Of Time and Memory by Don J. Snyder Read Free Book Online

never been before. I have come back to a place I never left. It is a place I’ve been running from all my life, a memory in the center of my bones, a story sewn into my cells, a knowledge beneath the soles of my feet, a scent on my palms, a warning along my shins.
    The earth is soft. As I stare at the dates on the marker, the numbers turn in my mind, 1931–1950—until, finally, it strikes me that she was only nineteen years old. Nineteen. A girl.
    I’m embarrassed speaking out loud, but I say these words to her: “I don’t know where you are, Peggy.”

Chapter Seven
    I n the nursing home the rooms are behind long carpeted corridors of doors the residents have decorated with photographs of the pets they had to leave behind when they were admitted, and grandchildren who live far away in the noisy, chaotic world that is the exact opposite of this world.
    My grandfather has white wavy hair and a steady stream of single women who keep tabs on him. He is ninety years old and has a hard time getting up out of his chair, but other than this, age seems to have taken nothing from him. His son, my uncle Jack, has told him that I would be coming by and from the moment I step inside his door the memories of my mother pour out of him. He has photographs for me that I can keep and framed photographs of her standing on every table and windowsill and on the bureau by his bed. “I dust them all myself,” he tells me. Just as my mother had been carefully and purposefully withdrawn from his house where I visited him and my grandmother when I was a boy, the two small rooms he inhabits now have been transformed into a gallery of Peggy’s face. I wonder if at this point in his life, nearing his own death, he is familiarizing himself with his daughter’s face, a face he believes he will see in heaven.
    We sit in her presence now. It strikes me how odd she would find the two of us, her tough-guy father, now sobbing like a child, and her newborn baby now grown bald on thetop of his head. I look at her father and then at her face frozen in time, trying to imagine how she would look by now at age sixty-six.
    â€œI delivered your mother when she was born, and I was the last person with her when she passed away,” he tells me. “She lifted her hands off the hospital bed and brought them to her head like this and cried out to me, ‘My head! My head!’ ”
    He puts his face in his hands and begins to cry softly. I haven’t seen him since my grandmother’s funeral nine years before, and the memories I have of him are standing in his garage workshop surrounded by tools and a shiny new car that he was very proud of.
    â€œWe never talked about Peggy,” I tell him.
    He shakes his head. “It was rough,” he says.
    Once he begins, he goes on and on. He tells me about the time that Peggy saved his life. He remembers that in the last days of her pregnancy her feet were so swollen that she couldn’t even fit into his slippers. And her sewing, he remembers the way she would stay up all night sewing baby clothes. And the first time he saw her after Dave and I were born, she told him that after seeing us she had decided she was going to have six boys.
    â€œShe didn’t know how sick she was,” he says as he begins to cry again. This time he battles through the grief until he can think of something else to tell me that will help him find his voice: “Do you know that Dick was helping me build the house on School Street that summer? Every afternoon after work, we’d drive from the print shop straight to School Street. One afternoon we were hurrying to get the roof on before the rain. A big thunderstorm came in. We were still up on the roof and we watched the lightning jump across the heads of the nails … Every afternoon when we were driving over Iwould say a prayer that Peggy was feeling better and might be there waiting for your father and me. Every