I still have the notes I wrote so I would never forget the details of it all: all the names and places foreign to my tongue. It was one of those wonderful times when we spoke of two different things and yet we were able to take turns and listen and somehow complement each other. We marveled at all that remains to remind us of lost people and times, your father always noting what would have been constant—the light and length of the days, the seasons. I told how my mother once got her palm read, holding it out to me as if I could see all that had been foretold, and how I’ve always wished I had a photograph to go back and study.

My dad was on my mind a lot those days, there in the house on School Street, with too much time alone, so I sent a lot of postcards that arrived long after I had returned. While thinking of our word, I was reminded again of Houdini. As a young boy in 1908, my father had witnessed the great magician leaping from the Mass Avenue Bridge in shackles and locks; there was a long, silent waiting before he surfaced and swam from the river. It was a story my father liked to tell, a piece of history he had witnessed, and he spoke of the sad irony of how after all that Houdini had survived, he was felled by a sucker punch from some selfish fool who thought he could get his five minutes of fame. According to Houdini’s wife, they didn’t make contact after his death, and then on top of that, she was not allowed to be buried beside him, because she wasn’t Jewish, but I like to think that they did make contact and kept it private, stressing that such a connection is intimate and needs to be kept that way.

Your father and I spent days thinking about it, something rarely spoken that would connect us. Remember in elementary school how we had a secret word in case of an emergency and someone you didn’t know had to come get you? (Petrushka!) Thank goodness we never had to use it. But now, people need passwords just to live in this time we are in, everyone relying on old dogs and cats long dead and childhood streets and numbers, phone exchanges that belonged to people we once knew or loved, stores that no longer exist.