What I do recall is that while back in my childhood room, I saw my mother’s hairbrush; it was simple and plain, so unlike her, just brown boar bristles, and she tossed her head side to side as she brushed and fluffed, the auburn heft of her hair falling chin-length, very fashionable. It was on my dresser, and I was surprised and delighted to see it there. It was there like a promise, because she brushed her hair before bed, 100 times, as she had read somewhere was the thing to do. She would have needed to come back into my room to get it, and I would have heard the door creak on its hinges. I would have seen her there in the dim light of the hallway lamp we left on all night because our stairs were so steep and the landing so small; I could almost see her there. And that is what I remember, straining my eyes against the darkness to see her there, the brush on my dresser, above which the mirror reflected light from the street below.

It’s mysterious how fluid time has become for me; I wake and pour a glass and have no idea what I’ll find.

We all have those objects that keep us feeling connected to a person or time long gone. For me, it’s that hairbrush and my mother’s little ivory pin shaped like a Scottie dog, with rhinestone eyes, and the watch my father methodically took apart and then put back together in the nights after my mother died. For your father, it’s a toy badge, a box of his father’s fishing lures, and his grandfather’s stethoscope.

Remember how you loved to play with that stethoscope, listening to your own hearts and the gurgles of your stomachs? Jeff, you loved it so much you wrote a school report in the sixth grade so that your father would have to let you touch it. You loved school reports and projects; so many vinegar-and-baking-soda volcanoes over the years! You loved reading about how the Frenchman who invented the stethoscope did so because he felt uncomfortable pressing his ear up to women’s breasts. Remember? You said, “S’il vous plaît open your shirt,” in a silly accent modeled after that cartoon skunk. I thought it was funny, but that was the kind of thing your father got impatient and irritated about; he was always much harder on you, Jeff, something I have never understood. Did he want you to be something you weren’t? Did he envy that you could be a young man without feeling the weight of the world? I have your yearbooks right here on the shelf, too, and you look so young, hair down in your eyes and that denim jacket you wore all the time.