Grandfather Memories Quotes

Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too.

And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.

You surround the dead with veneration and memory, you dream of immortality, and in your myths and legends there’s always someone being resurrected, conquering death. But were your esteemed late great-grandfather really to suddenly rise from the grave and order a beer, panic would ensue.

Blaire, This was my grandmother’s. My father’s mother. She came to visit me before she passed away. I have fond memories of her visits and when she passed on she left this ring to me. In her will I was told to give it to the woman who completes me. She said it was given to her by my grandfather who passed away when my dad was just a baby but that she’d never loved another the way she’d loved him. He was her heart. You are mine. This is your something old. I love you, Rush

That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.

JEWS HAVE SIX SENSES Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?

Demons do like to take up residence in ruins, especially those where there are remnants of black magic,” said Christopher. “And we all know what Grandfather Benedict was up to in that house. It’s why he turned into a worm.” “Ah,” said Matthew, “fond family memories.

The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

I've never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother's eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave?...All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our own ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

After everything is said and done, a memory remains a treacherous thing…How long does one cling on to the people they’ve lost? How long could I have remembered my grandfather? How long had it been since I forgotten him and my mind began harbouring other things?

And Grandfather Crow said to First Woman, tell me your stories so that I might know who you are and what you value. If your stories are of the glory of war, I will know you value power. If your stories are of kinship, I know you value relationship. If your stories are of many children, I know you value legacy. But if your stories are of adaptation and survival, of long memory and revenge, then I will know you are a Crow like me.

Human beings are naturally flawed when it comes to time and memory. The past is forgotten, or it is believed bad things will not recur, and people become bound in their current problems. That which afflicted the grandfathers of their grandfathers is a distant, dim thing, and not as important as present concerns, no matter how trivial.

You told me once," I say to Ky, holding up the bud for him to see and then pressing it into his hand, "that red was the color of beginning." He smiles. The color of beginning. For a moment, a memory flickers in and out. It is a rare moment in spring when both buds on the trees and flowers on the ground are red. The air is cool and at the same time warm. Grandfather watches me, his eyes bright and determined.

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

I was right outside the NSA [on 9/11], so I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio, 'the plane's hitting,' and I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it...I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do. And I think it's really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort-of scandalize our memories to sort-of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through -- and to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up, and that our Constitution says we should not give up.

Old Spice           Every Sunday afternoon he dresses in his old army uniform, tells you the name of every man he killed. His knuckles are unmarked graves.   Visit him on a Tuesday and he will describe the body of every woman he could not save. He’ll say she looked like your mother and you will feel a storm in your stomach.   Your grandfather is from another generation– Russian degrees and a school yard Cuban national anthem, communism and religion. Only music makes him cry now.   He married his first love, her with the long curls down to the small of her back. Sometimes he would pull her to him, those curls wrapped around his hand like rope.   He lives alone now. Frail, a living memory reclining in a seat, the room orbiting around him. You visit him but never have anything to say. When he was your age he was a man. You retreat into yourself whenever he says your name.   Your mother’s father, “the almost martyr, can load a gun under water in under four seconds.   Even his wedding night was a battlefield. A Swiss knife, his young bride, his sobs as he held Italian linen between her legs.   His face is a photograph left out in the sun, the henna of his beard, the silver of his eyebrows the wilted handkerchief, the kufi and the cane.   Your grandfather is dying. He begs you Take me home yaqay, I just want to see it one last time; you don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be anything like the way he left it.

An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.

I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers this planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis's dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Gaurds battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if I ever became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, 'So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It wont be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of the Romans. My history of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure that they'll enjoy it.

Alison's grandfather told her,'To err is human, to forgive divine

And to the memory of my grandfather, who taught me to look up to people others looked down on, because we’re not so different after all

When it comes to happiness, our soul is like a colander, a tire with a nail in it, our grandfather's memory. It feels like there is a homeless person inside of us, wandering around pushing a shopping cart.

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battle field in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home. I try to ignore death, but she's got her arm around my waist waiting to poison everything I touch.

I'll never forget today! I'll always remember, I know! Grandfather looked up through the cellar window at the late-summer trees stirring in a colder wind. "Of course you will, Tom," he said. "Of course you will.

And whenever you look back and realize something was the last of something - like the last moment you ever saw your grandfather's house or the smell of the street you lived on or Orich bars or whatever - it can be an ordinary thing, but it also becomes the only thing you have, the clearest memory, and it gains all this extra meaning.

The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to - because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.

Of my grandfather's eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska...But those two years had expanded, sponge-like, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy anecdote

To my family,” Leo begins. “A man’s legacy shouldn’t be determined by how much money he made or how successful he was, but rather by the memory he left behind and the way he made people feel.” Leo pauses to look up from the letter. “What?” Declan grunts. “Sorry. Your grandfather noted that I should pause for dramatic effect.

Whenever my mother tells me she had a dream seeing my grandmother, or my grandfather, my grandmother’s sister, my father, or my nanny, then recounts in detail what they talked about, I don’t think that she’s out of her mind. I only become slightly more cautious. Sometimes I’m even angry, at them, for appearing in our dreams, and only just checking on us, not saying anything expectedly wise, not telling us the stories from their otherworldly experiences.

My grandparents’ stories are my inheritance; each one is an heirloom I carry. Each one is a monument to an era that still courses through my grandfather’s veins. Each story is a memorial that still sits in my grandmother’s bones. My grandparents’ voices are a museum I am still learning how to visit, each conversation with them a new exhibit worthy of my time.

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.’ She

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me?” I ask. “We thought he might,” my mother says. “Why didn’t you stop him?” “We didn’t want to take away your choices,” my mother says. “But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising,” I say. “I think he wanted you to find your own way,” my mother says. She smiles. “In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that’s why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it.

This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock--I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.

Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.

You’re sure you want to do this,” Galen says, eyeing me like I’ve grown a tiara of snakes on my head. “Absolutely.” I unstrap the four-hundred-dollar silver heels and spike them into the sand. When he starts unraveling his tie, I throw out my hand. “No! Leave it. Leave everything on.” Galen frowns. “Rachel would kill us both. In our sleep. She would torture us first.” “This is our prom night. Rachel would want us to enjoy ourselves.” I pull the thousand-or-so bobby pins from my hair and toss them in the sand. Really, both of us are right. She would want us to be happy. But she would also want us to stay in our designer clothes. Leaning over, I shake my head like a wet dog, dispelling the magic of hairspray. Tossing my hair back, I look at Galen. His crooked smile almost melts me where I stand. I’m just glad to see a smile on his face at all. The last six months have been rough. “Your mother will want pictures,” he tells me. “And what will she do with pictures? There aren’t exactly picture frames in the Royal Caverns.” Mom’s decision to mate with Grom and live as his queen didn’t surprise me. After all, I am eighteen years old, an adult, and can take care of myself. Besides, she’s just a swim away. “She keeps picture frames at her house though. She could still enjoy them while she and Grom come to shore to-“ “Okay, ew. Don’t say it. That’s where I draw the line.” Galen laughs and takes off his shoes. I forget all about Mom and Grom. Galen, barefoot in the sand, wearing an Armani tux. What more could a girl ask for? “Don’t look at me like that, angelfish,” he says, his voice husky. “Disappointing your grandfather is the last thing I want to do.” My stomach cartwheels. Swallowing doesn’t help. “I can’t admire you, even from afar?” I can’t quite squeeze enough innocence in there to make it believable, to make it sound like I wasn’t thinking the same thing he was. Clearing his throat, he nods. “Let’s get on with this.” He closes the distance between us, making foot-size potholes with his stride. Grabbing my hand, he pulls me to the water. At the edge of the wet sand, just out of reach of the most ambitious wave, we stop. “You’re sure?” he says again. “More than sure,” I tell him, giddiness swimming through my veins like a sneaking eel. Images of the conference center downtown spring up in my mind. Red and white balloons, streamers, a loud, cheesy DJ yelling over the starting chorus of the next song. Kids grinding against one another on the dance floor to lure the chaperones’ attention away from a punch bowl just waiting to be spiked. Dresses spilling over with skin, matching corsages, awkward gaits due to six-inch heels. The prom Chloe and I dreamed of. But the memories I wanted to make at that prom died with Chloe. There could never be any joy in that prom without her. I couldn’t walk through those doors and not feel that something was missing. A big something. No, this is where I belong now. No balloons, no loud music, no loaded punch bowl. Just the quiet and the beach and Galen. This is my new prom. And for some reason, I think Chloe would approve.

I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

The youngster had frozen again as his memory flashed back to the glowering face of his grandfather, deeply lined, snarling, wild eyes stretched as wide and white as pot saucers...

Enfim, por alguma razão se fazem as guerras, respondeu o avô, levantando as sobrancelhas. Só nas guerras é que os homens podem matar-se uns aos outros sem serem castigados.

After becoming engaged to my grandfather, and before marrying him, she did something rather brave in Istanbul in 1917—she went out with him to a restaurant.

My dad—Victoria’s grandfather, “Poppa Jim”, as she called him—is forever waist-deep in the warm water of the harbour, holding a body.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly denned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.

The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm—she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on the face—and now when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger—was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.

Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came to his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: “It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for a long time.

My real life—or what memory reports as my real life—was increasingly one of solitude. I had indeed plenty of people to talk to: my parents, my grandfather Lewis, prematurely old and deaf, who lived with us; the maids; and a somewhat bibulous old gardener. I was, I believe, an intolerable chatterbox. But solitude was nearly always at my command, somewhere in the garden or somewhere in the house.

Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.

The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for prosperity, and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives. To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying, with a half-smile, to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room, and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When, in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she, like me, was pulled in two direction , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal. But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it, were you defying death, decay and the passage of time, or were you submitting to them? - I grew very bored with them.

Children are not born with memories of who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

Now it's hitting me. I will never have a family to grieve for me. I will never have people feel about me the way they feel about Marc's grandfather. I will not leave the trail of memories that he's left. No one will ever have known me or what I've done. If I die, there will be no body to mark me, no funeral to attend, no burial. If I die, there will be nobody but Rhiannon who will ever know I've been here. I cry because I am so jealous of Marc's grandfather, because I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.

You surround the dead with veneration and memory, you dream of immortality, and in your myths and legends there's always someone being resurrected, conquering death. But were your esteemed late great-grandfather really to suddenly rise from the grave and order a beer, panic would ensue.

My father, an enlightened spirit, believed in man. My grandfather, a fervent Hasid, believed in God. The one taught me to speak, the other to sing. Both loved stories. And when I tell mine, I hear their voices. Whispering from beyond the silenced storm, they are what links the survivor to their memory.

The women posed for snapshots. Dozens of snapshots. . . . They imagined that, long after the soldiers had become old, perhaps even after they'd died, someone would come to wonder about these women holding up rifles or tommy guns or donuts and laughing with their grandfathers in front of the big dark truck.

I lift the tablet to my mouth. And then I hear a voice from a place deep in my memory. You are strong enough to go without. Fine, Grandfather, I think to myself. I will be strong enough to go without the tablet. But there are other things I’m not strong enough to go without, and I intend to fight for them.

A small boy searches for a way to explain life with all its complexities. His Cherokee grandfather smiles and explains life in all its simplicities. Many years later, another small boy talks about the simple things of life, while his father describes how complex life is today. Inside, the father feels the not-so-distant words of his grandfather speaking softly: You are not just alive, you are part of all life itself. You are kin to all things, and everything has life . . . and memory. Things have a way of coming full circle—as a way of completing the Circle, and creating opportunities for life, love, growth, feeling, and learning.

And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the details of the lives that were lived. But it's harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus, to me he's a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He's not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun. Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop ... We are little more than one tree's growth of leaves in hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the other to make way for the next bright young generation.

My grandfather, like most lobotomists, performed a disproportionate number of psychosurgeries on women. This discrepancy never received a satisfactory explanation, but it seems worth pointing out that the known clinical effects of lobotomy—including tractability, passivity, and docility—overlapped nicely with what many men of the time considered to be ideal feminine traits.

Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning—or choosing—to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.

And I am glad, because although no one else in the world remembers him now, he will live inside me as long as I live. We shall die together. This grandfather was the first to make me wish not to die - so that the dead within me should not die. Since then, many departed dead ones have sunk, not into the grave, but into my memory, and I know now that as long as I live they shall live too.

I was never a child; I never had a childhood. I cannot count among my memories warm, golden days of childish intoxication, long joyous hours of innocence, or the thrill of discovering the universe anew each day. I learned of such things later on in life from books. Now I guess at their presence in the children I see. I was more than twenty when I first experienced something similar in my self, in chance moments of abandonment, when I was at peace with the world. Childhood is love; childhood is gaiety; childhood knows no cares. But I always remember myself, in the years that have gone by, as lonely, sad, and thoughtful. Ever since I was a little boy I have felt tremendously alone―and "peculiar". I don't know why. It may have been because my family was poor or because I was not born the way other children are born; I cannot tell. I remember only that when I was six or seven years old a young aunt of mind called me vecchio―"old man," and the nickname was adopted by all my family. Most of the time I wore a long, frowning face. I talked very little, even with other children; compliments bored me; baby-talk angered me. Instead of the noisy play of the companions of my boyhood I preferred the solitude of the most secluded corners of our dark, cramped, poverty-stricken home. I was, in short, what ladies in hats and fur coats call a "bashful" or a "stubborn" child; and what our women with bare heads and shawls, with more directness, call a rospo―a "toad." They were right. I must have been, and I was, utterly unattractive to everybody. I remember, too, that I was well aware of the antipathy I aroused. It made me more "bashful," more "stubborn," more of a "toad" than ever. I did not care to join in the games played by other boys, but preferred to stand apart, watching them with jealous eyes, judging them, hating them. It wasn't envy I felt at such times: it was contempt; it was scorn. My warfare with men had begun even then and even there. I avoided people, and they neglected me. I did not love them, and they hated me. At play in the parks some of the boys would chase me; others would laugh at me and call me names. At school they pulled my curls or told the teachers tales about me. Even on my grandfather's farm in the country peasant brats threw stones at me without provocation, as if they felt instinctively that I belonged to some other breed.

tenth anniversary of D Day in 1954, when many Germans preferred to draw a veil over the events of the war, my grandfather made enormous efforts to track down some of the troops whose units he had visited. He encouraged these men to discuss with him their personal memories of the Atlantic Wall, their frame of mind at the time of the invasion, and their actions during the historic day of June 6th. His intention

Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past. I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life.

Fully aware that life is too short for the choice to be anything but irreparable, he had been distressed to discover that he felt no spontaneous attraction to any occupation. Rather sceptically, he looked over the array of available possibilities: prosecutors, who spend their whole lives persecuting people; schoolteachers, the butt of rowdy children; science and technology, whose advances bring enormous harm along with a small benefit; the sophisticated, empty chatter of the social sciences; interior design (which appealed to him because of his memories of his cabinetmaker grandfather), utterly enslaved by fashions he detested; the occupation of the poor pharmacists now reduced to peddlars of boxes and bottles. When he wondered; what should I choose for my whole life's work? his inner self would fall into the most uncomfortable silence.

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks.

They came to a destroyed cabin and he pulled up and then went inside. Broken cups and pieces of dress material torn on a nail. A doll’s body without a head. He dug a .50-caliber bullet out of the wall with his knife and then carefully placed it on the windowsill as if for a memento. Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one’s father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out, Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work. Your heart melted sweetly, it slowed, lost its edges. Horses, horses. All gone in the burning.

When Gene Crutchfield brought his troubled friend to Hopkins in 1938, Hopkins was twenty-four years old and in charge of LeKies Memorial, the Methodist church in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He had taken over the parish the year before and wore a mustache to try to make himself look older. It complemented his horn-rimmed glasses and added a bit of distinction to an otherwise unimpressive medium height and build. Hopkins’s father and grandfather had been Methodist ministers, but tradition was not the reason he had dropped out of law school and entered the ministry. He had been attracted by the ideas then being promoted within the Methodist Church in Virginia. They were ideas of the kind that are now taken for granted in American life—nutrition and welfare support for dependent children; free medical care for the impoverished and the aged; the right of workers to organize a union, to receive a minimum wage, to strike; interracial cooperation.

These are little bits of things that happened, or things you think about. They’re light on tension, you know that. There’s no real peril. There’s no resolution. Still, they stick with you. You think about them even after they’re over, sometimes for a long time. Sometimes for a very long time. That’s how you know they’re important somehow. It’s why you can recall the smell of that party, even many years after the smell of your grandfather’s cologne has faded from your memory.

These memories, and the stories in these words, might appear to exist in the long ago. In the short-root mind, a kind of mind of a people whose children don't even know the names of their great-grandparents, there is no past. Everything is right now. This kind of mind has its roots in the material culture, in what can be accumulated. My great-grandfather reminds me that we need to keep within the long-rooted mind. Because of the longer roots we have a larger structure of knowing from which to take on understanding.

I’ve sat at the piano for hours already, looking for lyrics and melodies, but everything sounds the same and I feel as uninspired as ever. Does it mean I’m finished? A more sobering thought: if I’m finished, would I miss it? But the truth is, I’ve been here before. Many times. We all have. So how do we find the faith to press on? Remember. Remember, Hebrew children, who you once were in Egypt. Remember the altars set up along the way to remind yourselves that you made the journey and God rescued you from sword and famine, from chariots and pestilence, that once you were there, but now you are here. It happened. Our memories are fallible, residing in that most complex and mysterious organ in the human body (and therefore the known universe), capable of being suppressed, manipulated, altered, but also profoundly powerful and able to transport a person to a place fifty years ago all because of a whiff of your grandfather’s cologne or an old book or the salty air. As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me. Remember with every sip of wine that we shared this meal, you and I. Remember. So I look at the last album, the last book, and am forced to admit that I didn’t know anymore then than I do now. Every song is an Ebenezer stone, evidence of God’s faithfulness. I just need to remember. Trust is crucial. So is self-forgetfulness and risk and a measure of audacity. And now that I think about it, there’s also wonder, insight, familiarity with Scripture, passion, a good night’s sleep, breakfast (preferably an egg sandwich), an encouraging voice, diligence, patience. I need silence. Privacy. Time—that’s what I need: more time. But first I need a vacation, because I’ve been really grinding away at this other stuff and my mental cache is full. A deadline would be great. I work best with deadlines, and maybe some bills piling up. Some new guitar strings would help, and a nice candle. And that’s all I need, in the words of Steve Martin’s The Jerk. This is the truth: all I really need is a guitar, some paper, and discipline. If only I would apply myself.

There have been a lot of Smedries over the centuries," he said, "and a lot of Talents. Many of them tend to be similar, in the long run. There are four kinds: Talents that affect space, time, knowledge, and the physical world." "Take my talent, for instance," he continued. "I change things in space. I can get lost, then get found again." "What about grandpa Smedry?" "Time," Kas said. "He arrives late to things. Australia, however, has a Talent that can change the physical world--in this case, her own shape. Her Talent is fairly specific, and not as broad as your grandfather's. For instance, there was a Smedry a couple of centuries back who could look ugly any time he wanted, not just when he woke up in the morning. Other have been able to change anyone's appearance, not just their own. Understand?" I shrugged. "I guess so." "The closer the Talent gets to its purest form, the more powerful it is," Kaz said. "Your grandfather's Talent is very pure--he can manipulate time in a lot of different circumstances. Your father and I have very similar Talents--I can get lost and Attica can lose things--and both are flexible." "What about Sing?" I asked. "Tripping. That's what we call a knowledge Talent--he knows how to do something normal with extraordinary ability. Like Australia, though, his power isn't very flexible." I nodded slowly. "So...what does this have to do with me?" "Well, it's hard to say," Kaz said. "You're getting into some deep philosophy now, kid. There are those who argue that the Breaking Talent is simply a physical-world Talent, but one that is very versatile and very powerful. There are others who argue that the Breaking Talent is much more. It seems to be able to do things that affect all four areas. Legends say that one of your ancestors--one of only two others to have this Talent--broke time and space together, forming a little bubble where nothing aged. Other records speak of breakings equally marvelous. Breakings that change people's memory or their abilities. What is it to 'break' something? What can you change? How far can the Talent go?

Back then the towering gums marched down to the water and the area was sparsely populated with fibro weekenders - simple cottages and boat sheds - mainly owned by coal miners from the nearby Hunter Valley. My grandfather worked in the mines. He'd lend my family the one room boffy attached to his boasted almost every school holiday, and I have such vivid memories of jumping off his jetty and boiling crabs for dinner and fishing with a line wrapped around a piece of cork and playing in the rock pools and parking about in his tin runabout.

So what you’re really saying is you’ll come only when you think you’ll be too old to care. When my kids have left. Or when I’m a grandfather. I can just see us—and on that evening, we’ll sit together and drink a strong eau-de-vie, like the grappa your father used to serve at night sometimes.” “And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries.” But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false. Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber. Silence.

In 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig started laying stolpersteine, or "stumbling blocks" -- cobblestone-sized, brass memorials -- in front of houses where victims of the Nazis used to live. Now in over 800 German towns and villages, they make the number of victims palpable: In some streets there are stolpersteine in front of every other house, sometimes with a single name, sometimes with the names of an entire family. On these streets it would have been glaringly obvious that some neighbors were missing: the Jewish family, the girl with Down syndrome, the homosexual, the communist.

Fiona couldn't summon a smile. His grandfather sighed. 'If you insist on pity, then really you must pity yourself. Your head is still very empty.' Fionn frowned, indignation jostling the urge to cry fro a precious, fleeting second. His grandfather chuckled. 'Start filling it up, lad. That is your greatest responsibility. To live a life of breathless wonder, so that when it begins to fade from you, you will feel the shadow of its happiness still inside you and the blissful sense that you laughed the loudest, loved the deepest, and lived fearlessly, even as the specifics of it all melt away.

David had seemed so different from the tribe of minor English snobs and distant cousins who hung around, ready for an emergency, or for a weekend, full of memories that were not even their own, memories of the way their grandfathers had lived, which was not in fact how their grandfathers had lived. When she had met David, she thought that he was the first person who really understood her. Now he was the last person she would go to for understanding. It was hard to explain this change and she tried to resist the temptation of thinking that he had been waiting all along for her money to subsidize his fantasies of how he deserved to live.

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany. Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking.

But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one's life and for lives, like my grandfather's, that had come long before mine that I was suddenly taken back to a poor, disconsolate universe of simple folk like Mafalda's ancestors, fretting and scurrying in the tiny vicoli of an old Naples whose memory I wanted to share word for word with Oliver now, as if he too, like Mafalda and Manfredi and Anchise and me, were a fellow southerner whom I'd met in a foreign port city and who'd instantly understand why the sound of this old song, like an ancient prayer for the dead in the deadest of languages, could bring tears even in those who couldn't understand a syllable.

Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room. That’s why elderly people like my grandfather are so much more prone to cerebral bleeding after a blow to the head—the brain actually rattles around inside. The earliest portions to shrink are generally the frontal lobes, which govern judgment and planning, and the hippocampus, where memory is organized. As a consequence, memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas—to multitask—peaks in midlife and then gradually declines. Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth).

Another patient, Janet, was repeatedly abused by a grandfather who forced her cousin to sexually molest her and put sticks into her vagina. The patient dissociated at the time into a child alter personality, Susie, who remembered the abuse. Susie decided if she had no body, her cousin would not hurt her. Susie imagined she had no body but only her head. The fantasy she had no body to hurt, led to a dissociation of all perceptions of her body and the belief that she avoided pain and her cousin could not hurt her. This mechanism shows the interplay of reality and fantasy in a dissociative defense. Through fantasy, Susie has no body and no pain. Simultaneously, the reality of her torture was recognized as the source of this adaptation. Dissociative defenses adopted her wishful fantasy to solve a brutal experience and its memory.

Almost a hundred years earlier, to the day, Samuel Smiles had written the final pages of his book Self-Help. It included this moving tale of heroism as an example for the Victorian Englishman to follow. For the fate of my great-grandfather, Walter, it was poignant in the extreme. The vessel was steaming along the African coast with 472 men and 166 women and children on board. The men consisted principally of recruits who had been only a short time in the service. At two o’clock in the morning, while all were asleep below, the ship struck with violence upon a hidden rock, which penetrated her bottom; and it was at once felt that she would go down. The roll of the drums called the soldiers to arms on the upper deck, and the men mustered as if on parade. The word was passed to “save the women and children”; and the helpless creatures were brought from below, mostly undressed, and handed silently into the boats. When they had all left the ship’s side, the commander of the vessel thoughtlessly called out, “All those that can swim, jump overboard and make for the boats.” But Captain Wright, of the 91st Highlanders, said, “No! If you do that, the boats with the women will be swamped.” So the brave men stood motionless. Not a heart quailed; no one flinched from his duty. “There was not a murmur, nor a cry among them,” said Captain Wright, a survivor, “until the vessel made her final plunge.” Down went the ship, and down went the heroic band, firing a volley shot of joy as they sank beneath the waves. Glory and honor to the gentle and the brave! The examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal. As a young man, Walter undoubtedly would have read and known those words from his grandfather’s book. Poignant in the extreme. Indeed, the examples of such men never die, but, like their memories, they are immortal.

I cannot remember who scored runs or took wickets, and I have always held in check the temptation to take an archaeological dig into Wisden to find out. Long ago I realised that to go looking for the evidence risked shaking loose the memories I already had; and possibly losing some of them as a consequence. So the important fragments of that day remain intact, shut and airtight in my mind, as if sealed in a jar. The scorecard my grandfather bought me - and filled in with a silver ballpoint pen - is long gone too. I have nothing that preserves our time together there except for the dozen or so still, square images which I can slide in a private show across my mind. These keep alive its broad outline, which is sufficient. The bold statistics don't matter anyway. What does matter is the imprint our journey to Trent Bridge left on me. It's evident in this book, which is also part-payment of an outstanding debt to my grandfather which I can never fully repay.

THE STORY GOES THAT I sucked too avidly at my mother’s breast, and caused an abscess to bloom in the tender flesh of her left nipple. My grandmother, less kind in those days than afterward, disapproved strongly when at seventeen my mother had married, and managed to instill her daughter with a powerful sense of ill-equipment for the task of mothering me; the failure of her breast to bear up to the ardor of my infant lips filled my mother with shame. She didn’t go to the doctor as quickly as she ought to have. By the time my father found her, collapsed across the keys of the hotel’s piano, and got her into the county hospital, a staph infection had already taken hold of her blood. She died on February 18, 1951, five weeks after giving birth, and thus, naturally, I’ve no memory of her. I can, however, manage to recall a few things about my father, George Tripp, called Little George to distinguish him from my paternal grandfather, his namesake, from whom I’m supposed to

The late Fred Rogers, beloved host of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television show, wrote many beautiful songs for children that hold great truths for adults as well. In “I Like to Be Told,” he writes of every child’s desire to be told “if it’s going to hurt,” if a parent is going away, or if something will be new or difficult, because “I will trust you more and more” each time these things come true. We never outgrow our desire to be told the truth. A fellow writer told me the story of waking up one morning when she was a child and being told she wouldn’t be going to kindergarten that day but tot the hospital for eye surgery. Her suitcase was already packed. She was old enough to understand that this meant her parents had withheld information from her. The memory of being betrayed is more painful than the memory of the surgery itself. Compare this with a young boy who recently faced heart surgery. He asked his grandfather if it was going to hurt. His grandfather answered with honest that engendered hope: “Yes, for a while. But every day the pain should get less and less, and it means you’ll be getting better and stronger.

In E-CENT counselling, we teach our clients to explore the stories they are living, which mainly come from their family of origin. Even some novelists understand this process, as illustrated by Donna Tartt, writing about the family of Charlotte Cleve: “…the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history – repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before… … (T)hese family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruellest and most random disasters … were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth”. Donna Tartt, 2003. The Little Friend, London: Bloomsbury. Pages 3-4.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed ‘infinite riches’ in what would have been to motorists ‘a little room’. The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space’. It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the all-father to bring them safely to land once more. A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the rime had frosted their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time. Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the West. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.” Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The all-father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?

The median age in Gaza is very young. Earlier you spoke of asking your father for stories about your grandfather, and how important that was for you. But there are fewer and fewer people who have memories of life outside of Gaza. I’m wondering if you can say something about this. Unfortunately, it’s not only about memories of our grandparents, but it’s also their memories that are being lost, those are what we need to hear and memorize and then transmit to our children and grandchildren. But I’m also so saddened to think about my generation, our memories, being required or expected to tell our own stories of what happened to us in Gaza. I mean, for example, in 2021, 2014, 2009, or 2008. All the massacres and attacks on Gaza. Maybe our grandchildren will not ask us about Jaffa and Acre and Haifa. No, they will ask us about the 2014 war. What happened to you? What did you eat, which of your friends was wounded, did you leave your home, where did you go? This is a prolonged state of exile and estrangement and expulsion and ethnic cleansing. Our grandparents were driven from their homes and their cities, and any trace of them has been erased and replaced by something else, which is now called Israel. But we, their descendants, were also robbed of our right to dream and think about those places—no, instead, we are forced to live in the nightmares of our own current life. And they are creating more misery for us, wounding us again and again, so that we forget those earlier wounds in the face of the fresher wounds. The more the Israelis attack us, the more they are trying to erase the older memories. So it also becomes a matter of exhaustion.

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our mind confronting them. However that may be, when I woke thus, my mind restlessly attempting, without success, to discover where I was, everything revolved around me in the darkness, things, countries, years. My body, too benumbed to move, would try to locate, according to the form of its fatigue, the position of its limbs so as to deduce from this the direction of the wall, the placement of the furniture, so as to reconstruct and name the dwelling in which it found itself. Its memory, the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulders, offered in succession several of the rooms where it had slept, while around it the invisible walls, changing place according to the shape of the imagined room, spun through the shadows. And even before my mind, hesitating on the thresholds of times and shapes, had identified the house by reassembling the circumstances, it—my body—would recall the kind of bed in each one, the location of the doors, the angle at which the light came in through the windows, the existence of a hallway, along with the thought I had had as I fell asleep and that I had recovered upon waking. My stiffened side, trying to guess its orientation, would imagine, for instance, that it lay facing the wall in a big canopied bed and immediately I would say to myself: “Why, I went to sleep in the end even though Mama didn’t come to say goodnight to me,” I was in the country in the home of my grandfather, dead for many years; and my body, the side on which I was resting, faithful guardians of a past my mind ought never to have forgotten, recalled to me the flame of the night-light of Bohemian glass, in the shape of an urn, which hung from the ceiling by little chains, the mantelpiece of Siena marble, in my bedroom at Combray, at my grandparents’ house, in faraway days which at this moment I imagined were present without picturing them to myself exactly and which I would see more clearly in a little while when I was fully awake.

I was never a child; I never had a childhood. I cannot count among my memories warm, golden days of childish intoxication, long joyous hours of innocence, or the thrill of discovering the universe anew each day. I learned of such things later on in life from books. Now I guess at their presence in the children I see. I was more than twenty when I first experienced something similar in my self, in chance moments of abandonment, when I was at peace with the world. Childhood is love; childhood is gaiety; childhood knows no cares. But I always remember myself, in the years that have gone by, as lonely, sad, and thoughtful. Ever since I was a little boy I have felt tremendously alone―and "peculiar". I don't know why. It may have been because my family was poor or because I was not born the way other children are born; I cannot tell. I remember only that when I was six or seven years old a young aunt of mind called me [i]vecchio[/i]―"old man," and the nickname was adopted by all my family. Most of the time I wore a long, frowning face. I talked very little, even with other children; compliments bored me; baby-talk angered me. Instead of the noisy play of the companions of my boyhood I preferred the solitude of the most secluded corners of our dark, cramped, poverty-stricken home. I was, in short, what ladies in hats and fur coats call a "bashful" or a "stubborn" child; and what our women with bare heads and shawls, with more directness, call a [i]rospo[/i]―a "toad." They were right. I must have been, and I was, utterly unattractive to everybody. I remember, too, that I was well aware of the antipathy I aroused. It made me more "bashful," more "stubborn," more of a "toad" than ever. I did not care to join in the games played by other boys, but preferred to stand apart, watching them with jealous eyes, judging them, hating them. It wasn't envy I felt at such times: it was contempt; it was scorn. My warfare with men had begun even then and even there. I avoided people, and they neglected me. I did not love them, and they hated me. At play in the parks some of the boys would chase me; others would laugh at me and call me names. At school they pulled my curls or told the teachers tales about me. Even on my grandfather's farm in the country peasant brats threw stones at me without provocation, as if they felt instinctively that I belonged to some other breed.

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

Lesson one: Pack light unless you want to hump the eight around the mountains all day and night. By the time we reached Snowdonia National Park on Friday night it was dark, and with one young teacher as our escort, we all headed up into the mist. And in true Welsh fashion, it soon started to rain. When we reached where we were going to camp, by the edge of a small lake halfway up, it was past midnight and raining hard. We were all tired (from dragging the ridiculously overweight packs), and we put up the tents as quickly as we could. They were the old-style A-frame pegged tents, not known for their robustness in a Welsh winter gale, and sure enough by 3:00 A.M. the inevitable happened. Pop. One of the A-frame pegs supporting the apex of my tent broke, and half the tent sagged down onto us. Hmm, I thought. But both Watty and I were just too tired to get out and repair the first break, and instead we blindly hoped it would somehow just sort itself out. Lesson two: Tents don’t repair themselves, however tired you are, however much you wish they just would. Inevitably, the next peg broke, and before we knew it we were lying in a wet puddle of canvas, drenched to the skin, shivering, and truly miserable. The final key lesson learned that night was that when it comes to camping, a stitch in time saves nine; and time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted. The next day, we reached the top of Snowdon, wet, cold but exhilarated. My best memory was of lighting a pipe that I had borrowed off my grandfather, and smoking it with Watty, in a gale, behind the summit cairn, with the teacher joining in as well. It is part of what I learned from a young age to love about the mountains: They are great levelers. For me to be able to smoke a pipe with a teacher was priceless in my book, and was a firm indicator that mountains, and the bonds you create with people in the wild, are great things to seek in life. (Even better was the fact that the tobacco was homemade by Watty, and soaked in apple juice for aroma. This same apple juice was later brewed into cider by us, and it subsequently sent Chipper, one of the guys in our house, blind for twenty-four hours. Oops.) If people ask me today what I love about climbing mountains, the real answer isn’t adrenaline or personal achievement. Mountains are all about experiencing a shared bond that is hard to find in normal life. I love the fact that mountains make everyone’s clothes and hair go messy; I love the fact that they demand that you give of yourself, that they make you fight and struggle. They also induce people to loosen up, to belly laugh at silly things, and to be able to sit and be content staring at a sunset or a log fire. That sort of camaraderie creates wonderful bonds between people, and where there are bonds I have found that there is almost always strength.

My father had a sister, Mady, who had married badly and ‘ruined her life.’ Her story was a classic. She had fallen in love before the war with an American adventurer, married him against her family’s wishes, and been disinherited by my grandfather. Mady followed her husband romantically across the sea. In America he promptly abandoned her. By the time my parents arrived in America Mady was already a broken woman, sick and prematurely old, living a life two steps removed from destitution. My father, of course, immediately put her on an allowance and made her welcome in his home. But the iron laws of Victorian transgression had been set in motion and it was really all over for Mady. You know what it meant for a woman to have been so disgraced and disinherited in those years? She had the mark of Cain on her. She would live, barely tolerated, on the edge of respectable society for the rest of her life. A year after we arrived in America, I was eleven years old, a cousin of mine was married out of our house. We lived then in a lovely brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side. The entire house had been cleaned and decorated for the wedding. Everything sparkled and shone, from the basement kitchen to the third-floor bedrooms. In a small room on the second floor the women gathered around the bride, preening, fixing their dresses, distributing bouquets of flowers. I was allowed to be there because I was only a child. There was a bunch of long-stemmed roses lying on the bed, blood-red and beautiful, each rose perfection. Mady walked over to them. I remember the other women were wearing magnificent dresses, embroidered and bejeweled. Mady was wearing only a simple white satin blouse and a long black skirt with no ornamentation whatever. She picked up one of the roses, sniffed deeply at it, held it against her face. Then she walked over to a mirror and held the rose against her white blouse. Immediately, the entire look of her plain costume was altered; the rose transferred its color to Mady’s face, brightening her eyes. Suddenly, she looked lovely, and young again. She found a long needle-like pin and began to pin the rose to her blouse. My mother noticed what Mady was doing and walked over to her. Imperiously, she took the rose out of Mady’s hand and said, ‘No, Mady, those flowers are for the bride.’ Mady hastily said, ‘Oh, of course, I’m sorry, how stupid of me not to have realized that,’ and her face instantly assumed its usual mask of patient obligation. “I experienced in that moment an intensity of pain against which I have measured every subsequent pain of life. My heart ached so for Mady I thought I would perish on the spot. Loneliness broke, wave after wave, over my young head and one word burned in my brain. Over and over again, through my tears, I murmured, ‘Unjust! Unjust!’ I knew that if Mady had been one of the ‘ladies’ of the house my mother would never have taken the rose out of her hand in that manner. The memory of what had happened in the bedroom pierced me repeatedly throughout that whole long day, making me feel ill and wounded each time it returned. Mady’s loneliness became mine. I felt connected, as though by an invisible thread, to her alone of all the people in the house. But the odd thing was I never actually went near her all that day. I wanted to comfort her, let her know that I at least loved her and felt for her. But I couldn’t. In fact, I avoided her. In spite of everything, I felt her to be a pariah, and that my attachment to her made me a pariah, also. It was as though we were floating, two pariahs, through the house, among all those relations, related to no one, not even to each other. It was an extraordinary experience, one I can still taste to this day. I was never again able to address myself directly to Mady’s loneliness until I joined the Communist Party. When I joined the Party the stifled memory of that strange wedding day came back to me. . .

My darling son: depression at your age is more common than you might think. I remember it very strongly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I was about twenty-six and felt like killing myself. I think the winter, the cold, the lack of sunshine, for us tropical creatures, is a trigger. And to tell you the truth, the idea that you might soon unpack your bags here, having chucked in all your European plans, makes your mother and me as happy as could be. You have more than earned the equivalent of any university 'degree' and you have used your time so well to educate yourself culturally and personally that if university bores you, it is only natural. Whatever you do from here on in, whether you write or don't write, whether you get a degree or not, whether you work for your mother, or at El Mundo, or at La Ines, or teaching at a high school, or giving lectures like Estanislao Zuleta, or as a psychoanalyst to your parents, sisters and relatives, or simply being Hector Abad Faciolince, will be fine. What matters is that you don't stop being what you have been up till now, a person, who simply by virtue of being the way you are, not for what you write or don't write, or for being brilliant or prominent, but just for being the way you are, has earned the affection, the respect, the acceptance, the trust, the love, of the vast majority of those who know you. So we want to keep seeing you in this way, not as a future great author, or journalist or communicator or professor or poet, but as the son, brother, relative, friend, humanist, who understands others and does not aspire to be understood. It does not matter what people think of you, and gaudy decoration doesn't matter, for those of us who know you are. For goodness' sake, dear Quinquin, how can you think 'we support you (...) because 'that boy could go far'? You have already gone very far, further than all our dreams, better than everything we imagined for any of our children. You should know very well that your mother's and my ambitions are not for glory, or for money, or even for happiness, that word that sounds so pretty but is attained so infrequently and for such short intervals (and maybe for that very reason is so valued), for all our children, but that they might at least achieve well-being, that more solid, more durable, more possible, more attainable word. We have often talked of the anguish of Carlos Castro Saavedra, Manuel Meija Vallejo, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, and so many quasi-geniuses we know. Or Sabato or Rulfo, or even Garcia Marquez. That does not matter. Remember Goethe: 'All theory (I would add, and all art), dear friend, is grey, but only the golden tree of life springs ever green.' What we want for you is to 'live'. And living means many better things than being famous, gaining qualifications or winning prizes. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. Only now, when all that has passed, have I felt really happy. And part of that happiness is Cecilia, you, and all my children and grandchildren. Only the memory of Marta Cecilia tarnishes it. I believe things are that simple, after having gone round and round in circles, complicating them so much. We should do away with this love for things as ethereal as fame, glory, success... Well, my Quinquin, now you know what I think of you and your future. There's no need for you to worry. You are doing just fine and you'll do better, and when you get to my age or your grandfather's age and you can enjoy the scenery around La Ines that I intend to leave to all of you, with the sunshine, heat and lush greenery, and you'll see I was right. Don't stay there longer than you feel you can. If you want to come back I'll welcome you with open arms. And if you regret it and want to go back again, we can buy you another return flight. A kiss from your father.

Our grandfather, in dreamless sleep beneath us, spoke to us from the singing hive of memory.

An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.” Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.

The women posed for snapshots. Dozens of snapshots....They imagined that, long after the soldiers had become old, perhaps even after they'd died, someone would come to wonder about these women holding up rifles or tommy guns or donuts and laughing with their grandfather in front of the big dark truck>

Bostic never met her great-grandfather Jack Yates, but it was as if the contours of his being had been concretized in her memory. Yates was born in Virginia and married a woman named Harriet Willis, with whom he had eleven children. His wife and children, however, lived on a different plantation. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Willis’s owner moved his operations to Texas so that he could continue to enslave his workers. According to Bostic, when her great-grandfather, who had been freed by his own former enslaver, learned of this, he convinced his wife’s owner to allow him to purchase his way back into slavery so that he could be with his family.

To my grandfather, these and countless other objects in his collection were no mere tchotchkes. Their importance lay in the sense memory they triggered

North Koreans are raised to venerate our fathers and our elders; it’s part of the culture we inherited from Confucianism. And so in our collective minds, Kim Il Sung was our beloved grandfather and Kim Jong Il was our father. Once I even dreamed about Kim Jong Il. He was smiling and hugging me and giving me candy. I woke up so happy, and for a long time the memory of that dream was the biggest joy in my life.

For my maternal grandmother, who lives with us for a few months every year, that line came as an incredible relief. For her, it was personal. She and my grandfather grew up in Czechoslovakia during the very worst of communism. Unlike most of these new-age Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn, they knew the horrors that can come from a state-run economy, and the scars of socialism are seared in her memory. I vividly remember speaking with her during the lead-up to the 2016 election, when she was watching neo-socialists such as Bernie Sanders on CNN almost every day. (We’re working on getting her off the CNN train, by the way. But back in the Czech Republic, you pick up CNN early, like a drug addiction. Soon she’ll be watching Fox with the rest of the sane people in the world.) “Don, don’t these people understand?” she asked, her voice quavering, tears coming to her eyes. This is a woman who hid from Nazis in the basement of her farmhouse as a child and lived under Communist occupation for decades. At ninety-three, she’s still stronger and tougher than most. But she feared that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren might go through some of the same things she went through, and the thought of that had scared the hell out of her. “They don’t know how bad it can be. Please do something. Don’t they know this is all lies?

recounted an early childhood memory of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders and waving a tiny American flag in a crowd gathered to greet the astronauts from one of the Apollo space missions after a successful splashdown in the waters off Hawaii. And now, more than forty years later, I told the graduates, I’d just had a chance to watch my own daughters hear from a new generation of space explorers. It had caused me to reflect on all that America had achieved since my own childhood; it offered a case of life coming full circle—and proof, just as their diplomas were proof, just as my having been elected president was proof, that the American idea endures. The students and their parents had cheered, many of them waving American flags of their own. I thought about the country I’d just described to them—a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone. At about the same age as the graduates were now, I’d seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

Author’s Note This is a work of memory, but I have done my best to tell a truthful story. I met with all my siblings, several of my cousins, my parents, two of my aunts, dozens of former members of the Field, and several current ones (including the current director) to render as accurately as possible what the Field was like from 1976 to 1986 in the context of collective memory. While the Field, begun by my grandfather in 1931, still exists, it has been renamed and I’ve been told it is a radically different organization from the one I grew up in.

He did not regret his life, but he often thought about what would have happened if his grandfather had not developed dementia and he carried on his medical studies he would have become a doctor like his grandfather and he would have surely married Isabella and had several children and even grandchildren given the time that has lapsed but it was not to be and his life was mapped out to be a carer, and he devoted the past forty years to caring for people first ten of those years looking after his grandfather

Mrs. Mayfield’s bakery still filled the streets with the smell of fresh bread, the barbershop still seemed empty, and the Dundurn Gazette building still looked dilapidated and about to crumble. Maybe this is what I need, Gen thought. She craved stability right now. Recently she had felt lost and overwhelmed, hating life at university and struggling with her course, but desperate to please her mother. Every Isherwood woman attended the University of Toronto; Gen couldn’t be the exception. There was only one major road entering and leaving Dundurn, and it quickly took them away from the bustle. Soon they could see the arch boldly displaying the farm’s name etched into the metal: The Triple 7 Ranch. Nothing about the ranch seemed to have changed: the barn behind the house, the farmland beyond it, or the wheat fields arranged in neat lines stretching into the distance. Gen waited to hear Whisky, their German shepherd, as they pulled in. She always came out of wherever she was and barked loudly when cars arrived. “Where’s Whisky?” she asked after a couple of seconds. “Oh, Whisky passed on last year, honey,” her mum said. “No! What happened?” “Some hooligans from Saskatoon ran her over, honey.” “Sheriff Liam says we have to be extra careful now that some new businesses have settled out there.” “Who would do such a thing?” It seemed some things changed after all. ><>< Gen turned the knob of the bedroom door, which creaked as it swung open. Peering into her old bedroom, memories flooded her senses; she travelled to a time when the world made sense. She heard giggling and the patter of running feet as she recalled a time when all that mattered was finding the best place to hide while playing with her grandfather. She had been an only child but had never felt the loneliness others in her position described. Her grandfather had been her friend, confidante,

Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one’s father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out, Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work.

In the house, there is still a grandmother and a grandfather. The grandmother still has her mind, and the grandfather still has his body. The grandmother still has her long-term memory, and the grandfather still has his part-time job. The grandmother still holds grudges, and the grandfather still holds his tongue. With age, their survival has become a joint effort, a group project with a major deadline. But maybe that’s all it ever was.

In contrast, she had fond memories of time spent in her grandfather’s study. I made a point of standing at his elbow when he was working and if I drove him distracted his serene selflessness let no signs of irritation appear. In memory his little study is full of sunshine, with the scent of the passion flowers rioting over the balcony outside coming in through the open window. It would not even have occurred to me to stand at my father’s elbow while he worked; I doubt if he would have tolerated me there. The difference between the two men was that my father did not love children as children, though he did his duty by them when related to him with admirable patience, while my grandfather loved all children, clean or dirty, good or bad, with equal devotion. When he became aware of me he would patiently put down his pen and smile.61

But I’ve come to believe that’s bullshit. When you find a woman who’s snuck through the roadblocks to get to her burned-up house and she’s inconsolable when she sees it, those aren’t just “things” she’s crying over. When you find a grandfather and he doesn’t want the stereo or the strongbox with his life insurance in it, he just wants to find the American flag that the military gave him at his son’s funeral—that’s not what I call “things.” It’s their memories. After Ruidoso, we drove back toward Prescott.

Your grandfather knows memory is often a lie sealed with the hot wax of repetition.

It was then that a memory sprang forcefully to the front of his mind: something the boy had said once about his grandfather, in passing, that Carl had brushed aside.

recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.

No fim perguntei ao avô: Por que é que temos de estar encostados? Depois de o povo de Israel ter saído do Egipto deixou de ser um povo de escravos. Só um povo livre é feliz, só um povo livre tem bem estar e comodidades. É por esta razão que nos encostamos.

But then something nobody could have predicted happened. Embarrassed by this endless protest, Mayor Owen decided he had better find out who these addicts were, and how they could be shut up. They were from a different world: he had been a businessman for thirty years, and came from a privileged political dynasty in which his grandfather was the chief constable, and his father the lieutenant governor. He hadn’t ever known any addicts, so he decided to walk around the Downtown Eastside incognito, and sit with the addicts, and hear what they had to say. And this man who had argued that they should all be rounded up and locked away on army bases—this local Anslinger—was amazed. When he described his memory of it in 2012, he still seemed startled by what he had witnessed. “The stories you hear,” he said to me, “blow you away.” These people, he found, had had such hard lives. He remembered a fifteen-year-old girl on the streets, and shook his head. They’re not malicious, he came to see. They’re not bad. They’re just broken. So he arranged “an afternoon tea party” for “the most hard-core addicts” and sat and listened to them talk about their lives for hours. “The stories were just unbelievable,” Owen repeated, shaking his head again. Now

I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.

His horse, who had picked up the rather unfortunate name of Fat Ninny from Miles’s grandfather in the first few weeks of his life as a foal, came to greet Miles at his call, nickering, and Miles faithfully rewarded him with peppermints from his pocket. He petted the big roan’s wide, velvety nose. The beast, rising . . . twenty-three years old now?—had more gray among his red hairs, and wheezed from his canter across the pasture. So dare he ride, with this seizure-thing? Probably not the sort of days-long camping trips up into the hills he most enjoyed. If he trained Martin to be his spotter, he could perhaps risk a few turns around the pastures. He wasn’t likely to break any of his synthetic bones, falling off, and he trusted Ninny not to step on him. Swimming,

He hesitated, then arranged the gold medallion of the Cetagandan Order of Merit on its colorful ribbon, properly, around the tunic’s high collar. It was cool and heavy under his hand. He could be one of the few soldiers in history ever to be decorated by both sides in the same war . . . though to be truthful, the Order of Merit had come later, and actually had been presented to Lord Vorkosigan, not the little Admiral for a change. When they were all arranged, the effect was just short of loony. Separated into all the little secret compartments, he hadn’t realized just how much he’d accumulated, till he put it all together again. No, not again. For the first time. Let’s lay it all on the line. Smiling grimly, he fastened them down. He donned the white silk shirt that went underneath, the silver-embroidered suspenders, the brown trousers with the silver side-piping, the gleaming riding boots. Lastly, the heavy tunic. He fastened his grandfather’s dagger in its cloisonné sheath, with the Vorkosigan seal in the jeweled hilt, on its proper belt around his waist. He combed his hair, and stepped back to regard himself, glittering in his mirror. Going native, are we? The sarcastic voice was growing fainter. “If you expect to open a can of worms,” he spoke aloud for the first time, “you’d best trouble to pack a can-opener.” *

Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar’s death would not bring back his father, Elk’s Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, “A wrong has been righted.” No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, “A people has been avenged.

One of the easiest ways to tell if a sign is actually a sign is with what my grandfather called a bridge. Bridges come in two forms. The first is that whatever the sign is, it will instantly have a connection, or a bridge, to a memory. For example, These can be dates, times, locations, or something that brings back an instant memory of an experience that you had with this loved one who is trying

I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

In memory of all our brave soldiers who have lost their lives in action including my own grandfather “Gunner Thomas Henry Caunter

not the old trees, not even the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished—yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he lived.

As a boy, I remember my father telling me a bedtime story about the day my grandfather was decapitated.

An Alpha and its wolf should be as one, thinking and acting as a single unit.” She brushed her hair from her eyes and stepped out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. After scanning the area, she turned right and began to stroll down the street. He fell into step beside her. “You know, you sound like a textbook sometimes.” “A textbook? What do you mean?” “An Alpha should do this. An Alpha should do that.” “An Alpha needs to know its—” “There you go again. Don’t you ever just talk?” He scowled at her. She cast a glare his way before focusing her eyes straight ahead. “I’ve no idea what you mean.” “It’s like you’ve been…indoctrinated.” It irritated him, bringing back memories of a particularly annoying roommate named Quinten, at the Academy. The guy had read textbooks aloud every night until Damien had finally pitched him out the window. “My grandfather trained me for this role from a young age. If you’re going to be an Alpha, you have to act like one. Follow the rules day in and day out. It’s not a nine-to-five job, you know.” Barely,

And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones’s home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos—the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing—and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

My Mother's parents emigrated to the United States in 1920, after having lost their house and farm during the war (1914-1918). My grandfather had been an overseer of a big landed estate near Kolomija, Galicia. Thus, my Mother grew up in a village. The landowner kept teachers on the estate to educate his children as well as grandfather Stadler's sons and daughter. The sons were taught Hebrew, too. My Mother, the only daughter, was instructed only to read and write Hebrew, not the rigorous studies meant for sons. Girls were just supposed to be able to read the prayers. She received an education in German.

Mother's brothers Solomon, Louis, Meyer, Max and Morris had been already well established in New York before the war. They made my grandparents' passage possible through Romania. They stayed a few months in our house before their departure in 1920. I was a few months old then. My Mother never saw her parents again. Grandfather died in New York of Buerger's disease, a consequence of years of heavy smoking. He lived just eight months in the United States. My own Father's fate was similar. He died of cancer about eight months after his arrival in America. Both of them lived through hard years of wandering and homelessness during the world wars and survived but could not enjoy the ensuing peace, could not share life with children and grandchildren. They lived through the wars, yet peace was not theirs to savor.

Even if kids had time left after all of this regulation, they’re increasingly unable to partake in the world outside their schools and homes anyway. The 1950s hunter-gatherer childhood of Gray’s memory is partly a nostalgic myth in the spirit of Thoreau, for one part. For another, kids are largely prohibited from meandering on their own or in groups today. Writing in the Daily Mail, David Derbyshire contrasts a contemporary eight-year-old schoolboy (Edward), with his great-grandfather (George) of the same age.5 In 1926, George was able to meander some six miles to a pond to fish. Eighty years later, Edward is driven everywhere, even to safe, predetermined venues for bike riding. This shift didn’t happen all at once. Edward’s grandfather Jack was afforded a mile of freedom from his house at age eight, in the 1950s. His mother, Vicky, was allowed to wander about a half-mile away, to the local pool, in the late 1970s. By 2007, little Ed was permitted to stray less than three hundred yards from his door, as far as the end of the street.

Right now, We are living in perhaps the most exciting time in history to buy, own or play that eternal instruments, The piano Cover. What is your goal is to purchase something as small as software that can record what you want to play, a newly designed player piano, a digital machine or a classic phonetic model, there have never been as many options for the trencherman. Player Pianos Also called reproducing pianos. this class of instrument describe a modern update on the paper-outcry player pianos you keep in mind from old movies, and they have grown enormously in popularity over the final decennial. These are not digital instruments they are real, philological pianos with hammers and rope that can be played generally. but they can also start themselves. using filthy electronic technology. Instead of shove paper, they take their hint from lethargic disks, specially formatted CDs or internal memory systems. different manufacturers offer vast sanctum of pre-recorded titles for their systems. music in every genre from pop to the classics filed by some of the earth’s top pianists. These sophisticated systems arrest every nuance of the original performances and play them back with dramatic accuracy providing something that’s actually so much better than CD fidelity because the activities are live. Watch my new cover : Dancing on my own piano Thanks to these new systems, many people who do not play the piano are enjoying live piano music at any time of at morning, night and day. How many they are concurrent dinners for two or entertaining a houseful of partygoers, these high-tech pianos take centre period. For people who do play the piano, these systems can be used to record their own piano deeds, Interface by- Computers, aid in music education, assist with composing and many other applications. In short, these modern marvels aren’t your grandfather's’ player pianos! If you want to learn see the video first : Dancing on my own piano cover

In the middle of April 1945, we paid for three spaces on a truck, that would take a few families to the border. The night before we left, all three knapsacks ready, we looked around the house: the furniture in the dining room and bedroom, all brought by the parents from Vienna, the beautiful grandfather clock that had to be wound once a month - all these were part of our lives. Father, without saying a word, opened the clock, cut through the spring, took the two beautifully engraved, gilded weights and threw them in the garbage. He did not want anybody to enjoy that clock, that was brought from Vienna in 1918 and was chiming the quarter, half and the hours for our entire life, in good times and bad. It was the only spiteful act that I ever saw him perform, this quiet, gentle man.

My meal from Honey and Hickory came with a side of dysentery straight out of Oregon Trail.’” Finn now spat out the quote against the echo of Simone’s accusation, reciting from memory a review he’d found on a late-night, liquor-fueled deep dive into all things Honey and Hickory. “That’s a direct quote from a one-star review I found for Simone’s historic family restaurant online.” Simone strode forward and claimed center stage. “Written by a disgruntled cook who was fired for never showing up to work. It hardly classifies as empirical evidence.” “Look, Ms. Blake,” he said, leaning heavy on the honorific like she had, gratified when her eyes narrowed. “Beyond Honey and Hickory’s subpar reviews, your generic flavors can’t match the nuance of Finn’s Secret Sauce. You’re a mom-and-pop barbecue joint with no soul, stuck in the past.” Directing his next words to the investors, he said, “Whereas I’m all heart, focused on the future of barbecue. Sustainable, organic, outside-the-box flavor blends.” Simone clicked her tongue. “Organic? Wow, super cutting edge. If this was 1999.” Hands on her hips, she angled away from him, toward the crowd. “Honey and Hickory was farm to table long before it was fashionable, and we cook with locally sourced meat and home-grown produce.” “Like you had anything to do with that? Your grandfather probably set up those contacts while you were in diapers.” He turned his focus on the audience; two could play at that game. “Don’t let Ms. Blake fool you. She’s been at the helm of the restaurant for less than a year, yet she’s trying to convince you she played a role in Honey and Hickory’s decades of success.

So, share the beautiful memories that you created with your parents. Talk to your family members about what a loving and joyous mother or father you had. Tell your children about their grandmother or grandfather. Keep her alive in your memories and heart through conversations. It might be painful to reminisce her memories initially, but with time, it will only bring a smile to your face. The pain will slowly start to fade as you realize that remembering her is one of the ways to keep her next to you as you move forward with life.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that went them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion

Gam seemed upset. I told her not to worry. I’d already seen people my grandfather had known for decades erased from his memory: his youngest grandchildren, his driver. His new nickname for me stuck, and he called me “nice lady” until his final illness. He said it gently and with apparent kindness; he was very sweet to me after he’d forgotten who I was.

My grandfather used to say: "Life is astonishingly short. Now in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid - that apart from accidents - even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey." (From: the next village)

she’ll be as old as her grandfather is now… except there her imagination fails her.

Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips, and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation, like a difficult memory, or a ghost. Then Lucille and I could run off to the woods, leaving them to talk of old times, and make sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots.

This castle, the place where my mother birthed me, where my father and grandfather ruled, where all of my fondest memories reside, has become foreign. It holds no comfort, no excitement, and certainly no fairy tale.

Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.” Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.

but I guided you to those I thought you needed. Abe- the thing that used to be Abe--he guided your father and grandfather to the Moments that hurt most." "It all hurt, Issa." Tears squeeze from my eyes from the effort of holding in the screams of pain. I focus on the meagre relief the mist brings my sizzling skin. "The happy memories hurt just as bad, maybe worse." She studies me. "I know. But that kind of pain teaches you something different, June.

I know this day is going to be hard for you. My dad, your grandfather, always used to say to me, the hard times define us and how we use the memory of it defines our future... What is that supposed to mean? I guess it means we stay strong even when we don't want to. Use your sadness as a reminder, but never let it hold you back.

When she awoke to her memorial headache, she would find my grandfather on his knees, praying for her sweet, boozy soul.

Before we do anything, here's the first lesson in dessert making: don't stint on any of the good stuff. Fill it up with butter, and cream, and sugar, and fruit. All the things we want loads of but really shouldn't have. It should feel decadent." That's her grandfather talking, of course: "Pudding is an indulgence; it should feel like it," he used to say. She could recall one day, in the kitchen of their house in London, when she was maybe nine or ten, helping her mother frost a birthday cake for one of her sisters (Meg, surely; Julia had given up cake, by that point). Elliott sat on a stool at the kitchen island, watching them, guiding Susan's technique: "Take off just enough of the frosting to give a smooth appearance, but don't scrape it all off. The whole point of cake is the frosting, isn't it? You don't want a bare cake." "Julia would," Susan commented with a wry smile. "Julia doesn't appreciate things like this" was Elliott's response. "Now, now," Susan's mother gently remonstrated with a warning look at her father-in-law. "Well, I worry about Julia," he said. "If you can't indulge in a little cake now and again, what sort of joy do you have in your life? Can you indulge in anything? And yes, cake is an indulgence. You don't need it, but you want it. It should feel celebratory and just a little delightfully naughty when you have it. It's the same with any dessert.

downpour lashing at her face is becoming heavier and more steady, rippling windows, smearing headlights. Pari has no memory of ever meeting the man, her grandfather, Maman’s father, has seen only the one photograph of him reading at his desk, but she doubts that he was the mustache-twirling villain Maman has made him out to be. Pari thinks she sees through this story. She has her own ideas. In her version, he is a man rightfully worried over the well-being of

The voice of my ancestors said to me, The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not simply water, but the blood of your grandfather’s grandfather. Each ghostly reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of memories in the life of our people. The water’s murmur is the voice of your great-great-grandmother. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. You must give to the rivers the kindness you would give to any brother.

There is a simple life, a life in solitude, which I had grown unused to. Eating bread at a wooden table, gathering up the crumbs and tossing them to the sparrows. Slowly peeling an apple with a pocketknife and realizing that this gesture exactly re-creates your father’s gesture, which re-creates the gesture of your grandfather’s. The place is not the same, nor the time, nor the hand. But the gesture remembers.

Human beings are naturally flawed when it comes to time and memory. The past is forgotten, or it is believed bad things will not recur, and people become bound in their current problems. That which afflicted the grandfathers of their grandfathers is a distant, dim thing, and not as important as present concerns, no matter how trivial.

We have a collection of 800 jars of soil in our museum. We collect these soils from lynching sites. People who are involved in erecting markers collect the soil, put it in a jar that has the name of the victim, the date of the victim, and then they bring it back to the museum. An older Black woman was digging soil at a site in west Alabama. She was afraid because it was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. As she was about to dig, a big white man in a pickup truck drove by and stared at her. It made her anxious. Then he drove by again and stared some more. Then he parked his truck, got out, and walked toward her. She was terrified. Then the man asked, "What are you doing?" She was going to tell him that she was just getting dirt for her garden. Then she said, "Mr. Stevenson, something got ahold of me. I told that man, I'm digging soil here because this is where a Black man was lynched in 1937." She just looked down and started digging. The man surprised her by asking, "Does that memo you have talk about the lynching?" She said, "It does." Then he asked, "Can I read it?" He started reading while she started digging. After he finished reading the memo, he said, "Would it be all right if I helped you?" She said, "Yes." The man got down on his knees, and she offered him the implement to dig the soil. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, you keep that. I'll just use my hands." She said he started picking up the soil and putting it in the jar, and throwing his hand into the soil. She said there was something about the conviction with which he was putting his whole body into this that moved her. She went from fear to relief to joy so quickly she couldn't help it. Tears were running down her face. The man turned to her and he said, "Oh, ma'am, I'm so sorry I'm upsetting you." She said, "No, no, no. You're blessing me." They kept digging, and they were getting near to filling the jar. She looked over at the man, and she noticed that he had slowed down. His face had turned red. Then she saw that there was a tear running down his face. She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. She said, "Are you all right?" That's when the man turned her, and he said, "No, ma'am." He said, "I'm just so worried that it might have been my grandfather who helped lynch this man." She said they both sat on that roadside and wept. She said, I'm going to go back and put this jar of soil in the museum in Montgomery. Then the man said, "Ma'am, would it be all right if I just followed you back?" She said, "Sure." She called me on the way back. She said, "Mr. Stevenson, I want you to come to the museum and meet my new friend." I was there when these two people who met on a roadside in a place of pain and agony and violence and bigotry came in and together did something beautiful by putting that jar of soil in that exhibit. I'm not naive. I don't believe that beautiful things like that always happen when we tell the truth. I do believe that we deny ourselves the beauty of justice when we refuse to tell the truth. I've seen too much beauty come out of truth-telling, too much restoration, too much redemption, to believe that truth-telling doesn't have a power that is greater than the fear and anger that is prompting these orders, prompting some of this retreat. I worry about people who are already surrendering and waving white flags, and running for cover. I just don't think that's the way we're going to get to the other side.

And then the grandfather of geology, Nicolaus Steno’s words come back to me once again: “Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.

Are you ready to answer some questions?” I asked Paul. He was quite willing to oblige. I asked him when he first met Michael. Paul’s earliest memory of Michael places him at the Foot family home in Pencrebar, just about the time of the 1945 general election: [PF] The only thing [of importance] to us was how many members of the family were going to get elected. The information we had was no chance for Michael. He was the black sheep. He had gone away from the family tradition. [CR] No longer a liberal. [PF] Serve him bloody well right. [CR] Teach him a lesson. [PF] Everybody else had a good chance of winning. [CR] Do you think his father felt that way? [PF] No. They didn’t actually say that. It was the banter. His mother was a bit that way. [MF] Ah! Not my mother. [PF] When Michael was in the first results and he’d won, it followed that everyone else would win by enormous majorities. All through the next days there were these terrible results: Dingle had lost in Dundee, and John lost in Bodmin and then the worst was grandfather in Tavistock. He just shut himself up in his room. He wouldn’t talk to anybody for about four days afterwards.

Book of Enoch?’ ‘It’s an ancient Jewish religious work ascribed by tradition to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. Although modern scholars estimate the older sections date from about 300 BC,’ I said, regurgitating what I’d found on Wikipedia. I don’t have a photographic memory, but it’s not far off. ‘Apparently

nonchalant charminar ma, i can’t smile well-scrubbed twisted-smirks in your noble society anymore in the godly dense ocean of kindness with krishna’s duffed up white teeth with studious eyes of the devil i can’t anymore in a ramakrishnian posture use my wife according to the matriarchal customs substitute sugar for saccharine and dread diabetes no more i can’t no more with my unhappy organ do a devdas again in khalashitola on the registry day of a former fling. my liver is getting rancid by the day my grandfather had cirrhosis don’t understand heredity i drink alcohol read poetry my father for the sake of puja etc used to fast venerable dadas in our para swearing by dharma gently press ripe breasts of sisters-born-of-the-locality on holi on the day ma left for trips abroad many in your noble society had vodka i will nonchalantly from your funeral pyre light up a charminar thinking of your death my eyes tear up then i don’t think of earthquakes by the banks or of floodwater didn’t put my hand on the string of the petticoat of an unmarried lover and didn’t think of baishnab padavali ma, even i’ll die one day. at belur mandir on seeing foreign woman pray with her international python-bum veiled in a skirt my limitless libido rose up ma because your libido will be tied up to father’s memories even beyond death i this fucked up drunk am envying you carrying dirt of the humblest kind looking at my organ i feel as if i’m an organism from another planet now the rays of the setting sun is touching my face on a tangent and after mixing the colour of the setting sun on their wings a flock of non-family-planning birds is going back towards bonolata sen’s eyes peaceful as a nest – it’s time for them to warm the eggs –

That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me. I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste. I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria. I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country. The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so f*****g good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother's famine; my grandfather's black-marketeering to get us the 'deficit' goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency - and it was how you showed loved. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what it fed, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.

Where were you on the night of March 7?" Typical detective stuff you hear on television all the time. It's so phony. I hate it. Most people can't remember where they were three nights ago much less on a particular date. I know I can't. The times you remember are the ones you're supposed to: Christmas Day, the Fourth of July, your birthday. As you get older and occasionally look back, even those days drift together into one small blob of memories. But you always remember the first time and the last. You remember your first day of school and the last. You remember the first time you went to the show by yourself and the last time you saw your grandfather. The first time you made love. Most of the nights of my life have passed by barely noticed, like the black squares of rosary beads slipping through the wrinkled fingers in the last pew. But later, when I've looked back, I've realized that a few ink colored seeds have taken root in my mind and have grown into oaken strength. My dreams drift back and nestle in their branches. If those nights were suddenly not to be, I, who had come to lean on them, to relish those few surviving leaves of a young autumn that has passed and will not come again, would not know where I'd been. And I'd wonder, even more so, if there was anywhere to go. Every Chicago winter delivers four gray weeks, with rare spots of sunshine that are apparently the flipside of hell. Teeth bared, the wind comes snarling off the lake with every intention of shredding the skin off your face. Numb since November, hands can no longer tell or care if they are wearing gloves. Snowmen, offsprings of childhood enthusiasm, are rarely born during these weeks. Along with the human spirit, the temperature continues to plummet. The ground is smothered by aging layers of ice and snow. Looking at a magazine ad, you see a vaguely familiar blanket of green. Squinting back through months of brown snow, salt-marked shoes, running noses, icy railings, slippery sidewalks, and smoking sewers, you try to recall the feeling of grass. February is four weeks of hanging onto the ropes, waiting to be saved from a knockout by the bell of spring. One year, I was invited to Engrim University's President's Ball, which was to be held on the first Saturday in February. I don't know why I was invited. Most of the students who received invitations were involved in a number of extracurricular activities; they participated in student government, belonged to various clubs, were presidents of fraternities or sororities, were doing extremely well academically or were, in some other way, pleasing the gods. I was never late with my tuition payments. Maybe that was it. Regardless, the President's Ball was to be held in the main ballroom of one of Chicago's swankiest hotels. I thought it was an excellent opportunity to impress Sarah with my importance. A light snowfall was dotting the night air when

I love the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team for many reasons and they have given me some wonderful memories. When I look back, I don't think about the games they lost but I remember going to see the games when I was a little boy with my grandfather. I remember talking to my mom on the phone after the Cardinals won the World Series in 2006 while I was dressed up in my Captain of the Fallopian Swim Team Halloween costume. I remember taking my lovely wife to her first Cardinals game where she broke out in hives due to the heat and humidity. I remember the joy I felt as I sat with my little man watching our first Cardinals game together at Busch Stadium. I know I need to take my obsession down a notch but in the end it is worth it because it takes me back to times I will never forget and always cherish.

Or from even further back, from as far back as she could remember, there rose the fascination she had felt as a little girl every time she saw her grandfather shaving: he would sit down, usually around seven in the morning, after a frugal breakfast, and with a serious air make up his lather with a very soft brush in a bowl of very hot water, a lather so thick and white and firm that even after more than seventy-five years it still made her mouth water.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot recapture entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart. There is a river, the town, my grandfather steering a boat through the channel, my sister fixed in that suspended rapture she would later translate into her strongest poems, the metallic perfume of harvested oysters, the belling voices of children on the shore . . . When the white porpoise comes there is all this and transfiguration too. In dreams, the porpoise remains in memory’s waters, a pale divinity who nourishes the fire and deepest cold of all the black waters of my history. There were many things wrong with my childhood but the river was not one of them, nor can the inestimable riches it imparted be traded or sold.

Maybe you are across an ocean, sitting in a small house overlooking a field, reading this book. Maybe you, too, have lost a grandfather. Or a cat. I imagine you sitting there, holding this book, reading words once typed thousands of miles away: It will always be a special memory for me. Please know you were loved and that I/we will always remember you.

I’ve never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother’s eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave? Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words. Of course it isn’t these homely and accustomed ghosts that trouble sleep and curdle wakefulness. Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone. All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves. Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence. Our rational minds say, “No, it isn’t.” But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, “Yes, but it could be.” We come and go from mystery and, in between, we try to forget. But a breeze passing in a still room stirs my hair now and then in soft affection. I think it is my mother. PART ONE

Dew dampened the grass and shimmered on the apples. From a distance, the blueberry bushes glistened as if encased in frost, and the trees looked as if they had been cloaked in ice. Walking through the orchards was comforting to Sam, nearly as comforting as baking. There was a precision in both endeavors, which brought a sense of order to the world, and yet each was filled with new surprises and revelations every day. The trees lined up like hunchback sentinels, seeming to protect the women as they walked the land. The paths between the trees were grassy but worn, showing where tourists and U-Pickers had trod in straight lines before veering left or right. Every so often, the earth had been upended by moles, muddy earthquakes left in the wake of their own underground walks. "Grandpa hated moles, didn't he?" Sam asked out of the blue. "With a passion," Willo said, touched that Sam remembered an innocuous fact about her grandfather from long ago. It was even cooler as the three went deeper into the heart of the orchards, mist dancing in between the rows of trees and the lake glistening beyond like a mirage. It was magical, mysterious, a lost world. I always feel like I've been transported to the world depicted in Lord of the Rings, Sam thought.

Memories are precious, but they are part of the past. The things we treasure, whether a facet of a memory, a particular aspect of a loved one, or a tangible talisman, we carry with us—always. They continue to inform us about our loved ones and remind us that life is ongoing, that we can still learn from those who have died and can still feel their presence. The smell of Old Spice will forever be my grandfather. My bony wrists and the veins in my hands are remnants of my grandmother. These small things are treasures that will never lose their value and cannot be taken from me.

On the appointed day, I waited in the vestibule of the boardinghouse until his car rolled up the Chermin de Verey, turned around, and parked outside the gate. He disliked my housemistress intensely and refused to park on school property in case he ran into her. I got into the car, and we drove south in silence, over little highways that wiggled precariously through the mountains, on main streets through half-abandoned villages, on back roads past quiet factories with dark eyes shattered into their windowpanes, past geraniums and lace curtains and dingy cafes. My grandfather pointed out monuments to the Resistance along the way, sad gray stones tucked up onto the banks of the road, where bands of men had been denounced, discovered, shot down. Entire villages, he told me, had been massacred because they wouldn't surrender their resistance fighters. Women and children had burned alive because they would not speak. As I listened, I thought of all the times my grandmother complained to me that Americans had no sense of history. Now I understood that she meant Americans had no sense of her history, of our history. Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories. For the first time, I wondered if she had sent me back so I could learn what it was like to live in that punishing landscape. I cracked open the window a tiny bit; I felt suffocated. The wind pierced the silence inside the car, whose pneumatic suspension system I imagined pumping more air into itself to hold the weight of those stories. I wondered what life would be like without that load to carry.

What do you think of her?" he asked. Annandale replied without hesitation. "I would marry her myself, were I five years younger." "Five?" Christopher repeated skeptically. "Ten, damn you." But a slight smile had appeared on the earl's time-weathered face. "I commend you on your choice. She's a spirited girl. Fearless, Lovely in her own way, and with her charm she has no need of true beauty. You'll need to keep a firm hand on the reins, but the trouble will be worth it." He paused, looking wistful. "Once you've had a woman like that, you can never be content with the ordinary kind." Christopher had been about to argue over the question of Beatrix's beauty, which in his opinion was unequaled. But that last sentence caught his attention. "You're referring to Grandmother?" he asked. "No. Your grandmother was the kind of woman I thought I should marry. I was in love with someone else- a far less suitable girl. And I let her go, to my everlasting regret." He sighed, pondering some distant memory. "A lifetime without her..." Fascinated, Christopher wanted to ask more... but this was hardly the time or place for such a conversation. However, it gave him an unexpected insight into his grandfather. What would it do to a man, to marry a Prudence when one might have had a Beatrix? It would be enough to turn anyone bitter.

By declaring “I support states’ rights” just miles from the spot where the civil rights workers were murdered, Reagan revealed—to those who knew anything about dog whistles—that behind his grandfatherly pose he was a strong supporter of white supremacy, as his actions during his presidency would prove. His opposition to civil rights legislation, escalation of Nixon’s war on drugs, and support for apartheid South Africa were prefigured at Neshoba. Every Mississippian could decode the message.

His knees had turned to water and he had had to sit down on the soft edge, his hands automatically taking her hot, dry hands while his mind, for some strange reason, instantly dredged up from his storehouse of memories his grandfather's tale of Magellan crossing a nameless sea in a still young world. He had seen, as he had looked into her eyes, the sea; depths beyond depths, and the tiny ships and white sails of grace moving along the rim of time. Almost without knowing it, without being aware that he was doing so, he kissed her fingertips one by one, as he told himself that this was what it meant, that to love was to regain the capacity to remember a world without names, to recall by virtue the whorl above the beloved's knucklebones and the blue of the veins beneath the skin the unbearable fragility of mornings in this country, to find October odors trapped in the skinfolds between her toes along with the scent of talcum powder and soap and human sweat. He moved then, without willing it, helplessly, and sank himself into the swamp of her delirium, as her fever broke and her bones melted in a cold sweat that drenched him and the bedsheets, soaking his chest, his legs, his armpits so that he thought he was making love to the monsoon and was himself dissolving into a needle spray of rain and the pungence of washed leaves and cleaned tree bark in a festival to end the dry season.

do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves,

That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less.

The Magic of Fairy Tales: Sparking Imagination and Learning Fairy tales have been an integral part of childhood for centuries, blending adventure, life lessons, and imaginative escapism. Whether reading a short fairy tale before bed or diving into a long fairy tale, these stories entertain, teach, and connect generations. From baby fairy tales to more complex children's fairy tales, there’s something for everyone in the world of fairy tales. Starting with Baby Fairy Tales For young children, baby fairy tales introduce them to the enchanting world of storytelling. These simple, repetitive tales are easy for toddlers to follow. Short fairy tales are ideal for this age group, offering quick narratives that engage without overwhelming. Whether it’s a tale of magical creatures or friendly giants, these stories spark early imagination. Bedtime is a perfect time for these soothing stories, helping children relax before sleep. The Power of Educational Fairy Tales As children grow, educational fairy tales blend entertainment with important life lessons. Aesop’s fairy tales, for example, combine engaging plots with moral teachings. Fables like “The Tortoise and the Hare” or “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” teach patience, honesty, and consequences. These tales, often featuring animals, encourage critical thinking. Aesop's fairy tales are perfect because they are short, making them ideal for young readers or bedtime. Exploring Animal Fairy Tales Another favorite genre is animal fairy tales, where animals take human-like traits and embark on adventures. These stories teach empathy, cooperation, and teamwork. For instance, animals helping each other solve problems or overcome challenges promotes friendship and kindness. Animal fairy tales are especially engaging for young children, who can relate to the characters while learning important values. Fantasy Fairy Tales: Unlocking Imagination Fantasy fairy tales are perhaps the most magical. Filled with dragons, witches, and brave heroes, these tales transport readers into realms where anything is possible. Fantasy stories encourage children to use their imagination and learn about courage and resourcefulness. Famous tales like Cinderella or Snow White offer exciting adventures, teaching life lessons through magical escapism. Cultural Tales: Keloğlan and Heidi Fairy Tales Fairy tales also provide a window into different cultures. Keloğlan fairy tales offer Turkish folklore, with the clever Keloğlan outwitting his adversaries. These tales teach creativity and resilience. Similarly, Heidi's fairy tales bring the Swiss Alps to life, teaching lessons about family, kindness, and nature. Grandfather Scary Stories and Sleep Stories For older children, grandfather scary stories offer thrills and suspense. These stories help children safely face their fears. Meanwhile, sleep fairy tales and sleep stories offer a calming end to the day, assisting children to unwind before bedtime. In conclusion, fairy tales—whether short, long, educational, or fun—spark creativity, teach values, and foster emotional growth. By sharing these stories, we create lasting memories that will inspire future generations.

It didn’t matter that neither Feidhlim nor his neighbors could remember the details of his great-grandfather’s transgression. Memory was ephemeral. Hatred was a rock.

My very first memory is blood, slopping from the throat of a terrified bull, and my grandfather—red-handed—reaching for my face. I would have been three at this time. Maybe I have memories before that. I don’t know. If I did, they’d be flashes of tile patterns, or something. I can make it up, if you want.

Charles watched from a stage as the entire urban elite filed in front of him, bare-headed, with nooses round their necks and wearing only their shirts. They knelt and begged his forgiveness, but for a time the emperor ‘looked into the distance, saying nothing in reply, appearing to reflect on what the people of Ghent had done and whether or not he should pardon them’, until Marie begged him to forgive them ‘in honour and memory of his birth there’. This he graciously granted. He also laid the first stone of a citadel to be erected on the spot chosen by his grandfather Maximilian after an earlier revolt.66

I The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street- corner; I have outlived the night. Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable. Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you. The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for. The big wave brought you. Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words. The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city. Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are the illustrious toys you have left me. I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn. Your dark rich life ... I must get at you, somehow; I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile -- that lonely, mocking smile your cool mirror knows. II What can I hold you with? I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs. I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon. I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze: my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses. I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life. I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal. I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow --the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities. I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born. I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself. I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. (Two English Poems)

He imagined wooing a wife would be doubly difficult. And to be worthy of such herculean efforts, she must be exceptional. In truth, the only female with whom Robert had ever formed a true connection had been a girl, not a woman. He’d loved her as a child loved another child. No, that wasn’t quite right. As a soul loved another soul. Yes, that was closer. The feeling had a purity he’d never been able to explain. Golden, shimmering, inexorable. Perhaps that was why their bond had eclipsed anything less powerful—which was everything. He might feel simple lust for the Nottingham widow he visited sporadically, or appreciation for the kindly Miss Thatcher, who’d helped her physician father tend his grandfather’s ague last month. But nothing compared, really. Even years after he’d severed it, the bond cast a long shadow He closed his eyes, forcing golden memories to gray and recede back into their corner. Over the years, he’d found it best to forget.

The stone that rolled over the entrance to the cave where I hid during the forest fire so many years ago. The stone that rolled away from Christ’s tomb. My grandfather Stiofain saying to me, “Tanny, our hearts are like stone, and only suffering carves them into bowls big enough to catch the joy.” Incomprehensible to me at the time, but unforgotten. And so forth. I tore my eyes away from the fire, shut down the mill-race of memory, and resumed reading to the kids.

Children are not born with memories of who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better. Perhaps

I don’t remember that Tom talked. Now that I think of it, I can’t remember the sound of his voice or the kind of words he used. I can remember both about my grandfather, but when I think of Tom it is a memory of a kind of warm silence. Maybe he didn’t talk at all. Tom had beautiful tackle and made his own flies. But he didn’t seem to care whether we caught trout or not. He needed not to triumph over animals.

He knew all about Bartolome de Las Casas, and he could quote Ser Juana from memory, but in the world order narrated to me by my grandfather, we were migrants, we were exiles, were anointed, we were people protected by God, and people like Nathaniel and his friends were tourists.

We understand the forked tongue that our grandfathers talked about. [...] We know all the tricks of the wasicu world. Our young people have mastered it. I have mastered your language. [...] But I also know the genetic psyche. And I also have the collective memory of the damages that have occurred to my people. And I will never submit to any pipeline to go through my homeland. Mitakuye Oyasin!" — Phyllis Young