I’ve always believed Uncle Bob grew up at a half-address, although I can’t prove this is so. The one time I visited his childhood home, when I was 8 and he was 41, the smallness and secret feel of the tiny bungalow in Inglewood had that half-address mystery. His yard as I recall it was…
In my mid-twenties, still living in Redondo, I met my wife and imagine my odd pleasure as I visit her home for the first time to find that she lives in an apartment in the village. A comforting familiarity lifts me along the narrow stairs of faux-marble cast concrete rising through the dark stuccoed tunnel…
The cooking that was truly sacramental for father was southern fare, the food of his grandmothers, his mother and the ladies who had cooked for them over the years. His father’s mother had run a stage stop and inn, while his maternal grandmother was a judge’s wife who kept a grand, crow-stepped manse in the…
This Virginia language was one of apparent sweetness, humor, courtliness, and loving repetition – yes sir being the characteristic all-purpose note that signaled the small welcome surprise at the world’s fleeting manifold, as in yes sir, daddy’s Packard, or yes sir, Gene Tierney – a way of briefly holding something pleasing up to the light.…
Father was from Virginia, Mother, Nebraska. These places, their histories, myths and landscapes, made my two earliest languages. Each was secretive, inflected, and tonal, drifting from picture to word and back again, a dream of memory in two streams. (from Chapter 3, “The Old Language”)