“… it’s the memories that count, right? Not the actual events, I don’t think, but the memories of them. What we’re left with. I honestly do feel that. It’s so clear to me now that we’re older, well, a little older, anyway—not that we’re ancient, mind you—that the moments in a life, those little situations and incidents that pile up to make it what it is, are less important, mean less to a person, than the way we remember them. Does that make any sense or am I just babbling here? ‘Talking through my hat,’ as my father used to call it, although I never really did understand that, that sort of phrase. Any of them, actually, from ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ right on down the line. But he’d say them, my father would, and you had to smile and nod and agree. That’s the way it was at our place—he was the man of the house and we were there to agree with him. Not to cause a revolution. No, he ‘ruled the roost,’ as he liked to say. Oh yes, that he did. Well, you recall what he was like? Right, honey? I mean, he was much older when you met him—died not too long after the wedding—but you still got a sense of the man. Didn’t you? I don’t know that anyone who ever met him didn’t get a feel for what he was like, right off. That’s an admirable quality to have, I suppose. I suppose it is. To be up-front about who you are, put it out there ‘right off the bat,’ as he enjoyed saying—and then let people decide for themselves if they liked you or not. He was himself, through and through, right down to the end. Even to his last breath, he was his own man. ‘A man’s man.’ You felt that, didn’t you, sweetie? Sorry if I’m rambling on, but it’s funny how you, when you start thinking about it, the past or whatever you’d call it—one’s life—how things flood back. Like a big wave of … well, I don’t know what. Not water, exactly, but some kind of thing. And it always happens when you’re driving, have you ever noticed that? Whether it’s you at the wheel, or if I’m coming home alone from a late shift, my Thursday swing shift and it’s nearly midnight … being on the road and driving does that to me. Makes me think. I’m not completely sure that I like it. You know? That ‘memory’ stuff … well, not the memories themselves, no, of course not that—I just said that they’re important, so I don’t mean them—but being vulnerable, I guess, to them coming back like that. Engulfing you. That part, being at their mercy, I suppose, is what frightens me sometimes …”