Read Of Time and Memory for Free Online

time it is. “We don’t want to be late for dinner,” he says.
    I tell him we have plenty of time. But I can see we aren’t going to make it to the hospital where Peggy died, or to the cemetery. I see that the past is not about time at all really. The past is a place. Right here where the hearse was parked.
Here
is the past.
    â€œMaybe we
should
head back,” I say.
    When I start up the car he places his hand on my right arm and thanks me. “I can’t remember where we used to go on dates. You asked me last night, and I can’t remember. I can’tremember where I first met your mother either. I used to know the answers to all those questions, but now I can’t remember.”
    â€œIt’s okay,” I tell him.
    â€œBut I do remember that your mother and I weren’t together the last night of her life. She wanted to sleep in her mother’s bed. She had your granddad carry her to her mother’s bed, I remember. And at the funeral, riding to the cemetery, I kept thinking about that.”
    I see the tears standing in his eyes. I get the car moving and peel another orange for him, and all I want to do is tell him something that will make his tears go away. I want to tell him that everything is going to be okay, that even with the pain and the awful memories, we’ll be all right.
    We talk about football that night. It’s as close as we can get to anything real. He dreamed of playing football from the time he was five years old. High school and then college football. But he was too skinny. When the Depression came along his family was forced to move, but it was a fortuitous move for him because he ended up in a duplex right next door to Jack Graham, captain of the Lansdale High School football team. Jack took the skinny kid under his wing, introduced him to all the important kids, the pretty girls, the football coach who gave him the job as waterboy. Just to be down on the field during the games was a thrill. Just to be that close to it.
    In the morning he makes me breakfast before I leave. Someone from church has sent him grapefruit and oranges from Florida and he insists on cutting up some for me. A bowl of fruit. I’m watching him trying to figure it all out, the rightbowl, the knife, a dish towel to wipe the counter. Starting over, beginning with the orange this time. Where to put the seeds. It takes almost an hour.
    At the door we shake hands. He says a prayer that God will keep me safe on the drive home. From the parking lot I look back and see him standing at the door of the apartment building. It reminds me of myself standing outside the front door on Clearspring Road waiting for him to come home from work, to beep the horn once the way he always did when he spotted me there. Thinking of it—what the sound of his horn and the sight of him coming home from work meant to me! I want to take him back to Maine with me. I want to sit him in the wing chair in my living room, in front of the fireplace with all the kids gathering around him. Just keep him in my presence.

Chapter Six
    A month passes before I can make another trip down the same highways. I have spoken by telephone with an aunt of my mother’s who was very close to her. And two girls from her high school class. Pieces of my mother’s life are falling into my own.
    Before I drive to my father’s apartment this time, I return to Hatfield first, back to the same spot at the curb where the wedding car and the funeral hearse had parked. It is a Sunday morning and on the patch of grass in front of Grace Lutheran Church a young man in a stiff blue suit is changing the letters inside the glass cupboard that tells the times of Sunday school classes and the title of the weekly sermon. He is spelling out next week’s sermon one black magnetic letter at a time, and watching me out of the corner of his eye. “The Gift of Grace” is the title. He locks the cupboard with a padlock, glances