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hat summer, my dad visited again. As usual, it had been more than a year since I’d last seen him, so I was shy but eager. It didn’t take long for him to win me over with his special way of talking, as if he were picking up our great ongoing conversation. I sat with him in his cab, which he had parked by Mom’s garden, where the nasturtiums rioted red, orange, and yellow blooms over her wooden beds, the beans and peas in orderly rows.
    Inside my dad’s taxi, it smelled of his essential oils and something clean and healthy, like a natural food store, and also the incense he burned in the ashtray, a habit I took up when I got my first car. It was orderly, like everything about my father, with a slightly eccentric attention to detail. He always had at least one notebook going—pocket size with a Bic pen in the spiral binding, containing pages and pages of affirmations.
    For each visit, he’d borrow a different cab. Some were generic modern sedans, but at least once he got an old Checker cab. All of thecabs had bulletproof glass between the backseat and driver—a scary detail I thankfully didn’t have the mental sophistication to comprehend. I loved nothing more than to climb in back and push pennies through the money slot, pretending I was one of his fares. But today I was sitting next to him, his ever loyal copilot.
    â€œJohn Lennon’s coming back,” he said in a conspiratorial tone of voice that suggested I was the only person in tune enough to get the message.
    I nodded sagely, as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.
    â€œThere’s this woman who’s been channeling him, and he’s gonna give a television interview, and tell us all about where he’s been, and what we need to do.”
    I knew it was sad that John Lennon had died. I was interested in this TV appearance, but I think I was also looking for proof it was safe to believe my dad—that he knew truths about the world in the way adults were supposed to, and he could be trusted in his explanation of them. I watched for that TV special for years. In my mind, it’s as if it actually happened.
    T he next summer, Betty’s visit took a turn for the glamorous. She asked Mom to rent us a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Portland, sixty miles south and metropolitan by comparison. It had city buses, which Betty soon mastered. It had a department store, Porteous, which she waltzed us through as if I were Annie in a Daddy Warbucks montage.
    At the bed-and-breakfast, as always, I feared Betty’s interactions with the owners and other guests, but I was glad for an alternative to the tedium of past summers. Coffee was served in the salon. I loved the accompanying Hydrox cookies, which I washed down with the sugary coffee I began drinking as part of my endless bid to seem grown-up.
    It wasn’t always easy to fold myself back into regular life after my time with my dad or Betty. I was being raised to be disciplined and hardworking. But I was a kid, and one with a natural affinity for thebig life—big cities, big meals, big emotions. I learned to live treat to treat, the way the orphans in after-school specials put all of their faith in that big Christmas miracle. When I was occasionally allowed one of the indulgences I loved—putting flowered barrettes in my hair for a restaurant outing when family visited, riding the roller coaster for hours at an amusement park during my summer stay with Grammy, or even just the delicious sensory overload of seeing a movie at the theater, rather than viewing public television on our staticky little TV, I savored every moment, abuzz with joy.
    As much as I was desperate to go everywhere, and do everything, a part of me never wanted to leave the safe, perfect oasis Mom and Craig had carved out for us in the wild woods of Maine. Melancholy with longing, I became aware early on that wherever I was, a part of me would always want to be somewhere else.

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