“ ‘As I never saw my father or my mother,’ ” my tiny driver began, reciting from memory, “ ‘and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.’ ” This surely meant his parents had died without his knowing or remembering them—before the time of photography! Or so the snowshoer seemed to be telling me.

“I thought your father taught you to ski, and your mom got you some snowshoes,” I interjected. Now, naturally, we were both confused. The snowshoer’s eyes never left the street ahead of us, though he could scarcely see over the steering wheel, which he fiercely gripped in his small but strong-looking hands. I was convinced his mother had been correct in thinking that the ski-poling would make her small son stronger. Yet what was I to make of the snowshoer’s telling me that he’d known his parents only by their tombstones?

We had pulled into the driveway of my grandparents’ Front Street house, where the smallest English teacher in Exeter history stopped the car. He leaned back in his seat as he regarded me. “That was a quotation, Adam,” he told me calmly. “That was the second sentence of the second paragraph of Great Expectations. I thought the circumstances of the young, first-person narrator—namely, never knowing his parents—might resonate with you and what little I know of your somewhat similar circumstances.”

“I see,” I said. The sentence he recited had resonated, all right. I sat in the Beetle while the part about deriving your only knowledge of your parents from their tombstones went on resonating.

There was another car in the driveway—Aunt Abigail’s station wagon. Therefore, I was not surprised to see the querulous faces of both my aunts in a dining-room window; those two biddies went everywhere together. Soon my grandmother’s benign face appeared in an adjacent window. I could imagine what they were thinking. Who is bringing our Adam home? Who is that weird little man? However, Exeter being Exeter, my gossipy aunts would have known all about the handsome but miniature snowshoer. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had made it their business to know everything about everyone.

I could see that the obstacle presented by Aunt Abigail’s station wagon was bothering the little snowshoer. There was nowhere to turn around in the driveway; he would have to back up into Front Street.

“Backing up could have become a sticking point in my driving test,” the snowshoer was saying, “but I somehow managed.” He adjusted his rearview mirror, twice; he kept glancing in his side-view mirror, as if he might have missed something.