 201 French Verbs is from Christopher Kendris again. Then, Vietnamese Phrase Book, V.A. Berlitz. In Chapter 8, Basic Food, Berlitz teaches how to say Kye nye khong sak, “This is not clean.” Second Year Latin, Jared W. Scudder, has Dolores’s name on the flysheet, above olive-green illustrations of Roman soldiers in battle. Dolores attended high school at Our Lady of Victory in Fort Worth. So, Latin was likely encouraged, if not required. Italian in Three Months, another Hugo’s Simplified System. Crescent Carnival, Frances Parkinson Keyes, is an 807-page novel published in 1942. Frances Keyes wrote more than fifty novels, and she was married to a United States Senator besides. According to Google, her last name rhymes with “eyes,” not “keys”. The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. “To Dad on your 51st birthday” appears on its first page. No signature, but probably from Ben. Robert Frost is a poet he would have heard of, and Eden might not have been speaking to me in November 2002. Two months earlier, her birth mother, Barbara, had met her for the first time. For the second time, technically. The Booklover’s Birthday Book, edited by Barbara Anderman, has the days of the year, one per page, and lists the notable birthdays on each. I share a birthday with Saint Augustine of Hippo and Robert Louis Stevenson. 201 Little Buddhist Reminders, Barbara Ann Kipfer. Barbara Ann Kipfer is also the author of 14,000 Things to Be Happy About, which is not on these shelves. Next, Lillian Hellman, Doris V. Falk. Then, Jerusalem Walks, Nitza Rosovsky. And Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. And Jerusalem: Footsteps Through Time, Ahron Horovitz. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, is a paperback school book, with my son’s name on the inside front cover. So are The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, Rumble Fish, S.E. Hinton, The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells, and The Man Without A Face, Isabelle Holland, Now A Major Motion Picture. Courage to Change has no author. This is the book I picked up at an Al-Anon meeting. Ben had dropped out of college, returned home, and spent his days either sleeping or playing video games and doing nothing else. Months went by, four months, five months. Pam suggested that I put Ben out “under a bridge,” beneath I-35, where the homeless spend their days, because that would “straighten him out.” That cloud of disagreement did not lighten our marriage and soon ended it. The details are slipping away, but I decided to go to an Al Anon meeting during this time, to learn “to accept what I cannot change.” Though it did not work, it was not unhelpful, and the relatives of drunks were far more understanding.

  The Art of Leadership, George W. Bush. This softbound book of portraits of world leaders lies on top of a horizontal stack at the end of this row. Just under it, Portraits of Courage, “A Commander- in-Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors,” George W. Bush. I own both because The Bush Center was a client. The former President had taken up painting as a pastime. His second effort, Portraits of Courage, seems more successful, in part because we know what the former leaders actually look like. The warriors are not public figures. Also in this stack, A Century of Commitment, author unnamed. This is another vanity publication, a coffee table book “Celebrating Commercial Metals Company’s First 100 Years.” CMC was a client, too. Near the bottom of the stack, The Book of Rock, Philip Dodd. It is a bloated history. And, rock bottom, Eric Clapton, a book of scores, music and words from Eric Clapton Unplugged. This one is also Ben’s book. On a loose sheet of paper inside it, he left the guitar tablature for Led Zeppelin’s Over The Hills & Far Away.

  xxxii

  The books on shelf six of the fourth bookcase are piled in two horizontal stacks. In the first stack, Latin & English Dictionary, John C. Traupman, Ph.D. and 501 Latin Verbs, Richard E. Prior and Joseph Wohlberg, sit on top of two National Geographic magazines, one from August 1939 and one from that December. Both magazines are from who knows where. My guess is from one of the rooms in Dolores’s mother’s house on Elsbeth in Oak Cliff. They are remnants of her hoarding. Melville Chater writes the lead article in the December 1939 issue. “The Highway of Races” is the story of his journey along the Danube. Under the National Geographic magazines, a thin book of color photographs of Navajo blankets, In Beauty It Is Finished, edited by Pam Lange. Then a pile of thirteen TIME magazines from 1969, two Newsweeks from 1969, and one LIFE magazine. “Nixon Rides The Waves” in one of these magazines, and there is “Deadlock in the Middle East” in another. Someone asks, “Is Prince Charles Necessary?” Someone else has answers about “The Kennedy Debacle: A Girl Dead, A Career In Jeopardy.” Less hysterical, more mundane, Newsweek has “Moonwalk in Color.” The LIFE magazine is from Spring 2000. On its cover, I can see the subscription mailing address of Dr. Melody A. Fortenberry. Dr. Fortenberry was the psychologist my fifteen-year-old daughter saw in therapy. Her high school suggested she go, and Dr. Fortenberry was the recommendation from the school. Eden hated it of course. She declared that she got nothing out of it, but at least she got a LIFE magazine from Dr. Fortenberry’s waiting room.

  At the time, Eden was cutting herself. Or, possibly it began a year after. I am not sure because I was unaware of it. I tell myself that every life is a secret life, that the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes, and that nobody is who we think they are. It may be truer to say that nobody is who we hope they are, and we cannot see what we choose not to.

  A blue Hammond International World Atlas is at the bottom of the pile.

  xxxiii

  New York in the Thirties, photographed by Berenice Abbot, text by Elizabeth McCausland, is on top of The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, in the second stack on this sixth shelf. The survival catalog is copyright 1973, A Woman-Made Book, $5. It belonged to Dolores. It is as oversized as a phone book, though thinner, and its listings of resources include the Chicago Woman’s Liberation Union, Pregnancy Testing done for $1.50.Most of the rest of this sixth shelf stack is sheet music from my teens in suburban Los Angeles. Circa 1965, these are the garage band years – three guitars – lead, rhythm, base – and drums. I am holding on to Top Teen Hits, Tired of Waiting for You, Wooly Bully, Little Boxes, And more. Another LIFE magazine, this time from 1971, lies at the bottom of the stack, waiting for some future reader of “Bobby Fischer – The Deadly Gamesman.”

  xxxiv

  On to the seventh shelf down. Leif Enger’s Peace Like A River begins a trickle of paperbacks that were assigned to my children by their private schools. It flows through The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, then into Death and The Kings Horseman, Wole Soyinka, before emptying at Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, edited by Roma Gill, OBE, M.A., Cantab. B. Litt, Oxon. Under the front cover of Death and The King’s Horseman, an admission slip from 11/14/02 with the Attendance Officer’s signature excuses Eden for lateness or absence. “I am Kaha Huna, Goddess of Surfing,” Eden writes on the book’s title page, drawing a wavy line and her stick figure on top of it. George Karl’s basketball memoir This Game’s the Best is Ben’s book. Between two pages, Ben left a business card for Harvey’s Paint and Body, Collision Repair Specialists, 4310 Maple Avenue. We were on a first-name basis with John Harvey.

  xxxv

  Also on this shelf, The Alhambra, Washington Irving. Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot. Contemporary Hebrew 1, Menahem Mansoor. And The Complete Idiot’s Guide to The Talmud, Rabbi Aaron Parry. After that, a stack of books used like a bookend. None of the children’s books in this stack are remembered or even recognized. There is Spot Looks at Colors, Eric Hill, and Spot Looks at Opposites, Eric Hill. Ma Maison, textes de Nina Filipek, dessins de Louise Barrel. Little Boy Blue’s Nursery Rhymes, a Brimax Rhyme Time Board Book. And The Emperor and the Nightingale, Hans Christian Andersen. Then two bigger, thick paperbacks, a pair anchoring the stack to the shelf. Prescription for Dietary Wellness, Phyllis A. Balch, C.N.C. and James F. Balch, M.D., and Prescription for Nutritional Healing, Balch and Balch.

  xxxvi

  From a tower of children’s books, I can see all the way to a different house, and into its upstairs bedrooms, where there is a striped sofa, lamplight, moths beating against the black windowpanes. When exactly those brief years of reading to Ben and Eden began needs more illumination than the lamplight provides. It might begin in 1987, in a reading out loud to a two-year-old and her three-year-old brotherIt is fuzzy, that beginning. Even cloudier though is when it all ended. Age six and age seven? When he could read on his own, when she preferred to read on her own. Maybe one or two years after that.

  xxxvii

  The second stack of children’s books on the seventh shelf, fourth hallway bookcase, begins with Baby’s First Words, which are chair, rug, blocks, and ball. In the cover illustration, Baby seems to be around three years old. Next book down, Mother Goose Picture Riddles, Lisl Weil. Under that, Szekeres’ A B C, with pages as thick as sheets of balsawood. Next, Find the Canary, Neil and Ting Morris. Origami 1, Mrs. Atsuko Nakata. Only the Cat Saw, Ashley Wolff. James Marshall’s Mother Goose. Colors, Sarah Lynn. My First Word Book, Richard Scarry. The Tiny Seed, Eric Carle. The Mixed-up Chameleon, Eric Carle. Oh, What a Mess, Hans Wilhelm. The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System, Joanna Cole. Richard Scarry’s Mother Goose. A sticker decorates the title page of Eden’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, Dr. Seuss. “Kindergarten Graduation, May 1992,” it says. Next, Goodnight My Friend Aleph, Tova Mordechai. Then, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories, Beatrix Potter, illustrated by Lulu Delacre. Then, Amazing World of Ants, Francene Sabin, illustrated by Eulala Conner. And then, Hanukkah Cat, Chaya Burstein. Daisy, Percy’s Predicament, and Woolly Bear are three stories in one of The Rev. W. Awdry’s Thomas The Tank Engine and Friends books. Underneath it, My First Picture Book of Numbers, Brian Miles, illustrated by Anne and Ken McKie. Everywhere You Look looks like a primary school textbook. Its stories and poems are by different authors, On its first page, this poem by Arnold Lobel:

  Books to the ceiling, books to the sky. My piles of books are a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

  So true. And so is the illustration that goes alongside the poem. A house made of books towers above an old man, who looks, as some of us do, like a bearded gnome. He is squatting on two of the lumpy books and holds a third book open in his hands. His glasses sit on the very edge of his nose. xxxviii These children’s books on an old man’s shelves are sweet and sour. Tell me, children, does the past spoil, can it turn bad, like cream?

  xxxix

  The two Balch books need to be purged. Prescription for Dietary Wellness and Prescription for Nutritional Healing are bloated with loose paper. Articles and notes, most of them in the “foods that fend off cancer” category, were collected in 1997 while Dolores was dying. “Potentially Protective Foods” include beans and peas, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli. “Broccoli haters may find the research to their liking,” according to the article from the Associated Press, which reports that Brussel sprouts are fifty times more “protective” than broccoli. A neighbor forwarded an article about “Fats That Heal.” Silent for the past thirty years, “The Healthiest Diet on the Planet” speaks up this afternoon in the hallway. “It’s not complicated,” it says. “You just need to eat 8 different foods every day.” Date it a month before Dolores’s death. In a xerox of ten pages on Flax LNA, “lipid researcher Johanna Budwig recommends flax oil for enemas in colon cancer and bowel obstruction.”I am throwing out a 50-page booklet from Dr. David Williams. “After you read this bulletin, you won’t die of cancer,” it promises in red on its cover. Dr. Julian Whitaker mails his Health & Healing newsletter, “Tomorrow’s Medicine Today”, and his Forward Plus Daily Regimen supplements promotions. He pitches The Whitaker Program. A Fall/Winter 1997 tabloid-sized Healthy Cell News, from ALV Publishers, Inc, goes into the trash as well. First, though, I am taking a last look at the low-res black and white photograph of its expert, Dr. Johanna Budwig, “famous for flaxseed oil findings.” Dr. Budwig looks like death warmed over.

  xl

  The eighth, bottom shelf in the fourth bookcase down the hall has books for children, but these are from high school or college. Another copy of Catch-22, Joseph Heller, lands here. It is assigned high school reading. Same with two Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. paperbacks, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. Next, The Orphan Train Adventures, Joan Lowery Nixon. And The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas, Paul Zindel. Then, The Barracks Thief, Tobias Wolff. The bookmark in Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther, is a baseball card – Terry Steinbach, catcher, Minnesota Twins, voted the American League’s starting catcher in 1988 and named MVP of the All-Star game in 1988.So, Ben’s book. Ben’s name is written in The Short Guide to Writing About Literature, Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain. It seems so unlikely. Next, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello, has the yellow Voertman’s Used sticker on its thin spine. Voertman’s is a bookstore in Denton, Texas, near the University of North Texas. So, this is a book my daughter left behind. Next in line, The Merchant of Venice, with my son’s name on its inside front cover. When Ben attended Jesuit Prep for high school, grey-haired Father Leininger taught his first-year English class. Father Leininger assigned his class only one Shakespeare play to read and discuss that year. Not Macbeth, not The Tempest. Not Hamlet, either, that story of a young man in confusion, which all his students might have related to. Father Leininger assigned The Merchant of Venice.

  xli

  Two newspaper clippings, two ticket stubs, a credit card receipt and a postcard are preserved between pages of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. The postcard announces a reception at a gallery in New York for Tom Sime. Dolores did not go, but Tom, a former patient, gave her one of his paintings on a large canvas. It looks like a brown tunnel and stays outside, in the garage behind rakes and brooms. The ticket stubs in All The Pretty Horses are from the Music Hall at Fair Park, performances in 1992.One of the newspaper clippings is an undated notice that Norman Mailer will be reading from Oswald’s Tale at Borders Books and Music. The receipt? Dinner at Marrakesh Restaurant, 5027 Lovers Lane, Dallas, January 1997. A month later, Dolores was diagnosed with colon cancer. But the summer before we had been in Marrakesh, Morocco, on a family escapade, Ben at 12 and Eden ten, along for the fun. Our last night there, Dolores ate sheep’s brains for dinner, something not on the menu at the Marrakesh in Dallas.

  The other newspaper clipping is from the Arts pages. “No dearth of near-death tales” reviews Saved by the Light, Life After Life, Embraced by the Light, and other titles that belong to the vogue of “I died but not really” books.

  xlii

  Kelly Babington’s name shows up on more than one book on these shelves. This morning, it appears on the inside front cover of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White. This time, I can see it in the filing cabinet of memories, in a folder labeled “Babysitters.” A slant of light in the hallway allows that cabinet drawer to slide open, and there it is.

  xliii

  Alaska Stories, edited by John and Kirsten Miller, has multiple authors, including John McPhee, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Jack London, and Robert Coles. “To Eden,” I wrote on its title page, “who will live and write many stories of her own.” Dated Summer, 1999. It is nice to think that a gift would be kept, but neither of my children wanted much of what I had to give them, and Eden has wanted none of it. Bens name is on a name tag affixed to the cover of Winnie-The-Pooh, A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepard. Then, The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare. Dubliners, James Joyce. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. And another Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse. How many Siddharthas does it take for American teenagers to get through high school? Next, The World’s Religions, Huston Smith. Then another Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, on the same shelf. Since I have never read anything by Kurt Vonnegut, this must be Ben’s. Or Eden’s. Then, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut yet again. 10,000 Ways to Say I Love You, Gregory J.P. Godek. Way number 1 is “Honor your partner’s individuality.” Number 10,000 is “Live happily ever after.” Way number 5180 is “Never say never.” This is one of those books of no known origin. According to its cover, Godek is also the author of 1001 Ways to Be Romantic. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling is not mine, but here it is, in front of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The message to Ben on the title page of Arms & Armor, Eyewitness Books, is dated June 10, 1992. “For your 8th Birthday with lots of love.” I can see the same hand on the flyleaf of In Search of the Miraculous. The “Mom and Dad” there becomes “Grandma and Grandpa” here.

  Total Orgasm, Jack Lee Rosenberg, illustrations by Joseph Jaqua, is Dolores’s book. It will always be 1972 under its covers. The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia, Steven Jay Rubin, is Ben’s book. So is The Canary Prince, Eric Jon Nones. Then, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bridge, H. Anthony Medley with Michael Lawrence. And the last book on this bottom shelf of the fourth hallway bookcase, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder.

  Squeezed between The Complete Idiot’s Guide and The Holocaust are five publications that might belong on eBay. An Official Souvenir Program from the 1965 World Series – Dodgers and Twins. Three MAD magazines from 1966. And a comic book, Venom Attacks the Amazing Spider-Man, each word in its title a work of typographic art.

  Chapter Fourteen
  JOY

  In my inbox this morning, the Red Hand Files, where Nick Cave writes of a joy that is retroactive, a joy that is released by a memory or a sudden recollection, and that is as likely to find expression in tears, rather than in smiles.

  ii

  There are no books on the two shelves at the bottom of the fifth hallway bookcase, and its top two shelves are the cookbooks, already named, with their unused recipes. So that leaves only four shelves to account for. The third shelf down begins with The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, next to Modern English Usage, H. W. Fowler, and Along the Ganges, Ilija Trojanow. The name Trojanow is too strange to pass over. The author’s bio is found under the author’s photo on the flap of the glossy jacket, bending around the back cover. There is not much to learn however, other than Ilija is male and born in Bulgaria. Next, The Art of Drowning, Billy Collins, with two scraps of paper inside. One is a printout of a Carl Sandburg poem named “Shirt” that begins I remember once I ran after you and tagged the fluttering shirt of you in the wind. It goes on from there. The poet sees someone in “a glassful of something” and then again in a bonfire’s red embers when he is sitting with “chums.” The second scrap in The Art of Drowning is a paragraph about authenticity, from W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. “No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be,” Auden writes, “but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a short while, whether something he has written is authentic.” That may be true. It is easier to judge good and bad, however, than to know whether someone else is authentic.

  iii

  Also on this third shelf down, When She Woke, Hillary Jordan. Everyman, Philip Roth. Kim, Rudyard Kipling. Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson. Bits of paper in these last three books are from Maria Popova’s newsletter, which she called “Brainpickings” before she gave it the creepier name “Marginalia.” The one inside Axel’s Castle is an excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald“s story collection “All the Sad Young Men.” I circled that title. Next, Wittgenstein’s Poker, David Edmonds and John Eidenow. Next, The Worse Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht. Among the worst-case scenarios teased on the cover: How to Escape from Quicksand, How to Break Down a Door, How to Land a Plane, and How to Wrestle an Alligator. Then, Kisses, Hulton Getty. And Incompleteness, Rebecca Goldstein. And Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith. And The Tree Where Man Was Born, Peter Matthiessen. In the shade of two pages of The Tree Where Man Was Born, I discover a printout from The Standard Interactive, Wednesday, October 5, 2005.You may never have heard of The Standard Interactive, but it has Your Views, Your TV Guide, Your Stars, and Your Top Puzzles. In the “Ask Anything” column, someone asks, “Is it true that HIV/AIDS was created by Americans to depopulate the black race?” The Standard Interactive cities Dr. Leonard Horowitz of Harvard University and goes on at length about a biological warfare “programme,” the “Federally-funded Special Cancer Virus Programme,” Richard Nixon, John D. Rockefeller, III, eugenics, and the “database of the mycoplasma computers.” The column offers several flowcharts, with the one from 1971 being “the “irrefutable missing link.” With all its programmes, The Standard Interactive must be British. After that, A Happy Death, Albert Camus. Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore. Common Sense, Thomas Paine. Common Sense is a numbered copy from the “This Heritage Remembered” series, illustrations by Jack Unruh. The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Mark Twain, is also from “This Heritage Remembered,” illustrations by Don Sibley and Rex Peteet. So is A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, another numbered copy, designed by Paula Scher at Pentagram.

  A woman is clinging to a man’s leg, pulp-fiction style, on the illustrated cover of An Outcast of the Islands, Joseph Conrad. The newspaper article left between pages 8 and 9 is headlined “Russian missiles believed armed with gas warheads.” Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, another of Dolores’s dogeared paperbacks, is falling apart. Its pages are spotted and browned. Inside, a ticket to Bishop’s Palace in Galveston, Texas, and a business card from L’Art de Chine – Ivory – Jade – Semi-Precious Stones – Carvings – Cloisonne. Also, a boldfaced warning typed on a grey strip of paper warns that “The 4.00 PM sailing to the Statue of Liberty and American Museum of Immigration will allow you only 50 minutes for your visit. You MUST be on last boat departing Liberty Island for Manhattan at 5:15.“ This is evidence of travel, but too far back in time to bring anything back from that trip.

  Nearing the end of the shelf, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau. The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck, has a bookmark from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Gift and Book Store. Then, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont. The rest of the books on this shelf are in a stack of vanity publications from the business of graphic design and advertising. There is Absolut Book, Richard W. Lewis, a coffee table tome that valorizes print ads for a vodka, and Graphic Design America, and multiple “show books” that are funded by entry fees from graphic design competitions. Handsome, hardbound AR 100 is a book of nothing but spreads from corporate annual reports.

  iv

  The grey spines of three perfect bound magazines from January, April, and July 1970 fuse together on the fourth shelf down. They are issues of MIND, A Quarterly Review of Pyschology and Philosophy, edited by Professor Gilbert Ryle, Magdalen College, Oxford, and published by Basil Blackwell, 49 Broad Street, Oxford. Price Seven Shillings and Sixpence. I was nineteen and never a subscriber, but never mind, here they are, fifty-five years later, as emblematic as anything of my pretentions. I do not remember or even imagine ever reading a single article, “discussion note,” or “critical notice,” which are sections named on the covers. Still, I must have wanted them, the January 1970 essay by R. Rekha Verma on “Vagueness & The Principle of Excluded Middle,” and, in April, Ronald Jager’s “Truth and Assertion,” where the phrase modus ponens appears. Modus ponens is in the R. Rekha Verma essay as well. And here modus ponens is again, in July, when Aaron Sloman’s “Ought and Better” says that modus ponens is a valid principle of inference. Sloman’s essay begins “It is often said that “ought’ implies “can’, yet it is clear that one can say without contradiction such things as, “Ideally, you ought to pay for the damage you have done, though I know you cannot afford it’. Crouching on the floor in the hallway, I am looking for more of modus ponens. In July 1970, J. P. Day of Keele University contributes “The Anatomy of Hope and Fear.” He does it without modus ponens, but his pages are full of symbols, lines with arrows, and sentences that explain the difference between Despair and Desperation, as well as the meaning of “quasi-vector.’ On the hardwood floor, turning these pages, my knees aching, I know that the nineteen-year-old who wanted to be a reader of these essays was someone I once knew, but we are no longer friends.

  v

  Gerard de Nerval, Choix des Textes & Preface par Albert Beguin is a slender book. Its soft paper cover wears a thin clear wrapper, like a jacket but glued to it. Published in 1939 in Paris by GLM, 6 Rue Huyghens, its poems and short prose date mostly from the 1850s. The preface makes the point that the charm of Nerval, his sweetness and purity and innocence, “son intensite douce et pure, sa totale innocence,” is enhanced by the fact that his poetry is unknown. He is one of “ces hereux meconnus,” those happy unrecognized ones. It is true, I have no idea who he is and need to go online to look him up, but it is false that he was happy being unrecognized. As it turns out, Gerard de Nerval did not go unrecognized in his own day. Nerval had a reputation for nuttiness. He was seen taking his pet lobster for a walk on a leash through the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Why a lobster? Why this book on my shelf, how did Nerval get here? That memory has a wrapper glued to it as well, and it is an opaque one. I might have found Nerval in a bookstall in Paris during the two months of 1973 when I was posing as a poet. So, along the Seine, not far from Rue Cardinal Lemoine, around the corner from the Pantheon.

  vi

  Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray. A blurb on the back cover claims that Spalding Gray “zigzags through his far-flung adventures with the speed and agility of an Indy 500 driver on the San Diego Freeway.” This is praise written by somebody who has never been in traffic on the 405. Next, Chatiments, Tome 1, Victor Hugo. Then Anthologie de la Poesie Grecque, choix, traduction, notices par Robert Brasillach. The Greek in Anthologie de la Poesie Grecque is on the left page, the translation on the right is in French. Theocrite’s “L’Epithalame d’Helene, page 229, is pimpled with pencil marks. I am copying Greek words, writing English translations, marking the meter as short short, short and long, the vertical lines that separate the feet, the anapests and spondees. Who did you think you were, I am asking myself this morning in the hallway. The twenty-one-year-old who made the pencil marks cannot answer. Who do you think you are? That may the most important question we ask ourselves. When it is asked by someone else, it is usually not a question. It is a sneer. This morning, the only language I understand in Anthologie de la Poesie Grecque appears on a discount card left inside the book. It is a Mann Theaters Student Discount card and expires in 1973.

  vii

  A business card left in Buddhist Scriptures, selected and translated by Edward Conze, is from Chaya, 110 Navy Street, Venice, California. Next, Games People Play, Eric Berne, M.D. Then, Seven French Short Novel Masterpieces, with an introduction by Henry Peyre. And Romans de Voltaire, presente par Roger Peyrefitte. Poems of Ben Jonson, edited with an introduction by George Burke Johnston, and a Be Nice To Me I Gave Blood Today sticker still stuck on its back cover. Odes, Horace, edited with introduction and notes by T.E. Page. The Aeneid of Virgil, this version a “new verse translation” by C. Day Lewis. Englands Helicon, edited by Hugh MacDonald, is missing its apostrophe. Like most of these books, Englands Helicon has not been opened in over fifty years. Everything inside it still rhymes, all the shepherds, the nymphs, deceived Philistus and false Clorinda. The Problem of Anxiety, Sigmund Freud, is another of Dolores’s books. The Booklover’s Book List may have been a gift, or a souvenir. It comes from the gift shop of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The pages are lined and empty. They are divided in sections, and each of the sections are accompanied by a picture, usually a detail from a painting or a drawing from the museum’s collection. The sections are labeled Books to Buy, Books to Borrow, Books by Topic, Books for Children, Books to Give as Gifts, and Books Lent. So, it is a kind of notebook for lists, though no one has listed anything.

  viii

  Portrait of My Body, Phillip Lopate. A note left inside says, “There is only one great adventure, and that is inward toward the self. Henry Miller.” It is my handwriting and difficult to read; “adventure” is a guess. Fifty pages later, bits of paper the size of dollar bills turn out to be my nine-year-old daughter’s handmade money. There is a one, a five, and a ten. She writes on each, “This Note Legal Tender for all Members of the Perkins Family.” She draws a circle on the bills. Instead of Washington or Lincoln or Hamilton inside the circle, she draws a stick figure that she labels “Crazy Guy.” Eden signs her first name, as “Treasury Secretary” of our household. Next, Krsna The Supreme Personality of Godhead, His Divine Grade A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. The book’s color illustrations are lurid. The captions are otherworldly, too; or, just foreign. For example, “Seeing Krsna enjoying with His cowherd friends, Lord Brahma decided to play a trick (p.88).” This book was handed to me at an airport, in an era when airport security was not what it is now.

  Refresh, compiled by Kobe Yomada, is pocket-sized. Someone using a thin red marker has drawn smiley faces, underlined words, and made arrows on many of the pages, which are a compilation of simple statements, one per page, all of them quotes. “For fast-acting relief, try slowing down” is attributed to Lily Tomlin. I see one of the smiley faces on that page. “Always leave enough room in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, and even joyous” is a quote from Paul Hawken. On the Paul Hawken page, a drawn red arrow is pointing to the word “you,” and the words “happy,” “satisfied,” and “joyous” are underlined. And someone has written “each day!” out to the side. But who? The thin red marker is also used for the “2007” written on the inside front cover. So, someone right after my divorce, giving me Refresh and offering encouragement? It takes long minutes to remember Jocelyn, the girlfriend I have not seen since 2008.“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them,” says Sylvia Plath. An eerie quote, considering. Jocelyn adds “Use the spa more,” in red marker on the Sylvia Plath page and draws a red flower. This little book is self-help. I broke it off with Jocelyn, unfairly, but would love to be in a bath or the spa with her one more time.

  ix

  The next books on this fourth shelf, a run of paperbacks, seem to belong together because they are all short in height. Word & Object, Willard Van Orman Quine. Pork City, Howard Browne. The Arabs In History, Bernard Lewis. The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus. The Stranger, Albert Camus. Cien Anos de Solidad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fish, Monroe Engle. Story of the Eye, George Bataille. The House of Breath, William Goyen. The Collected Stories of William Goyen. And then some hardbacks, old books that I might have found in a used book bin or at a sale of public library discards. Young Lonigan, James T. Farrell. Winter’s Tales, Isak Dinesen. Count Bruga, Ben Hecht. This Ben Hecht hardback, copyright 1926 by Boni & Liveright, has an odd mustard yellow cover with arty typography from the Jazz Age and a debossed illustration of Count Bruga, clown-like, stylized and geometric, with top hat and walking stick or baton. It is a book you can find for sale on eBay for $53.34, “binding moderately soiled.”

  Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station has baby pictures of my son and daughter between pages 252 and 253. They are professional portraits. Tolstoi’s Essays on Life is one of the Carlton House World’s Greatest Thinkers books. It probably belongs with its cousins, the five other Greatest Thinkers on the lower shelf behind the downstairs desk. Page 18 of Lenin in Zurich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is dogeared. Page 18 may be as far as I got. Two of my headshots, sized as passport photos, are also marking that page. Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier, unread, has three newspaper articles folded between pages 92 and 93 of its 581 pages. One of these articles is from the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, August 2005. Another, from a different newspaper, has a diagram that shows the position of the earth and the sun in winter. The third article is from the Chicago Tribune, Tuesday, November 6, 2007. It advises how you can be younger than your “real age”. Reduce stress, it says. Also, take your vitamins, quit smoking, be active, wear a seat belt, fill up on fiber, monitor your health, laugh, and, very important, become a lifelong learner. Of this list, I can say I always wear a seat belt.

  Last on this third shelf, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie, also unread.

  x

  The magnolias in my yard are blooming. The large white flowers are too monochromatic to be called gawdy, though they are showy. My next-door neighbor tells me that she dislikes these trees because of the debris that drops from them, the brown leaves, the dead petals, but that is in a different season. That season comes for all of us. No reason not to enjoy the show while it lasts. I have read that Europeans first encountered the flowering magnolia tree on an island in the West Indies. How astonishing that must have been. They named the tree after a French botanist, Pierre Magnol. My magnolias are native enough to do well in the heat of the Texas summer, and in winter I value the privacy they provide from the house next door, where my neighbor might well have a little debris to rake up, since these trees are along the solid fence that also divides us. The ones in my yard must be the American evergreen, Magnolia grandiflora. It is a good name for them. Their flora are very grand.

  xi

  Fifth shelf, fifth bookcase down the hallway:

  Managing for Results, Peter F. Drucker. Modern Poems, edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair. Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt. “If you care about poetry,” declares the Boston Book Review blurb on the cover of these 973 pages, “you must read this book.” The loose sheet of paper I find folded up inside Lives of the Poets is titled “Signs of Possible Childhood Depression.” There are 25 listed. Sadness is the first sign. Also inside this book, an ad for Salomon Smith Barney. “See How The Pros Are Investing This Year,” it screams. The year, 2001, is 25 years past.

  Next, Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene. The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher. Shakespeare Soliloquies is a Peter Pauper Press Book, with a grey dustcover. La Divina Commedia, Vol. III, Paradiso, Dante Alighieri, is the book I took with me to read in Paris cafes. This softcover dreamcatcher, this ridiculous reminder of ambitions that now seem inseparable from pretentions, a book last touched when I placed it on the hallway shelf and, before that, when I moved it from one house to this house. Before that, untouched since 1973. Paradiso came from parts unknown. Its pages are covered with handwritten repetitions of terza rima. Most of its pages are taken up by footnotes. And, since the footnotes are in Italian, they are also scribbled over with my attempts at translation. So, I was twenty-two and in Paris and spending my time copying down Italian. It seems obvious that it was a misuse of time. Judging from the scribbles, I did not make it beyond the beginning of Canto Terzo on page 33 before jumping to Canto Trentesimoterzo on page 402. I must have realized I was never going to get to the end of Paradise otherwise.

  xii

  Two postcards are stuck in Paradiso. One is a photo of Garrya elliptica, the “Silk Tassel Bush,” a native California evergreen shrub. I covered the back of the card with quotes from The Anatomy of Melancholy. I was in a café on Boulevard Raspail and reciting Burton’s motto: “A good thing is no worse for repetition.”Also this, from his verses:

  Do not, O do not, trouble me So sweet content I feel and see All my joys to this are folly None so divine as melancholy. Looking at these lines, I might as easily have been in an asylum, babbling. The other postcard came from City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. It has a black and white picture of the storefront on its cover. On the back, a silhouette of gondoliers bearing a flower-covered casket, with the printed date, time, and place of a poetry reading, Friday, December 8, 8:30 pm, Tel Hi Gym, 555 Chestnut, S.F. Admittance, $1. Ezra Pound had died in Venice on November 1, 1972. The event that December was a commemorative. I went to hear Thom Gunn read, and because I was a poet, or thought I was.

  xiii

  I am sliding The Mystery Guest, Gregoire Bouillier, off this fifth shelf. What it is, why it is here in the hallway – those are mysteries, too. It is a short book, and I like the typography on the cover, so I take it down, and try out the opening paragraph, and bring it with me to the downstairs desk. So The Mystery Guest now has an “intending to read” status. Nothing wrong with that. Like the Paul Masson wines in the Orson Welles commercials, circa 1979, a book should only be read when the time is right. The best of them may need to age. The reader may need to age.

  xiv

  Next The Wayward Bus, John Steinbeck. Then Norfleet, J. Frank Norfleet, “The actual experiences of a Texas Rancher’s 30,000-mile transcontinental chase after five confidence men.” The Best-Known Works of Emile Zola, another “The Book League of America” hardback, came from my parents’ house. Then, the six New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare paperbacks, edited by Horace Howard Furness. I am straightening the spines of Twelfth Night or What You Will, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello and The Tempest. Next, Prefaces to Renaissance Literature, Douglas Bush. And Bad Hair, James Innes-Smith and Henrietta Webb. And Technique in Fiction, Robie Macauley and George Lanning. On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner, has a foreword by Raymond Carver. The Art of Fiction, David Lodge. The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. In The Gentleman from Indiana, Booth Tarkington, I find a handwritten claim of ownership on the page facing the inside front cover: “Property of Velma Whitman, August 8, 1910, Kan City, Kan.”

  First Spanish Course, E.C. Hills and J.D.M. Ford, copyright 1917, is stamped Springfield Public Schools, State of Vermont. The Grim Reader, Writings on Death, Dying, and Living On, edited by Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman, holds a letter inside from April 14, 1998, acknowledging the receipt of my check in the amount of $500, “intended as payment for the memorial plaque” for Dolores. The letter says if I have any questions, I can call. Next, How I Became A Holy Mother, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Heat & Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Strike the Father Dead, John Wain. Poetry 180, selected and with an introduction by Billy Collins, saves one of many drug-store developed pictures of my daughter between its pages. Eden seems happy and looks beautiful. The photo is at page 126, next to Judith Kerman’s poem “In Tornado Weather.” A photo left inside Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen, shows my son, a teen-aged Ben, with his former best friend Phil. After that, Everyman’s Talmud, Abraham Cohen. Then, Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux. Plain and Simple A Woman’s Journey to the Amish, Sue Bender. And, the last in the row, North of South, Shiva Naipaul. Of the books on this fifth shelf of the fifth bookcase in the hallway, only six have been read.

  The Mystery Guest will make seven.

  xv

  The excerpt on its jacket flap is intriguing. “Just when you think you’ve thought of everything,” Gregoire Bouillier writes, “you forget the book sitting right there on the bedside table.” This is one reason I am giving The Mystery Guest a try. Also, it is very thin. Only 120 pages. So even if reading it turns out to be a mistake, it will not be a big one.

  As it turns out, The Mystery Guest, Gregoire Bouillier’s account, or memoir, or total fiction, is a guilty pleasure. It is like an object found in the middle of the street. Something ownerless, but also valuable, like a money clip, or a wallet with no identification in it and so empty of any possibility of returning it to whoever dropped it.

  xvi

  Dustcover and book jacket are different names for the same thing. In my opinion, jacket is the better name. Especially on these bottom hallway shelves, where a layer of dust lies on the covered and uncovered alike. Their top edges, which are never covered, are a topsoil of dust and dog hair and the carapaces of insects. Clearly, dustcovers – book jackets – cannot be judged for the job of keeping books clean. Instead, their role is to let us readers judge a book by its cover. It is impossible not to, when so much trouble has been taken with design, illustration, and typography. Hardbound books wear their jackets as decoration. Paperbacks have illustrations directly on their skins, like tattoos. And if the bodies of these books are in dust, then the words inside are their souls, immortal or otherwise.

  xvii

  Did you know that books been bound with actual skin? A French physician named Bourland took the skin from the back of one of his patients, after her death, and used her skin to bind Des Destinees de L’Ame, Destinies of the Soul, a work written by Arsene Houssaye in 1879.Bouland decided that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” according to the note he left inside his copy. He did not write anything on the binding, not a title, not the author’s name, in order “to preserve its elegance,” according his note. And Bourland’s method of bookbinding is not simply a one-off. The method has its own name: anthropodermic bibliopegy. The “practice” dates to the 16th century, says the American Bookbinders Museum, and was especially popular in the 1800s.Doctors would use human skin to bind books in their own collections. Sometimes, state officials provided them with the skins of executed criminals. This is all reported in an article I am reading this morning in Smithsonian Magazine about the decision by Harvard University to remove Des Destinees de L’Ame from its Houghton Library collection. That peculiar book was a gift from an alum in 1934, a loan at first and then, after his death in 1954, donated by his widow. Students new to working at the library used to be hazed by being asked to fetch this book and only after told about its human skin binding. The fun is over now. The problem has been removed. Not the book, but its human skin binding. The article reports that “the disbound book is still available to researchers in person and digitally,” while the skin is in temporary storage. Librarians at Harvard are researching the identity of the unknown woman and any living relatives, and consulting with French officials.

  xviii

  Today, Tuesday, April 23, 2024, is World Book Day. That is news to me, but it is nothing new. The first World Book Day happened in the 1920s, when the Director of the publisher of Miguel de Cervantes decided to announce it as a way to honor Cervantes and boost sales of Don Quixote. It was celebrated at first on October 7, Cervantes’ birthday, and subsequently moved to April 23, the date of his death. These days, Cervantes has nothing to do with World Book Day. Now it is all about encouraging children to read, as if books were vitamins. And there is also a World Book Night, “a national celebration of reading and books presented by The Reading Agency.” It takes place on April 23 as well. So, no difference between day and night.

  xix

  The sixth shelf of the fifth hallway bookcase begins with The Loss That is Forever, Maxine Harris, Ph.D., subtitled The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father. Inside it, I find a xerox of Dr. T. Berry Brazelton’s “Family Today” column from September 13, 1989, “Parents teach kids to deal with grief.” My daughter’s birthday is September 13, which is coincidental. Eden was only four in 1989. This article was at its most relevant in 1999, her fourteenth birthday, when she was still in the wake of Dolores’s death. Also saved, a drawing Eden did on a piece of craft paper. There is a sun, a cloud and two bizarre figures, their stick feet and stick arms sprouting from oval heads, no torsos, one figure labeled “Dad” and the other labeled “Me.” Our mouths are shaped like V’s. We might be smiling. We are horizonal, though, as if we are lying under the scalloped line she drew above us. This scalloped line might be mountains on a horizon. Or might be waves, with the two of us under them Next on the shelf, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis. Then, A Time To Grieve, Carol Staudacher. This is a book that I read cover to cover. Sentences are circled, lines are starred or copied in margins, and bits of paper are saved between pages. One bit is the grey business card of Greg Reed Brown, an employee at Stone Tablets, “Inscriptions In Natural Stone.” Browsing through the underlines, I find a Spanish proverb: “Life is short, but it is wide.” And further on: “I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept it without wishing I had given it away.” This piece of confusion is attributed to Louise Brooks. It is on a page about sorting and discarding the possessions of the dead.

  xx

  Este Libro No Sera Vendido is stamped in gold on the cover of Nuevo Testamento, Espanol e Ingles. Did I steal this book? Two pages in, another question, this time in print: “Quienes son los Gedeones”? Next, The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy. Then, Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, with an introduction by Leo W. Schwarz. Saint Joseph Daily Missal is a small, stout book. Its cover is nearly detached, and the red edges of its pages are touched by gold. I may have pilfered this book as well. A Union Prayer Book has a narrow silk ribbon bound into it, for use as a placeholder. Torah, Hebrew Publishing Company, opens from right to left. My sister’s name and our old street address and phone number appear on the page facing what our Catholic neighbors on Belton Drive in Los Angeles, would have called the inside back cover. Next, The Holy Scriptures, “according to the Masoretic Text,” is all English, from the Jewish Publication Society of America. I find my name opposite its title page. Also, 8001 Georgetown, our address before moving a few blocks west to Belton Drive in 1962. And our OR1-7928 phone number. No area code needed.

  The obituary for Rabbi Mordecai Soloff, 91, Author of Jewish Texts, is on a yellowed newspaper clipping inside The Holy Scriptures. His works include “When the Jewish People Was Young,” which is on my table upstairs. According to the obituary, Rabbi Soloff immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1910 and earned degrees from City College of New York and Columbia University. Rabbi Soloff told me once, in 1963, when I met with him for Bar Mitzvah prep in his dark study, under a fog of smoke from his pipe, that he had intended to become an engineer but was prevented from pursuing it by quotas on Jews. Next, Minyan: Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity, Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, holds a ticket to a cable car in Chiang Mai, Thailand, marking page 57. Next, Ruggles of Red Gap, Harry Leon Wilson. Then Evelina, Fanny Burney. And Field Book of Seashore Life, Roy Waldo Miner. Pragmatism and Other Essays, William James. The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener. Second Skin, John Hawkes. And Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone.

  After I read Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers in 1977, I set out to write my own novel, using Dog Soldiers as my model. I never did write one, but I tried for months. My technique was to duplicate the exact rhythms of Robert Stone’s novel. Meaning, where Robert Stone had a paragraph with eight sentences, I wrote a paragraph with eight sentences. Where he had three lines of dialogue, I wrote three lines of dialogue. I treated Dog Soldiers as though it were an instruction manual for assembling a piece of wooden furniture from IKEA, a baby crib or folding TV trays. The method did not work. Parts were missing, and it was as though the instructions had been written by someone whose first language was Chinese.

  I am looking for a model for what I am doing now, this naming and recounting of the books on my shelves, mixed with memories.Maybe The Anatomy of Melancholy, with its obsessiveness, its larding on of details, the fact that its genius cannot be separated from the nuttiness of the labor that went into it. Or my model is In Search of the Miraculous, which is as unreadable now as it was when I was sixteen. Both books have a kind of shapelessness that masquerades as order, and the act of reading them, of turning their pages, raises teleological questions. Is there any plan, or is it all nothing but one moment after another?

  xxi

  Next in line, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom. Then, Writing a Novel, John Braine. It has a postcard inviting Dolores to attend “Ground Rounds,” which has nothing to do with meat, but comes from the Department of Psychiatry, Southwestern Medical School. Salomon Grimberg, M.D., will be speaking about “Frida Kahlo, Loneliness And The Artist,” September 4, 1987, at 10:30 a.m. The postcard is a painting of Frida Kahlo, from The Unloved Frida, a detail from The Two Fridas, collection of Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Then, Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom. And Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata. And Soul Mates, Thomas Moore.I left a photo of me and my daughter between pages 36 and 37 of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby. Eden is around seventeen and smiling. I am wearing khakis and the blue sportscoat. The two of us are lined up against a brick wall. Saved between the same two pages, a rectangle of one-cent stamps that honor Margaret Mitchell. Next, Capricorn Rhyming Dictionary, Bessie Redfield, which claims on its cover that it is “The poet’s indispensable handbook.”

  Eugene Atget, Photographs, is from The J. Paul Getty Museum. Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, Richard Carlson, Ph.D. has a folded-up paper inside, “Helping Children Cope With Anger.”This paper looks like a handout from a lunch meeting; it has the small mustard stain. Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman, is full of paper scraps. One is a short book review of Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist. Another is an obituary for Owen Barfield, 99, “Word Lover and C.S. Lewis Associate.” The obituary quotes Barfield on how there is “some kind of magic” to how particular combinations of words work together.Between two other pages I discover an index card with a note from Eden, at age 12, and her own combinations of words – “Dad – gone for now, be back whenever,” she says. Next book, The Materials, George Oppen. Then Emerson’s Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson, another shabby, serious-looking volume that transferred from my parents’ house in Oceanside. It is one of The World’s Popular Classics, Art-Type Edition, Registered Editions Guild.

  The sides of the pages of Emerson’s Essays are spotted, as though they had spent time in storage or in damp weather.I try brushing them off, but these spots are discolorations, not dirt. “Intellect,” the final essay in the book, begins on page 236 with this verse: Go, speed the stars of Thought. The light brown legs of the spider that is flattened between pages 236 and 237 are going nowhere.Flipping ahead to the last page, I can read the promotion for Registered Editions Guild Classics. It says that this “popular library offers for the first time the world’s best books.” Surely this is not true. The world’s best books have been pushed to the hinterlands time and time again.And which are the best? The list of Registered Editions Guild Classics on the very last page includes Kipling, Stevenson, Dickens, Melville, Poe, Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, and Austen. And Hudson, Haggard, Butler and Anna Sewell. Fewer than ten books left on this shelf. There should be a special word for coming to the end of things. Something that Jon Koenig might have come up with for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Perhaps different words for the different realities, depending on what is ending. The end of the day, childhood’s end, the end of love, the end of life. I never got to the end of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. Or of The Flaneur, Edmund White, which has a list of holiday presents for my children stuck between its pages. Also, a ticket to “Proof” at the Walter Kerr Theatre for November 14, 2002, and a creepy souvenir postcard from an exhibit of “Plasticine Heads” at Rivington Arms, October 24 – November 27, 2002, artist, Jonah Koppel. A souvenir is a reminder, but this exhibit, if it was ever seen, has left nothing in mind. The four thick paperbacks of the Viking Portable Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, are next in line. They are a color-coordinated series, with gold, green, red, and pale blue covers. Each cover declares the number of pages, and the price: Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets, Marlowe to Marvell, 608 pages, $1.85. Restoration and Augustan Poets, Milton to Goldsmith, 672 pages, $1.85. Romantic Poets, Blake to Poe, 576 pages, $2.25. Victorian and Edwardian Poets, Tennyson to Yeats, 672 pages, $1.85. As I fan through the pages, dust rises from their edges. There are no penciled comments in the margins, no underlines or asterisks or stars in any of these four books, with one exception.I see 43 notes in the margins of Jonathan Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” pages 312 to 326 in Restoration and Augustan Poets. The poem appeared in 1733, noted. Swift died in 1745, noted.

  The Works of Theophile Gautier, One Volume Edition, Walter J. Black, Inc, and The Works of Alphonse Daudet, One Volume Edition, Walter J. Black, Inc., both books copyright 1928, are the final two books on this shelf. Other than when they were moved from my parents’ house, or from one shelf to another, these two have not been touched in seventy or eighty years. Hard to know who bought them. Harder to imagine anyone reading them. Alphonse Daudet, French novelist, antisemite, writer of In the Land of Pain after his treatments for syphilis.Theophile Gautier, French poet and dramatist, friend of Gerard de Nerval. The peculiar brown paper of the Daudet cover is meant to look like cowhide. The darker Gautier has a rougher, patterned skin, more like lizard or crocodile. Both front and back Gautier covers are crumbling.Any touch at all and pieces of them turn into flakes.

  xxii

  Both the Gautier and the Daudet belong in an old age home for books. They could share a room. They need assisted living, with physical therapists for their damage, and specialists in cover conditions or broken spines.A story in this morning’s New York Times reveals that hospitals for books do in fact exist. The Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation, inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, has six conservationists who “treat books from all the departments in the museum.” They repair what is falling apart, the bindings of the old and the carelessly stained pages of the youngsters.

  xxiii

  Travel souvenirs are neatly packed on the two bottom shelves. From some Caribbean island, two cloth dolls. These mother dolls are wearing bright blue skirts. Their cloth skins are the color of coffee. Cloth babies are sewn with green and gold thread into the crooks of the mother’s arms. Here is the mate cup made from a gourd, and the silver straw called bombilla, and the bag of Yerba Mate, and a tiny mateando flipbook, all of that from Buenos Aires. The hand painted ceramic from Budapest was sold outside the Great Synagogue on Dohany Street, in the old quarter of Pest. A cork coaster comes from Belmont Sanctuary Lodge, in Machu Picchu. The marble coaster with inlaid stone flowers is from a shop in Agra, trapping tourists after a visit to the Taj Mahal. Not every souvenir on these two shelves is from travels. An empty box of Barnum Animal Crackers is on display, just for its packaging. A squarish, misshapen pink teapot was a craft project from a child’s ceramics class, though I do not remember whose or exactly when.

  The Peter Rabbit-themed bowls, cups and plates on the very bottom shelf have also come from parts unknown. I turn them over to look for a clue, but only find Wedgwood of Etruria & Barlaston. That may be a location, but it does not exist in memory. The bowls and cups and plates are decorated with drawings and quotations from the Beatrix Potter tale.Were these a baby shower gift, in celebration of our adopted-at-birth boy or girl? If so, from whom, for whom?Like the tiny handle on the teacup, that information does not fit into the grasp of an older adult. The bowls are holding dust and a dead insect.

  What else, on this dusty bottom shelf?I pick up a beaded fork, alongside a beaded spoon and two artsy beaded knives. I know these useless utensils well. Second marriage vintage, they come from a shop across from Café Pascual’s in Santa Fe.Also from those years, the small plate from Thailand, with its ornately enameled rim that encircles a portrait of King Chulalongakorn. The King’s chest is bedecked in military medals. Next to this plate, a raja and his consorts are cavorting on the outsides of a painted wooden box. This box comes from India, but not from travels. It is another gift, from someone also lost in memory. Inside the wooden box, matchbooks from all over, from hostess stands in restaurants and forgotten meals.

  Chapter Fifteen
  SORROWS, OBSCURE AND OTHERWISE

  A bear named Bear sits on the top shelf of the sixth hallway bookcase. This was my son’s first companion. Bear is alongside a teddy bear made from a mink stole Dolores owned in a prior life and never discarded. I had it commissioned after her death. There is a large, orange menu from Lucas B&B propped on this shelf. After Dolores and I were married by a Justice of the Peace, we stopped at the B&B for lunch. I must have taken the menu. Encased in its original laminate, it is as stiff as the beehive hairdos of the waitresses who worked there. A small wooden box holds the ashes of the red zone dog I found as a puppy in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Palestine, Texas. That happened the year before my second marriage. Wally outlasted that marriage by another twelve years. These memories share the bookcase with stacks of children’s books.

  The Reason for the Pelican, John Ciardi, is a book of poems for children. The translator of Dante writes, The reason for the Pelican/Is difficult to see/His beak is clearly larger/Than there’s any need to be. Underneath it, A Fire In My Hands, Gary Soto. Then Thomas Goes to Breakfast and Boco the Diseasel, The Rev. W. Awdry. Curious George Goes Fishing, Margaret and H.A. Rey, is on top of a bright yellow Curious George and the Pizza, Curious George Visits the Zoo, Curious George Plays Baseball and Curious George Walks the Pet. Next, Mrs. Rumphrius, Barbara Cooney. Then, The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, a folk tale retold by Arthur Ransome. And Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak. The Boy Who Looked for Spring, Susan Fleishman, illustrated by Donna Diamond. Who Hides in the Park, Warabe Aska, is “a celebration” of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, in English, French and Japanese. Something From Nothing, Phoebe Gilman. Where’s Waldo, Martin Handford. Where’s Waldo is the book I take down from the shelf. Its cover has semi-separated from its oversized pages. Still, there’s Waldo, with his red and white striped knitted hat, and his red and white striped long-sleeved shirt, his blue pants, the goofy glasses. On page after page, Waldo never finds a crowd he does not want to blend into. The beaches he goes to are impossibly crowded. So are the parks. Even the ordinary city streets are mob scenes. What is the meaning of all this? Maybe each of us is in need of learning how to find someone. Even if the Waldo we are looking for is ridiculous, even when we are ignoring the people in our world who may be more worth finding than Waldo.

  ii

  After Waldo, where’s Plato? He is somewhere on the next shelf down, in one of the fifty volumes of The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. These Harvard Classics are filling all of shelves two and three of this sixth bookcase. There is a crimson-bound volume of Continental Drama and a volume for Epic and Saga. Here’s Harvey, Jenner, Lister and Pasteur. Sainte Beuve and Renan. Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin and Newcomb. There is Essays. Historical Documents. Sacred Writings. Donne, Herbert, Bunyan and Walton.Volume 7 has the Confessions of St. Augustine, my assigned reading for next November 13. Volume 6 is dedicated to Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, all 574 pages. There’s Plato at last. Also, Cicero and Pliny. And here I am, not knowing who Newcomb was, or why Dr. Eliot, Harvard’s retired president, included him.

  A battered book has been squeezed into this third shelf as well. It looks like it belongs on a garage sale card table. The book is a collection of old photographs, copyright 1898 — “photogravures,” one per postcard-sized page, of buildings on the Harvard campus. There’s Dr. Eliot’s house, off campus.

  iii

  Next shelf down:

  The Favorite Game, Leonard Cohen, first American edition, Viking Press, 1963. This is one of Bill Gilliland’s gift, handed over in a health club locker room. Next, English Literature 1789-1815, W. L. Renwick. Then, English Literature 1815-1832, Ian Jack.Proceso A Una Madre Lesbiana, Guy Gibson, was found on a bookrack in Mexico City.Scoop, Evelyn Waugh, has a note from my Uncle Harold inside. Harold is Bertha’s big brother. He has heard that Dolores is ill. “With the little time that God doles out to man,” Harold writes, “you would think that a God of love and mercy would at least make it a time of health, if nothing more.”The rest of the note is all about Harold, who has been in the hospital himself. He has a heart problem. He still does not know whether it will mean angioplasty or heart surgery.

  The room rates — “Precios de Habitaciones” – for Hotel Colon, Calle 62, No. 483, Merida, are wedged between two other pages of Scoop. Dolores and I traveled through Yucatan and stayed at Hotel Colon in 1975. That was our first year together. It rained in Merida, every afternoon, more or less at the same time. This lovely rain is part of the embroidery of the day. Its drops are like threads. When we go out into it, to the outdoor market, an old man wearing a white guayabera sells me a straw hat. He is old, since I am twenty-three, but he has not aged a day in my memory of him. I also still see the blue tiles in the common steam room at Hotel Colon. On the rate sheet, prices for a “Doble” start at 220.00, which must mean pesos.

  Next, A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh. Then Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, a used hardback published in 1945.The inscription on the flyleaf of Marriage Poems, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, awakens ghosts of 2001. Eden is fifteen when she writes, “Love always and happiness in your new marriage for many years.” Though neither wish came true, the book is her gift, and she may have meant it at the time. Next, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and The Complete Poetry of William Blake, with an introduction by Robert Silliman Hillyer. This ancient Modern Library book has 1,041 pages at rest beneath a cover the color of mown green grass. Then, Montolive, Lawrence Durrell. And Closing Time, Lacey Fosburgh. Hollywood Now, William Fadiman. Paris, Julian Green.

  A Rage to Live, John O’Hara, is signed on its title page, but it is difficult to tell whether the black “John O’Hara” is real. It looks machine made. A past book owner’s name is more obviously handwritten on the inside front cover: Mrs. Ray Bennett, 4207 Woodlawn Ave, Rossmoyne, Ohio. Rossmoyne has long since been swallowed up by Cincinnati, but Mrs. Bennett’s former house on Woodlawn can still be seen with Google Street View. Next-door neighbors have parked a Salem Cruise Lite RV and a Spectrum ProAvenger fishing boat on a trailer in their front yard. My bookmark in A Rage to Live, at page 17, is a tinted postcard, all retro, of the Community Circus in Gainesville, Texas. I am looking at a tuxedoed ringleader, and a clown in a striped jacket, two black horses, and four white women with bare midriffs. Next, Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes, the last book on this fourth shelf.

  iv

  On an index card that falls out of Scoop:

  How small of all that human hearts endure that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

  and

  But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.

  Neither of these lines come from Evelyn Waugh. They are mystery guests in Waugh’s book.

  v

  In 1727, Benjamin Franklin started a “discussion group” in Philadelphia. He named it the Junto, which sounds like a secret clubhouse for pre-teen boys. It was a forum for “mutual improvement,” whose members engaged in debates on moral and scientific matters. Franklin thought that this group needed a library, so he started the Library Company of Philadelphia and charged Junto members a subscription fee. With the fee as collateral, members could borrow books. That was something new. There were lots of libraries in England, but the books in those were donated by the wealthy and were either held “in the stacks” or chained to bookshelves to prevent theft. Franklin’s library became a model for lending libraries in colonial America. By 1800, there were forty lending libraries in a newly independent country.

  vi

  Paperbacks read or unread decades ago fill the fifth shelf on the sixth bookcase down the hallway. I could not pass the simplest quiz on any of them. Did I ever read Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, V.S. Naipaul? I am running my forefinger over the spines of An Area of Darkness, V.S. Naipaul, and Miguel Street, V.S. Naipaul, and The King Must Die, Mary Renault, as if memories might be stimulated by touching them. According to Scientific American, January 8, 2019, the sense of touch can generate “surprisingly powerful and long-lasting memories.” In this case, however, nothing. Next, The Raw and The Cooked, Claude Levi-Strauss. Then Le Pere Goriot, Honore de Balzac, a Livre de Poche. Then Selected Prose and Poetry, Stephen Crane, and Selected Tales and Sketches, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Selected Poetry and Prose, Percy Bysshe Shelley. These are Rinehart Editions with scholarly introductions. When I fan their pages with my thumb, dust rises from the edges, and then floats downward, as if the hall were a snow globe, though one without the water, or antifreeze, or glycerol.

  vii

  The title of Who Rules America, G. William Domhoff, repeats the question that college professors are challenging undergraduates to ask in 1969. Secretly, we answered that we hoped it would be us. Behind The Lines – Hanoi, Harrison E. Salisbury, came from my parents’ house. Next, The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, Harvey Gross. Poetry Handbook, Babette Deutsch. And Genesis: A Living Conversation, Bill Moyers. Hidden under its cover, a schedule of chapter readings for once-a-month discussions and the names of the couples who would host that month in their homes. The first and last of the ten listed meetings on Genesis are at my house. From the days of Dolores, I was part of this social circle of five or six Jewish couples who met once a month to discuss topics. The Genesis conversations fell into the period of my second marriage. Pam, former debutante and Methodist, hated this group, as might anyone who did not see the other couples as a kind of kin. Three of the other wives were converts and overly opinionated. They were, to be fair, difficult relatives.

  viii

  Next, A Prosody Handbook, Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum. The Founding of English Metre, John Thompson. Recapitulation, Wallace Stegner. The Good Terrorist, Doris Lessing. Then, The Fire Engine That Disappeared, Sjowall and Wahloo. In the hallway, I am reading the jacket flap of this unread little book issued by the Crime Fiction Book Club, “solely for members of book clubs in the Readers Union Group.” Nowhere in this book – not on the jacket flap, not on the title page — do the authors’ first names appear. I have to use Google to solve that crime. “Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo are a husband-and-wife team.” “These two writers are said to have invented Scandinavian noir. Next, Life After Life, Raymond A, Moody, Jr., M.D. Then, The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton. And In The Land of Israel, Amos Oz.

  A Flag for Sunrise, Robert Stone, is littered with scraps of paper. One bit, from Southland Enterprises, says “Make $8,000 or more in one month, guaranteed.” To get started, you need to send a stamped self-addressed envelope to a P.O. Box. Also in this Stone, a fragment of the “Mailbag” column from the Dallas Times Herald, Monday, November 3, 1981.D.W. in Dallas asks, “What happened to the actresses who played Vanessa on Guiding Light and Viki on One Life to Live? New faces are currently playing those parts!” “ANSWER: Both Maeve Kincaid (Vanessa) and Erika Slezak (Viki) are on maternity leave.” What Maeve Kincaid was doing in November 1981 is question I never asked. That said, I wanted to save the answer. Maeve was my tutor for a semester at Harvard, ten years earlier, when she was the graduate student assigned to me by the English Department. Maeve was also the most beautiful woman in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, if not in the entire world. I would meet with her once a week in a room no bigger than a closet only to be intoxicated by her aroma. She may have been teaching me Wallace Stevens, but that is unclear. Also hidden in A Flag For Sunrise, between pages 278 and 279, a prediction for the future, from a fortune cookie. “An affectionate message,” it says, “good tidings will come shortly.” The two phrases combine to make a pleasing ambiguity, typical for writers who only have space for eight words and have English as their second language.

  ix

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, hardback and paperback, fills out the rest of this fifth shelf. There is The Manor, Isaac Bashevis Singer. A Day of Pleasure, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer. A Crown of Feathers, Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Séance, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Short Friday, Isaac Bashevis Singer. A Friend of Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer. And then An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader. These books have all been read, but I would fail the simplest quiz on plot lines or the names of the characters. I can recall Krochmalna Street, but only as a name.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux gives An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader a confusing title. A reader is the one who does the reading, not the book that is read, though it might also be a device, the scanner, for example, like the credit card reader at checkout in a grocery store.

  x

  The letter to Dolores inserted between pages 92 and 93 in An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader, at the start of the story “The Black Wedding,” is, from her mother. Its two sheets of stationery are covered front and back with handwriting from an era when penmanship was taught to young ladies. In a book of short stories, it tells a story of its own. “I’ve tried to call you several times but couldn’t get you,” Frances writes. “It is quite late now so thought I’d write instead of awakening you.” The unreliable narrator continues. “No doubt you have been hearing on the television that the government agreed to help pay part of people’s light bill if proven to be disabled and needed to use an air-conditioner. Vernell and her mother had received help so she gave me the telephone number to call and wouldn’t you know they told me they were out of applications.” Vernell is the unknown good daughter; the comparison to Dolores is implied. “My light bill was one hundred and sixty-nine dollars, so naturally I had to pay it. I’m not going to get anymore prescriptions this month, and it’s a good thing as I have to take nitro constantly to get any relief.” Eventually, Frances asks Dolores to co-sign on a loan at Oak Cliff Bank. “I need three hundred and I’d only have to pay around thirty a month. I could get some glasses, which I sorely need, and use my own frames, and pay off a loan shark with the couple of hundred I have left….” It continues. She promises to pay back money Dolores has already provided, she apologizes, she says there won’t be such high light bills because “we will get a break in the weather.” She mentions she must get to the doctor, who will want to do an electrocardiogram but he can do that in the office. She hopes the new medication will help so she will not have to take so much nitro. “You have no idea how much I suffer at times in fact most of the time. P.S. Excuse writing, I have trouble with my eyes.”

  It is a story with a plot, but without resolution. Frances is on Elsbeth Street in Oak Cliff, not Krochmalna Street in Warsaw. And Oak Cliff is across the Trinity River from downtown Dallas, not on the banks of the Vistula. But there could be a twist. Frances’s address on Elsbeth is only a few doors down from the house where the Oswalds used to live, Lee Harvey and his wife, Marina, once upon a time.

  xi

  April is ending. The azaleas in the yard, the reddish ones nearer the back door, the white on the way to the pond, bloom perennially. The yellow water irises above the dark of the pond are another kindness. The only cruelty in April are refrains of encouragement in the local paper to do Spring cleaning. I need a hint from Heloise: Does Spring cleaning include bookshelves? Should those never-to-be-read books be discarded? Or do I sell them for a few pennies to Half-Priced Books? Same question about the already-read.

  With sacred books that are damaged or past their useful lives, tradition says to bury them. Inter them respectfully. So, any book, scroll or parchment with the name of God on it should not be rolled to the curb in a trash can. Proverbs 9:10 says fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear, meaning awe; and holy books, God-infused, are held in awe. But what about the paperbacks on the bottom shelf of a hallway bookcase. There is nothing awesome about a dusty, pocket-sized Pan-American Spanish Self-Taught, edited by Francisco Ibarra. Nonetheless, I am struggling to get rid of it. Even the more embarrassing books on these shelves are impossible to let go of. The Phil Dusenberry book, and Loyalty Myths, and The McKinsey Way — all those books that had some past relationship to earning a living. Same with Dolores’s textbooks. Her outdated six volume Psychology: A Study of a Science, does not have a prayer of being studied again. It is nutty, this unwillingness to be done with what will never be needed. It is a kind of fear, however different than that fear of the Lord that permits wisdom to begin. It is a fear of transience. It reminds me of my panicky refusal to get into an MRI, even an open one, however much a diagnosis is needed.

  xii

  Sixth shelf down, sixth bookcase:

  Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Mark Doty. A Piece of My Heart, Richard Ford. Picturing Will, Anne Beattie. Hard Laughter, Anne Lamott. The postcard used as a bookmark in Hard Laughter is an arty photo of a red tomato on a maple leaf. On the back of the card, “Thank you for your kind note. Your support is very special. Beverly, Scott & Robin.” At first, I have no clue who these people are. Then I find the clue. It is printed at the bottom of the card in the credits for the photo. Autumn Harvest, Rockville MD 1986 by Marshall Kragen. Marshall Kragen is a name I remember well. He was the webmaster, or whatever it was called in 1997, for the colon cancer “listserve” that sent emails I spent hours reading between February and July. Most of the emails were from the husbands or wives of patients. They got very detailed on the relative virtues of leucovorin and 5-FU or whether M.D. Anderson was better than Johns Hopkins. I stopped reading it after Dolores died that July. I checked in a year later, just to see what if anything had changed, and learned that Marshall Kragen had died, too. I must have sent my condolences to his family.

  Ecuador, The Galapagos & Columbia, John Paul Rathbone, is one of the Cadogan Guides for a trip I never took. Then, Seize The Day, Saul Bellow. And then, Henderson The Rain King, Saul Below. This paperback is a Fawcett Crest Book, 95 cents. Dolores writes her name on the inside cover nonetheless. Next, The Victim, Saul Bellow. The postcard buried inside is a black and white photograph of “Howard Carter cleaning the second coffin,” a 1970s souvenir from one of the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibits. Cleaning coffins must be hard work. Nonetheless, not a geled hair on Howard Carter’s head is misplaced.

  xiii

  Teachings of Rumi, Andrew Harvey, holds a ticket to Siegfried, 1/20/01. January 20 is my father’s birthday, if his birthday is not January 21. I could never keep straight which of the dates is correct. When it came time to write his obituary in 2010, I had to look it up, and even then double checked with my mother. My father was not big on birthdays. The note inside The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, is from Pam, March 5, 2000. Pam was dyslexic and could, as the saying goes, misspell cat even if you spotted her the c and the t. “My dearest,” her note begins, “there is not enough papper or time to list all the things I shoud thank you for and want to. Altho S-F was pretty wonderful, what next year?” We had just returned from what the Access guide on a shelf behind the downstairs desk calls Wine Country. We married the following January. By the end of that year, this house. A handful of years after that, turmoil and divorce.

  So, any lessons in Teachings of Rumi? Is the seed of every moment contained in the moment before? Or are beginnings and ends as disconnected as any two continuities can be?

  Next on the shelf, Snow Falling On Cedars, David Guterson. Illuminations, Walter Benjamin. Feeding A Yen, Calvin Trillin. And The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, Gary Zukar.

  xiv

  In The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, page 16 is dog-eared. What I found there must have stopped me from going further. I am giving it a second chance this morning. The page describes the characteristics of a Master. The sentences assert. They use a hidden authority that will answer no questions. “This is another characteristic of a Master,” Gary Zukar writes, and I repeat it out loud to myself in the empty hallway, “whatever he does, he does with the enthusiasm of doing it for the first time.” I wonder. Is it not possible that a Master might tire of doing the same thing over and over? And even if it is for the very first time, might a Master not be unenthusiastic about it? A Master might be sad, the first time his spouse goes to chemotherapy. Or feel a touch of fear, the first time a Master finds himself bereft.

  Next, Four Wings and A Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly, Sue Halpern. Then, The Book of Nightmares, Galway Kinnell. And Selected Poems 1923 -1967, Jorge Luis Borges. This Borges is a bilingual edition, with poems translated by W.S. Merwin, Robert Fitzgerald, John Hollander, Alastair Reid and others. In the margins on the pages with the poems in Spanish, I have tried some translating of my own. My penciled notes are like beads, mostly words in Spanish-to-English pairs. For example, lastimoso pitiful. A typed postcard from The New York Times is still soliciting between two pages in the middle of this book: “Your subscription expires February 5, 1978,” it warns. I am supposed to “remit $3.00 to assure uninterrupted service.” In 1978, I may have done that; I may have remitted.

  xv

  John W. Lovell Company bestowed a fake leather cover on the front of the 461 pages of Waverly, Sir Walter Scott, Bart. This is an old book. Its back cover is missing. The coated endpapers have a pattern that looks like spin art, or of slides under a microscope.Their pattern may have been meant as a visual reference to Italian marble, but these blood red splatters and veinous blues seem more biological than stony. I have no memory of where this book came from.I also wonder about Bart, what it means.Unlike lost memories, it is easy to look it up online. Bart, for “baronet,” ranks below baron and above knight. It is the lowest hereditary titled British order. So, although Walter will always remain a commoner, he can use the prefix “Sir.”

  Little Rivers, A Book of Essays in Profitable Idleness, Henry Van Dyke, is next in line. “If we can only come back to nature,” Van Dyke writes, “we should die young, even though we live long.” I am reading Van Dyke on a random page, as his very first reader might have done when Profitable Idleness first appeared in 1894. A History of the Nineteenth Century Year By Year, Edwin Emerson, Jr., is published in 1902. Even then, this book was not topical. The volume on my shelf is Volume One, and Its 600 pages go no further than 1815.

  So many books on the hallway shelves are like ramakins or aperitif glasses. They might as well be in a storage closet that needs to be cleaned out. They have never been used. They were bought imagining a life in which they would be. So, in my twenties, probably. Books by Sir Walter Scott, Bart, and Henry Van Dyke and Edwin Emerson, Jr. are like looping videos of a cozy, crackling blaze of oakwood in a fireplace, displayed for effect on a flat screen TV.

  xvi

  In one of her Marginalian newsletters, Maria Popova writes in praise of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and its author, John Koenig, who offers new words to describe sensibilities that are neither new nor uncommon. By inventing a name, Koenig makes describable what is recognizable. Zielschmerz is one of his new words. This is Koenig’s definition:

  “Zielschmerz n. The dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.”

  It is from the German, Ziel, goal, and Schmerz, pain.

  xvii

  Four other books are stacked on the horizontal, to the right of A History of the Nineteenth Century Year by Year. At the bottom, Aleph Isn’t Enough, Linda Motzkin. Then Mishkan Hanefesh, Rosh HaShanah edition, and Mishkan Hanefesh, Yom Kippur edition. Then, no bigger than an address book that fits in a breast pocket, Prayer Book Abridged for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States. The Prayer Book cover is a dark shade of khaki, almost olive. Regina Reegler is stamped on its small cover, below a Jewish star. It is my mother’s maiden name, though I never thought of her as a maiden. When she married in 1948, she was no longer considered young. She was already twenty-seven and a former Marine.

  xviii

  Seventh shelf, sixth bookcase down the hallway, The Amateur, Wendy Lesser.Then, The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks. There is a newspaper article between pages 43 and 44 of Russell Banks’ book. It tells of a tragedy that occurred in 1917. A French cargo ship that carried high explosives collided with a Norwegian ship in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Sparks flew, setting off a fire. The French ship exploded. This was a cataclysm, devasting everything within a half-mile radius, releasing an energy equivalent to three tons of TNT, and creating a tsunami as well. Two thousand people died. What is this faded column doing tucked inside The Sweet Hereafter? I do not remember. Maybe it was saved to preserve the quoted comments of one of the Halifax survivors. She is quoted at length in the very last paragraph: “Whoever survived had their lives transformed,” said Dorothy Swetnam Hare, 86, now of Calgary, Alberta. “This was no ordinary tragedy. A place that was there was gone. We went on to lead our lives, of course,” Ms. Hare said, “and the lives we had were good. But none of us ever quite lost a sense of sorrow.”Definitely, the column was saved for the sake of this last paragraph.

  Next, Selected Poems, Robert Bly. Then a Union Haggadah that comes from my parents’ house. My mother’s married name and the address of a childhood home are printed on the page across from the inside front cover. The spine of this slim book has ridges and cracks. The hard grey cover is like a shell, as if Union Haggadah were a prehistoric egg. There are two dozen other Haggadot next to it on the shelf, but those are Maxwell House pamphlets.

  xix

  The epigram across from the title page of The Waterfall, Margaret Drabble, is an Emily Dickenson poem. I know this poem, or used to, by heart. It begins Drowning is not so pitiful/As the attempt to rise. In the hallway, there is a half-hearted quality to that remembering, as though it is an echo or has reduced to a whisper. Next, The Works of Edgar Allen Poe in One Volume, with a “special biographical introduction by Hervey Allen, author of Anthony Adverse.” This Poe was published in 1927 by Walter J. Black, who had his offices at 2 Park Avenue, New York. The provenance of its 760 pages is another mystery story. Poe’s name is on the dark, dark brown cover in gold. The crackled faux leather of the cover is almost reptilian. It turns into flakes when I touch it. The spine is dissolving, too. Both front and back covers have detached. This must be another book that comes from my parents’ house and, before that, from Aunt Bertha.

  Next, A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul. Then, African Silences, Peter Matthiessen. Ticking Along with the Swiss, edited by Dianne Dicks, is an unread collection of essays.Patricia Highsmith, who contributes “Winter in Ticino” to the collection, lived the final years of her life in Tegna, a Swiss village in the Italian-speaking canton Ticino. Her house in Tegna is said to be like a bunker.Her ashes are in Tegna. Leafing through Ticking Along, I discover a torn-out article saved from the Times, January 23, 2000, about Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria. Ticking Along is also holding a business card from Zago Papers, a store that sold handmade paper in Santa Fe that same January, when Pam and I were there. I consider googling Zago Papers, to see if it is still there. Instead, I look up Sils Maria, and learn that it would take around three hours, weather depending, to get there by road from Tegna. And also Patricia Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth, thirty miles to the west of this paperback book.

  xxi

  Eden writes down her name on the first page in History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, one of the Penguin Classics. Also, the name of her private high school. In Genevieve Jurgensen’s The Disappearance, a woman loses her two daughters in a car accident. She writes a book as part of her grieving, and to memorialize. So, her daughters are lost, but not deliberately. They are in a car that is struck by a drunk driver. Next, Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Book League of America, translated from the Polish by Jeremiah Curtin. The translator “begs to dedicate” this work to his friend and classmate Auguste Compte of San Francisco, California. There is a worldliness to Curtin’s dedication. And a scent of adventure below the final paragraph of his introduction as well. Under the Jeremiah Curtin in all caps, he names a date, which is distant, and a place, far away: 1896, Ilon, Northern Guatemala. Curtin’s friend and classmate is not Auguste Comte the 19th century French philosopher and mathematician, the founder of positivism and inventor of a religion that has no God in it.But who is Jeremiah Curtin. And what is he doing in Northern Guatemala, circa 1896, writing about Henryk Sienkiewicz?

  Forgotten inside Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews, a Tax Collector’s Receipt for Texas Title Application records my purchase in April 1987 of a 1982 Jaguar with only 11,350 miles on it. Sales price: $12,500.Seller: J.D. Flickinger.I remember the most beautiful blue car. J.D. Flickinger must have tired of struggling with its Lucas electrical system, just as I soon did. Lucas, Prince of Darkness, Jaguar owners used to say. Next, Care of the Soul, Thomas More. The postcard used as a bookmark shows a detail from a Chagall stained glass, “Angel announcing the eternal life.” Next, Papers on Metapsychology, Sigmund Freud. The book is underlined throughout. It takes for its topics the unconscious, narcissism, mourning and melancholy, and the instincts and their vicissitudes. Then, Self-Hypnotism, Leslie M. Le Cron.And then, A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani. The Time of Our Lives, Mortimer J. Adler. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann. Writing the Novel, Lawrence Block. How to Write Plots that Sell, F.A. Rockwell. And The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter, William Froug.

  xxii

  The Technique of Screenplay Writing, Eugene Vale, has the stamp of Larry Edmonds Cinema Bookshop, Hollywood, CA, on its title page.Inside, a brown card. This keepsake from 1974 is the personal stationery of John B. Cooke, 975 Vernal Avenue, Mill Valley, CA.The typed message is addressed to me at my parents’ house in Los Angeles. “It looks very likely that I’ll be in Hollywood sometime next week,” John B. Cooke writes. “I’ll call when I’m sure of my schedule. If you’re no longer staying at your parents’ house, call me this weekend and give me your new number.” John B. Cooke is one of the names I found in the card file at the Office of Career Services before graduation. He is an alum willing to give career advice. He may have been a screenwriter. At the least, he is someone “in the business.” I have just finished college and returned home and do not know what to do, which has remained a question, more or less, off and on, for fifty years. His message concludes, “I’m trying to see about six people in two or three days, so we may have to get together on fairly short notice.” There was no getting together, but his brown card is noticed.

  xxiii

  Next, 1984, George Orwell, A Signet Classic, preface by Walter Cronkite, afterword by Erich Fromm. There is a another souvenir postcard from the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas inside the Orwell. After that, Savage Scene: The Life and Times of James Kirker, Frontier King, William Cochran McGaw, and Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, is assigned reading. Ben writes his name on the cover of this paperback. Same with The Red Pony, John Steinbeck.

  I and Thou, Martin Buber, carries a souvenir postcard, too. This one is from “The Treasures of Tutankhamun.”. Howard Carter, in slacks and a dress shirt this time, is cleaning “the third coffin.”A dark, small Egyptian crouches beside him. The white turban on the Egyptian’s head is not a towel but looks like one. Also inside I and Thou, a postcard promoting Poppy and Bonkers, the two clowns that performed at Eden’s seventh birthday party. They are looking for repeat business. “Poppy and Bonkers Perform At Parties,” the card announces. “Hey there, you’ve got a birthday coming soon!” There are photos inserted into I and Thou. One shows Ben and his wild teenager hair. One is a snapshot of me and Eden. She is in a wheelbarrow and might be five years old. I and Thou hides a folded article from 2001 offering advice on the benefits of taking statins. And another souvenir postcard, this time from the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois. Last, a courtesy card that is slipped under a door after sundown at La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla, California. lt tells tomorrow’s forecast, when tomorrow was August 13, 2001. Tomorrow’s Predicted High, 76 degrees. Wave Height: 1-3 feet. Ocean Temperature: 70 degrees.It says Pam and I may breakfast in our room by dialing room service or dine overlooking the Ocean in the Mediterranean Room. And, We wish you a good night.

  xxiv

  The bottom shelf of this sixth bookcase has only one book. TIME’s Year In Review 1997 lies on its side on top of a Dallas Morning News from July 14, 1997.

  The front of its glossy jacket is full-cover photography of the funeral of Princess Diana. This, declare the editors of TIME, is the most impactful death of that year. Thumbing through TIME’s Year in Review 1997 in the hallway this morning, nearly thirty years after, and glancing at the photos, and skipping through the clever captions, is like staring into the sky.

  Other than that, just other mementos and some dust on this bottom shelf.

  xxv

  As noted, to-do lists can be reassuring, they are evidence of agency. There is another inside Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall in this sixth hallway bookcase. It is a few pages in, just beyond the Emily Dickenson epigraph.

  The content on the list this time? Same old, same old.Plans for Ben that are not his plans. These are not actually to-do lists. They are daydreams.

  Chapter Sixteen
  APRIL IS ENDING

  The seventh, last bookcase built into the hallway is the one with the fewest books. Of its eight shelves, only the second and third are booked up. The other six shelves hold souvenirs, or bottles of strange liqueurs in wire racks, herbsaint anise, Port wine, crème de cassis. And most of the books on this last of the bookcases are stacked on their sides, between shorter clumps of upright spines. As usual, these books are a bouquet of mismatched flowers.Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah, Alan Verskin, and Maimonides, Moses Halbertal, are pressed next to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera, and The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam.Armies of words in formation, thousands of words keeping company, upright or lying down, on the last two shelves:

  The Road, Vasily Grossman. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin. The Death of Sitting Bear, N. Scott Momaday. Hothouse, Boris Kashka. Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin. Bellevue, David Oshinsky. Still Writing, Dani Shapiro. Wild Stories, The Best of Men’s Journal. Fodor’s Exploring India, 2nd Edition. Fodor’s Exploring India, 3rd Edition. Walking Israel, Martin Fletcher. The Accommodation, Jim Schutze. India, A Portrait, Patrick French. India, A History, John Keay. India Companion, Louise Nicholson. The Fallen Angel, Daniel Silva. Marcion, Adolf von Harnack. Come and Hear, Adam Kirsch. The Amos Oz Reader, edited by Nitza Ben Dov. The Great Game, The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, Peter Hopkirk. Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum. Eve Out of Her Ruins, Ananda Devi. The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers, Fouad Laroui. Seeing Red, Lina Mervane. Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania, Mike Ormsby.And, from Berlitz, Hungarian Phrase Book & Dictionary.

  Among all these titles on the second shelf, it is not Dassoukine or his trousers that I am the most curious about. And I have never looked twice at what the editors of Men’s Journal consider their best. It is Berlitz that sends me to the search engine this morning. Who is Berlitz? And what is the “Berlitz Method” touted on the bright cover of Hungarian Phrase Book & Dictionary? How did it all start, at a school in Providence, Rhode Island in 1878, before traveling across the United States and worldwide so methodically?

  Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz, is born Berlizheimer in Muhringen, Kingdom of Wurttemberg in 1852. His first test of linguistic savvy is translating the unwieldy name given to him at birth by Jewish parents into something more understandable, after immigrating to Rhode Island in 1872.My own grandfather knew to do the same. I asked him once, as he smoked one of his unfiltered Camels, what our family name had been before he came over to the States, traveling solo as a teenager from “somewhere near the Dnieper River.” He claimed not to know. His name, my name, is “something like Purkin,” he said. He had so little interest in it that our conversation stopped there.

  ii

  The spines of the books on the third shelf of the seventh bookcase are just below eye level. Looking at them, I am seeing eye to eye with the end of the task, the last of this work of listing and recalling.

  As far as I know, John Koenig has no name in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows for that peculiar sadness that comes with passing the last period of the final sentence on the last page of a book. Call it a sadness tinged with satisfaction, but it is not exactly that. Not relief, either, though that is part of it. Maybe it is that compound of the bitter and the sweet that belongs to every ending. A race has been run. There has been no contest, however, so no winning or losing. And there is no result.

  iii

  Here on this last, third shelf is Rimbaud again. This time he is one of Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. And here is Robert Stone again, Fun with Problems. And then, The Essential Kabbalah, Daniel C. Matt. Then, Maimonides’ Introduction To His Commentary on the Mishnah, translated and annotated by Fred Rosner. And Death in the Andes, Mario Vargas Llosa. And Prague: A Cultural History, Richard Burton. Letters to A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. Ballistics, Billy Collins. Blue Horses, Mary Oliver. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, another Mario Vargas Llosa. And one more hardback Tanach, The Holy Scriptures. This Tanach has my son’s name imprinted in gold at the bottom of its white cover. All the graduates in Ben’s confirmation class received one, probably at the confirmation ceremony. Surely I was there, though no hazy image remains. I am not even seeing the blur from that event. To the best of my knowledge, it was the last time that Ben entered a synagogue, though it is possible he will again, when my time comes. Future arrangements have not been made yet for a memorial service, but I do have my plot, next to Dolores’s, in the Temple Emanu-El cemetery on Howell Street. That arrangement was made in 1997, at her request.

  iv

  For the most part, the “self-help” books on my shelves have been no help. Likewise, the majority of the books whose authors have “Ph.D.” after their names. Those two categories overlap. I am looking at the titles on the spines of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, Rich Hanson, Ph.D., and How to Break Your Addiction to a Person, Howard M. Halpern, Ph.D, and The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, Susan Anderson. Also on this last third shelf, Rising Strong, Brene Brown. I Will Not Be Broken: 5 Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis, Jerry White. Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff, Ph.D. The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, Christopher K. Germer, Ph.D. And Uncovering Happiness, Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. Is happiness covered, as if by a wet blanket? No reason to pursue it, if I can just uncover it.

  My Louise: A Memoir, David Collins, is wedged between Tevye the Dairyman, Sholem Aleichem, and Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth. A short, stocky Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, Michael Dahlie, is next to Sybille Bedford, Selina Hastings. Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living has diagrams and instructions on how to tie a bow tie and make a martini. And then, A Truck Full of Money, Tracy Kidder.

  On their sides, The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe, Eli Valley, and also The Jews of Eastern Europe, J.H. Ademy. Under those, Krakow, Eyewitness Travel, and Warsaw and Poland, Tadeusz Jedryslak. When Tadeusz Jedryslak was a schoolchild in Poland, was he asked over and over how to spell his name, or did the Polish teachers just know? All these books, mostly unread, were bought to study before a summer trip to Poland, as were God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume I, The Origins to 1795, Norman Davis, and God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume II, 1795 to the Present. There are over thirteen hundred pages in these two volumes on the history of Poland. I traveled there in 2016, visiting Krakow and Warsaw, just a tourist, then on to Prague in the Czech Republic. The trip took ten days. Reading these two volumes would take months.

  v

  A friend tells me he reads books by having them playing through the speakers in his car as he drives. Tim Robbins is reading Fahrenheit 451 to him. Dennis Quaid is reading The Right Stuff. Jake Gyllenhaal is reading The Great Gatsby. What they are doing is formally described as narrating rather than reading. My friend, an M&A attorney, is a fan of John Grisham. The narrators of the Grisham books are not famous actors. So Michael Beck and Cassandra Campbell and Edoardo Ballerini are also reading to him while he drives. A woman gave me a book as a birthday gift last November. What she gave me was not really a book. It is a link to download The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride, from the Kindle Library. And the Kindle Library is not a library, just as a webpage is not a page. So I now have a spineless book on my MacBook Pro on the desk downstairs. The world is becoming disembodied. That is something the future of the world shares with my personal future and, for that matter, the future of every body.

  vi

  There are the guides and phrase books on shelves behind the downstairs desk. Down the hallway, the deeper studies of Poland and other destinations. But there is the foreign literature in translation, too. There is Mario Vargas Llosa, bought before and after a trip to Peru. Kafka and Kundera, in preparation for Prague and after my return.

  So many of these books are about specific places that “Geography” is a possibility, as a broad category in any reorganization of my shelves. Histories of a place might be grouped with fictions that take place there, however thin or even silly the connection. Forster’s A Passage to India next to John Keay’s India, for example. Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad could share a neighborhood with Lonely Planet’s Moscow & St. Petersburg and Ian Fleming’s crumbling Signet paperback From Russia with Love.

  vii

  How many books does it take to turn a collection into a library? Some say quantity has nothing to do with it, I simply need an organizing principle, not just a truckload of books. Others say all that is required is a place set apart. A room, a wall. Then there are those tiny “free lending libraries” that invite strangers to take or leave books. Such a mini-library might be no bigger than a shelf in a wooden box, the box set on a pole near a curb, protecting a half dozen used books from the weather. Now that I have listed by name some two thousand books, what do I have? A collection, or a library? Probably neither. It may be a truckload, if the truck is a 15’ U-Haul.

  viii

  I found an article from one of the glossier travel magazines left between the pages of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel that names the 26 “most beautiful libraries in the world” and suggests that the reader “add at least one of them to your bucket list.”

  Of the 26 libraries that belong “on your bucket list”, many are exalted, even royal destinations. The Library of El Escorial in Spain, for example. Others are more pedestrian. The Starfield Library in South Korea is on the list, but to cross it off you will need to walk inside a shopping center in Seoul.

  I am curious about this idea of a “bucket list.” Wikipedia says it came initially from a bored screenwriter who created a checklist of the things he wanted to do before he “kicks the bucket.” What bucket was that? Probably, I assumed, the bucket that the horse thief or the rustler about to be hanged in a Western movie is standing on. His neck is in the noose, the rope tied above him to the tree branch. When the posse or the cattleman’s hired hands kick the bucket out from under him, he dangles, at the end of his rope.

  That is not correct however. In the first volume, A-O, of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary down the hallway, I am reading about the bucket. It refers to a wooden yoke used to hang pigs for slaughter in England. Hanging by their feet, pigs in their death spasms would “kick the bucket.” And so “to kick the bucket, to die” came to be. There is another, related meaning as well, dating all the way back to 1597, when the bucket was “a beam or a yoke on which anything may be hung or carried.” There are other supporting quotes for “bucket” as well, but the magnification in the Bausch & Lomb reading glass in its box below the dictionary is nowhere near strong enough to help me read the rest of them. When my parents gave me this two-volume dictionary, I was seventeen. My eyes would have not needed any help from Bausch & Lomb.

  I needed no bucket list then, either. If I had one this afternoon, I could cross off the visit to the Morgan Library & Museum, one of the named 26 most beautiful libraries in the world. The Little Prince and Le Petit Prince on the desk downstairs are both from its gift shop.

  ix

  The underlines and asterisks in pen and pencil and notes in the margins of these books are calls to pay attention, prompts for memory. In schoolbooks, that is understandable. There will be a test, so remembering what you have read matters, at least until the end of the semester. In life, there may be multiple choice, and it may even feel sometimes as though there are grades, but the purpose of remembering is much less obvious, however essential it seems. Why not instead see forgetting as a blessing?

  Sentences that I read disappear from memory, just like house keys or the Philips screwdriver. So do facts, names, streetscapes, smiles. It seems like a serious problem. But as a neuropsychologist has written, memory is not designed “to help you remember the name of that guy you met at that thing.” To take this idea just one thought further: A failure to remember is less troubling than an inability to forget.

  x

  There is a two-page handout discovered between two pages of the book of Tomaz Salamun’s poetry on a shelf across from the downstairs desk. “An Introduction to Tomaz Salamun” is dated November 17, 2009. That does not seem so long ago. It must have been handed out at a live event, because its last paragraph mentions “the poet it is our good fortune to hear tonight.” Its very last line is explicit: “Ladies and gentlemen,” it says, “please join me in welcoming Tomaz Salamun.” In this hyperbolic introduction, it asserts that Tomaz Salamun demonstrates “a willingness to follow language to the border beyond which lies madness and suicide.” This sounds like the phrasing of someone who has no experience of madness or suicide.

  Between other Tomaz Salamun pages, I find a xerox about Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms: Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro da Silva. It is as puzzling as the Salamun introduction, but it includes this provocative, almost masochistic idea: “The world wasn’t made for us to think about it, but to look at it and be in agreement.”

  Also inside Tomaz Salamun, a xeroxed handout of four poems from Actual Air by David Berman, and four xeroxed pages from “The King of Time,” Velimir Khlebnikov, translated by Paul Schmidt. An excerpt from “The Submariner’s Waltz,” a poem by Paul Fattaruso, is stapled to multiple pages of “Paul Fattaruso and Dara Wier in Conversation.” There are more poets writing in the world than there are goose down feathers in all the king-size pillows on earth. Someone made these xeroxes of poems and passed them out. But who and where, and why I was among the recipients – all that has flown away like a feather in a breeze.

  xi

  To remember some of what has been forgotten, that was the purpose of this exercise. Or, one of the purposes. I have neglected most of the others, but surely one of them was to decide what books already shelved might be worth encountering for the first time, which of the unread should now be read in the time that is left. Also, to reorganize, and to throw away, though little of that is likely to happen. If nothing else, to complete this ritual of listing, all the way to the last book at the end of the bottom shelf.

  It is the end of April now. I am shuffling back to the fourth bookcase in the hallway, browsing on the fourth shelf down, and sliding out Baudelaire, a pinkish Penguin paperback. “To The Reader” is the poem that begins Les Fleurs du Mal. This is one I never tried translating. But if anyone is still with me, check out the Robert Lowell translation of “To The Reader.” You can listen to it on YouTube. Tom O’Bedlam is the “narrator.”

  Lowell’s version begins with the bitter litany of vices. Tom O’Bedlam intones. There is infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice. Lowell puts it into meter, he has rhyme, he is incredible, his lines so verbally inventive, they are just this side of demonic, and probably semi-autobiographical.

  He exhorts all readers to “pray for tears to wash our filthiness.”

  xii

  “If you live long enough, it can all work out.” My mother said that, when she was in her late eighties, after a discussion we had about my estranged daughter, while I was visiting my parents in Oceanside.

  I responded that I was unlikely to live as long as she and my father would. “All you had was the Depression and World War II,” I said, “I have had real problems.”

  My mother’s phrase continues to resonate. I wrote a message to my daughter a month or two ago and placed it in an unsealed envelope. I gave it to Ben, because I do not have Eden’s address. He says he does not know it either, though he sees her from time to time.

  Eden, I began, we do share a past. Then I went on, just for a paragraph, suggesting that she and I meet for an hour, at a sandwich shop near her, to catch up, or whatever she might tolerate. I did not end it Love, Dad, because I have heard that she will only refer to me as Mark.

  xiii

  What now? No more shelves to pick through. Maybe a break, the Texas summer heat will be approaching soon. I can make plans to leave town.

  That is not the reason for stopping this ramble, but it is reason enough. Nothing is more life-like than the inconclusive ending.

  I could go in July to the house in Oceanside, where I seldom go but someday intend to take more advantage of.

  xiv

  Someday is the answer to what day is it today. Be here now, the wisdom goes, in praise of presentism. This is the essence of what seems enviable to me in the lives of animals, as I imagine them, looking out a window at my side yard this day in late April, watching some wrens at a feeder, and a mourning dove dipping its beak into the trough below a fountain. These animals may not be “living for today,” if that means anything other than living for the next meal. Still, they do seem vibrant and present. Even twitchy. Though that muscularity may be just to avoid becoming the next meal of some predator. And they do not seem hopeless. In my imagining, they may have a joy that does not depend on hope. Birds especially, in a swarm, or solitary, resting, or on a wire, in flight, on the wing. The Carolina wren that I am hearing this day is hard to see. It is in the oak branches somewhere. Not hiding, but hidden among the leaves. Its call is clear enough though. It is the males that sing the loud song. The sound of a triple beat. Short long, short long, short long. And whatever the bird is singing, or saying, it does not seem to mind repeating it over and over. I have read that a captured male Carolina Wren was recorded repeating itself nearly three thousand times a day.

  I read about it in the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, on the fourth shelf down, left side bookcase, opposite the desk downstairs.

  ***