Then she looks up at me with her deep blue eyes and sees me as a child playing inside a rock, pretending that wild flowers are hamburgers and cooking them on a small stove-like rock.

She can never get enough of this story. She has heard it thirty or forty times and always wants to hear it again.

It’s very important to her.

I think she uses this story as a kind of Christopher Columbus door to the discovery of her father when he was a child and her contemporary.

Corporal

Once I had visions of being a general. This was in Tacoma during the early years of World War II when I was a child going to grade school. They had a huge paper drive that was brilliantly put together like a military career.

It was very exciting and went something like this: If you brought in fifty pounds of paper you became a private and seventy-five pounds of paper were worth a corporal’s stripes and a hundred pounds to be a sergeant, then spiralling pounds of paper leading upwards until finally you arrived at being a general.

I think it took a ton of paper to be a general or maybe it was only a thousand pounds. I can’t remember the exact amount but in the beginning it seemed so simple to gather enough paper to be a general.

I started out by gathering all the loose paper that was lying innocently around the house. That added up to three or four pounds. I’ll have to admit that I was a little disappointed. I don’t know where I got the idea that the house was just filled with paper. I actually thought there was paper all over the place. It’s an interesting surprise that paper can be deceptive.

I didn’t let it throw me, though. I marshalled my energies and went out and started going from door to door asking people if they had any newspapers or magazines lying around that could be donated to the paper drive, so that we could win the war and destroy evil forever.

An old woman listened patiently to my spiel and then she gave me a copy of Life magazine that she had just finished reading. She closed the door while I was still standing there staring dumbfoundedly at the magazine in my hands. The magazine was warm.

At the next house, there wasn’t any paper, not even a used envelope because another kid had already beaten me to it.

At the next house, nobody was home.

That’s how it went for a week, door after door, house after house, block after block until finally I got enough paper together to become a private.