Things I want you to know:

My father often asked where my mother got all the crazy language she used; who did she think she was?

“I read,” she said. “I read a lot.” And she pointed to her stack of fashion and movie magazines. She talked about “dead hoofers” and “ducky shincrackers,” and told me she hoped I wasn’t going to be “khaki wacky,” which she then explained meant “boy crazy.”

“She’s only ten!” I remember my father saying, only to have her say how it’s never too soon to teach a girl not to be an “able Grable” or a “sharecropper.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but she said things like that often. She said of my father’s sister, my aunt Cammy, whom we only saw once a year: “Mutton dressed up to look like lamb.” And my father said, “It takes one to know one.” She bleated and went back to what she was doing, which was teaching me to braid my own pigtails. The funny sound made my father laugh. They did laugh (sometimes at the expense of others, but they did).

You knew a different man in those later years. You two knew him as a sweet man under a crocheted lap blanket watching Walter Cronkite or old reruns of “Gunsmoke.” He even liked that silly “Gong Show,” remember that? But that wasn’t the real him; that was just a shadow, something soft and worn.

I will always think of one afternoon in particular. My father and I were at the lunch counter in the drugstore, and the waitress asked us if everything was “lulu.” It was a word my mother had used often—“That’s lulu, Lily,” she would say when she thought I had done something good. My father froze and stared at me as if to ask if I’d heard it, too. His first look was one of shock, and then he stared back at the woman, searching her face while ordering his sandwich. I don’t recall the rest of lunch, only that when we got home, he sat in his chair and cried for a solid hour. I had never seen him cry and I wasn’t sure what to do, and so I went up to my room and waited until he called up and said it was time for dinner. I remember he cooked eggs that night, my egg cooked inside a hole he’d made in a piece of bread with a drinking glass; he also toasted the little circle of bread, off to the side, just as my mother always had done. The next day he was fine, and he never mentioned it again.