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at the cash-register with a few items at the Goodwill when a guy in a suit
    behind me tapped me on the shoulder.
    "Sorry to bother you," he said. His suit looked expensive, as did his manicure
    and his haircut and his wire-rimmed glasses. "I was just wondering where you
    found that." He gestured at a rhinestone-studded ukelele, with a cowboy hat
    wood-burned into the body. I had picked it up with a guilty little thrill,
    thinking that Craphound might buy it at the next auction.
    "Second floor, in the toy section."
    "There wasn't anything else like it, was there?"
    "'Fraid not," I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in
    newspaper.
    "Ah," he said, and he looked like a little kid who'd just been told that he
    couldn't have a puppy. "I don't suppose you'd want to sell it, would you?"
    I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my
    stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used book-store,
    and a Grease belt-buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door
    by the elbow of his expensive suit.
    "How much?" I had paid a dollar.
    "Ten bucks?"
    I nearly said, "Sold!" but I caught myself. "Twenty."
    "Twenty dollars?"
    "That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street."
    He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke.
    His face lit up like a lightbulb.
It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my
    childhood was particularly happy.
    There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My
    grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank
    out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as
    my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled
    lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.
    There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his
    wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the
    twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures:
    crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away
    places. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World's Fair once, and a
    lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies' gloves.
    Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once, he had half of a carny carousel, a few
    horses and part of the canopy, paint flaking and sharp torn edges protruding;
    next to it, a Korean-war tank minus its turret and treads, and inside the tank
    were peeling old pinup girls and a rotation schedule and a crude Kilroy. The
    control-room in the middle of the carousel had a stack of paperback sci-fi
    novels, Ace Doubles that had two books bound back-to-back, and when you finished
    the first, you turned it over and read the other. Fyodor let me keep them, and
    there was a pawn-ticket in one from Macon, Georgia, for a transistor radio.
    My parents started leaving me alone when I was fourteen and I couldn't keep from
    sneaking into their room and snooping. Mom's jewelry box had books of matches
    from their honeymoon in Acapulco, printed with bad palm-trees. My Dad kept an
    old photo in his sock drawer, of himself on muscle-beach, shirtless, flexing his
    biceps.
    My grandmother saved every scrap of my mother's life in her basement, in dusty
    Army trunks. I entertained myself by pulling it out and taking it in: her Mouse
    Ears from the big family train-trip to Disneyland in '57, and her records, and
    the glittery pasteboard sign from her sweet sixteen. There were well-chewed
    stuffed animals, and school exercise books in which she'd practiced variations
    on her signature for page after page.
    It all told a story. The penciled Kilroy in the tank made me see one of those
    Canadian soldiers in Korea, unshaven and crew-cut like an extra on M
A
S
H,
    sitting for bored hour after hour, staring at the pinup girls, fiddling with a
    crossword, finally laying it down and