The book is so specific and resonant in my memory it still seems a physical presence; it fills my lap, the stiff boards of its bronzy cover emblazoned with a hodgepodge of Egyptian and Assyrian stuff, all covered with a thin glaze of something like cellophane which gradually begins to peel at the corners like sunburnt skin. Open the heavy book: a pointedly bookish smell (varnish? glue?), itself a little tomblike, redolent of stones and dust. Pages always cool as marble. The opening describes a dig, the work begun with pickaxes and spades and then continued, once the discoveries start, with spoons and hand brooms gradually whisking away earthen layers which cloaked the wonders the rest of the book was given over to: ancient things, compelling in their strangeness. Golden jackal’s head, turquoise eye of the jaguar. A promise, a world or worlds beneath this one. And at the end of the long cool shafts, the empty passageways: the sealed chamber, the treasure.

Childhood’s work is to see what lies beneath. Under my family’s surface, I could feel the buried foundations, the desires or disruptions, the longings and unfulfillments. I watched for the ways they’d push up, heave against the plain surface of the days. I learned to look out for the dangerous outcroppings, and if I couldn’t know what they meant, I couldn’t miss the ways these histories colored the present, intruding into today.

Aren’t our parents always mysterious to us, mounded fields in which we can barely read the forming architecture beneath? What can’t be seen troubles the earth, contours of an old city. What is buried? The child senses moments of pressure, outbreaks of something important. And later it’s the same: even as adults, the work of understanding our parents is archaeological; what shaped them, we ask, who gave me shape? What’s the history of the two people who are the origin of history, that shrouded beginning point whose evidence I handle now, holding the broken bits to daylight?

Begin with the stories they tell about themselves.