On the facing page are pictures of Oakmont School in Havertown, and the Havertown Library. I'm still discovering that I have lots of direct memories of this time, which is a surprise to me. One of the effects I've always felt from my mother's death was the loss of my childhood. Your mother is the repository-- she is the keeper of the memory. You do not need to retain or retrieve your own memories, because they are so precious to your mother.

My father always remembered things so differently, or remembered such different things, that I've never quite trusted him. I always think he has slanted things to tell the story he wants to tell. I don't begrudge him this, necessarily, but I don't want to remember his story from this time. I want to remember my story.

Flashing on Oakmont School: Mr. Bixler, the petty-dictator music teacher, whom we always giggled that he was making it with Miss Meredith, the old-maid 6th grade teacher. I used to fight with the art teacher because I wanted to make art my way. The Hindu girl in braces-- she must have had polio. Getting a carnation corsage at school pick up the day I did my Sherwood "audition" and the smell of the carnations making me nauseous. A new Kettlecloth dress for the first day of school every year. The word of the day in 5th grade. Mrs. Mutter, the fifth grade teacher, whose young daughter died of spinal meningitis. Writing to authors and illustrators and receiving samples of their work in return, which I believe I still have (in fact, somewhere in this house I'm pretty sure are some Garth Williams sketchbook pages, and possibly some Tasha Tudor). Miss Buchanan, fourth grade. Nearly choking to death on a hard candy in the school library one summer when Paula Klein and I were working there alone, which was probably soooo against the rules. Getting the job of "assistant librarian" when Jan Roberts had already been assured that the job would be hers.

On and on. It turns out that I had a life, and that I remember it. All it took was three nearly identical pictures to bring it all flooding back.

Why take pictures? To preserve a moment. To document an event. To record something important or amusing. To remember. To admire. To create beauty or art. Do you take them for yourself, or for the ones who come after so that they remember, admire and see the art or the moment that the photographer valued.

Turn the page and here is a set of photos from downtown Havertown, and from Eagle Township. My brother in front of the Democratic headquarters, this must be from LBJ's presidential run because my father volunteered for that campaign. Two more photos show god knows what corner of west suburban Philadelphia. These two barely inspire memory, were certainly not framed with any idea of composition or beauty, and have very few identifying markers in them to help the uninformed understand what they are.

And yet they were important enough for someone to place in this album. I pass them on here, though I don't know what it is I am helping the reader to recognize or understand.

My father supposed that he was great photographer. I can't remember my mother ever so much as holding a camera (this can't be-- there are pictures of me, my brother and my father in circumstances where the only possible photographer would have been my mother). He had a nice, but not a great camera-- for one thing it was a viewfinder not an SLR, and he had only one lens. No zoom, no wide. And the worst indictment: that these photographs, even the ones that are interesting for other reasons, are just not very good. They have no focal point, or understanding of scale or composition.

It goes back to the very first photo in the book, of my father confronting the photographer-- see me! I am important, and I know what I know, better than you ever will! And we all bought it. My father was the family photographer, therefore he was good at it. Yet it patently wasn't true-- he wasn't very good at it. But the force of his belief in this was so strong that we all took it as gospel.

It is a terrible thing to grow up and learn how fallible and weak your parents are.

There are so few shots indoors at 104 Ellis. The ones on this page are the only ones in the album. It makes me wonder if these must be in the collection of slides. The basement train set, ostensibly my brother's, was one of many hobbies that my father would decide he would be (or was) an expert in, and rather than just enjoying it we would all have to have a university degree in this. The photo studio was another such thing. Remarkably, it never occurred to either of my parents to garden; in fact I cannot remember a single backyard garden anywhere in my entire childhood. I don't think this was something that people did back then.

Like the photo studio, when the train set was up, everyone who came over would be paraded down to the basement so my father could hold forth (there is no other way to describe it) about model trains and train sets. I believe that these were actually fairly valuable trains, or that they have become so. They were "HO" scale-- a very small scale, and apparently quite unusual. I have one of the engines, but I believe we had at least two, possibly three, and of course several cars including a caboose. I wonder if my brother or my father has these. If my father has them, I suppose they will end up in the possession of his step-grandchildren along with many of the items that I associate with my childhood.

This is my home. A strange conceit-- I only lived here for five years, and in Philadelphia for barely 10 years. But this is where I "grew up." The house on Ellis Road still defines who I am. I know this house-- there were nine trees over 100 feet tall. We had to shovel the long driveway by hand. There was no sidewalk on our side of the street. The house behind us and catty-corner was home to a German shepherd dog who once attacked me when I was sitting in an old laundry basket and couldn't get up. We weren't allowed to cut through the yard of our neighbor Grace. (She was the original "hey, you kids, get off my lawn" curmudgeon. She lived there with her same-age, same-sex companion, whom I now realize was probably her partner. I wish I had been nicer to her, as that required some courage in the mid 60s.) Grace weeded her lawn with a tweezer. My mother loved the cardinal lamppost. I know so many tiny things about this house, inside and out, and about our neighbors the Blaufelds, and the Heimbeckers across the street and the Robertses two houses over.

But I remember it all only as I interacted with it. I didn't know that Grace was gay. I knew that the farther off neighbor Theodosia was scandalous, but I still don't really understand why. I knew that Mr. Heimbecker was to be avoided, but didn't realize until I was an adult that it was because he was drunk.

Perhaps this is home because this is where my family was happy and normal. In Urbana we were an unhappy family, unique and isolated, as unhappy families supposedly are.

Are we real without our memories? If the stories aren't preserved, did they happen?

The next set is only me-- moodily staring into a mirror, mugging on my 7th birthday, the aftermath of a tantrum, 4th grade Halloween and the inevitable school set. On the following page a backyard romp with the McCormick cousins, Sandy playing in the yard, the porch, the basement, the living room.

Still glued in place, we get back on the next page to Andy and Sandy, joined by our neighbor, also Andy (whose sister was also Sandy). A set of photos trying to recreate a famous toddler shot of my brother and me looking adorably into each others eyes. The pre-teen creation is not so adorable, as we kept laughing. The two Andys with me in the "portrait studio." Leaf jumping, a visit to Valley Forge, looking at the Telstar satellite, setting out on a Sunday outing with my dad, all dressed up.

What does a memory feel like? Is it a photograph or a dream? Is it a movie that I inhabit, or one that I watch? When I say I don't remember, am I simply misunderstanding memory? I remember Valley Forge. I can see in my mind's eye the soldiers' cabins, the Susquehana River, the redoute forts. I can place my child-self in these images. These are actual memories, or what I think a memory must be: snippets of sensation-view, sound, movement, emotion, sense. Perhaps it is best that I cannot post these photos, because then they become like my experience of memory-- I know these, but I cannot produce them. I can only know them.

When I say I do not remember, perhaps I only mean, I do not know, or even I am not there. I think that if you dropped me off at my house on Ellis Road, I could easily walk to Oakmont school or even to the junior high school, more than a mile away. I know how to do that. Does this mean I remember this or only that I know this? Is there a difference?

I always say that I have trouble bringing up an actual "memory," but I remember walking these routes. I could even tell you the name of the two streets to walk down-- Cleveland and Darby. I could point out Diane's house, and Andy's, and Jan's. I might actually be able to find my way to Paula's house on the way to school. Right now, thinking about it, I have "memories:" driving down Darby Road with the chains on the tires. I can hear the whirring sound. Diane stepping off the sidewalk into the snow to let a nun pass. Cutting through the backyard to Jan's house hoping for an invitation to sit in her wading pool. Scaring Jan's baby sister Beth with a bug. Dancing to 45s in Jan's bedroom. The first day of 7th grade, which was the first day I learned that I would have to meet new people and that they would not be universally nice.

So perhaps what "not remembering" means is that I do not bring up these recollections. I think that we use our children and grandchildren for this-- remember me, remember these experiences that I had, because they make me real.

Andy and Sandy

Nine pages into the album is the time during me.

I've set up the first page of my life with matched sets of my brother and me. One is a clearly deliberately set up by my parents to take the same shot of me and my brother, others were obviously taken on the same day in the same place and therefore make a matched set. As a second child, you never really think about this compare-and-match impulse of parents: this one is behaving thusly right now, what is the other one doing. Perhaps as the parent of siblings I've done this both to myself and to them.

Foolishly, I glued these into the album with glue stick. I cannot remove them without damage. In fact, this is the case with the next three sets of pictures, documenting my childhood. An interesting metaphor. I have glued my life into these pages-- you cannot remove me! Is this what I'm afraid of? Without the photos, without this evidence, I will be removed. But now, of course, I also cannot post them here. An entirely unknowable consequence. When I decided to redo the old album that these photos came out of I had no way of knowing I would be creating this journal. So my children will not be able to easily share me, they will have to hold me in their hands. They let go of me and move on, but the book anchors them in place.

I can't remember Andrew sucking his thumb, but turn the page and there he is. The page is a chronicle by age, largely of school portraits. Andrew as a newborn, a second grader, 3rd grader, 4th grader. A moody low light portrait, and a set of photos shot in the "portrait studio" that my father tormented everyone with when I was in about 4th grade.

He hung a blanket up in the basement and set up lights and a tripod. Everyone who came to our house got their picture taken in this studio. This is one of those things that I would not remember if I didn't have pictures of it, and in fact I don't "remember" it. I have no active archive of memories associated with this--in my brain it might as well not have happened. I do not remember sitting for a portrait, but there are picture of me as well in this setting. My whole life happened, and I do not remember it. What I remember from these pictures are the stories about the pictures, and not the events themselves.

From here, the album seems more organized and arranged with more care. I begin to wonder if Nora put together the previous pages. Perhaps they are disorganized and random because of the prism through which the arranger was looking. She knows these stories, and even the images but for her they are even more remote than for me-- simply unconnected images from a history she is part of but not intimate with.

There two pages are infant pictures of my brother Andrew. The first page is a famous set, a family legend: my brother's first taste of zwiebach. This is the first set of photos in the album with a clear narrative thread. It is also one of the few stories that I can connect back to my grandfather's Swedish heritage. Why else would a Greek woman and an Irishman even know about zweibach? The first shot is typically adorable-- wide eyed baby holds food. Food is good! yum! He attempts to get his mouth around it in the second shot, but it's hard and awkward and an odd shape. Third shot is the action pay off. Ptuuii!

On the facing page are Andrew and my cousin Jimmy McCormick, less than a year old, checking each other out in a crib. Jimmy was the scourge of our childhood. Mean and bullying, bigger than everyone. Jimmy joined the army.

Jimmy's dad, Uncle Jimmy (Col. McCormick) was my favorite example of the government triple dipper-- Army pension for his 20 years in uniform. Retired at 40 with a full Colonel's pension, got a government desk job, which he stayed in for his 20, retired at 62 with a second full government pension, and then started collecting social security. Your tax dollars at work.

In 1950 and 1951 my parents lived outside Aix en Provence as part of my father's graduate work. Strangely, I have never questioned why he did this grad work there. His Ph.D. thesis was about Moliere, so I suppose there must be a Moliere connection with Aix.

There are four pages of pictures now from Aix. There are pictures of the house they lived in, which Bill and I, with my father's help, found again years later. The house is a gentle pink with green shutters. When I saw it, the color was not a surprise to me, despite the fact that all the pictures from this time are in black and white. Amazingly, Aix had not grown out toward the house; the setting even in 1983, more than 30 years later, looked much like it looks in the photos. Other photos are of the people they knew--landlords and neighbors? colleagues? friends? The people who form you become peripheral and are forgotten until your descendants look at the pictures and wonder who they were. Do the children of their French hosts look at pictures of my parents and know only that they were the Americans who lived there after the war?

My father's life continues on the next page. His brother, his father, his sister, his house on 15th Street in Brooklyn. On the facing page a similar set about my mother: her father, her brother, maybe my grandmother's house on 18th Street? I remember 18th Street as being quite narrow and lined with parked cars on both sides, but this street seems quite wide and empty.

I can only sketch my grandfathers. I cannot draw a complete or accurate picture. Alexander was from a wealthy Athenian family; he emigrated to America in the early years of the century, and then went back to Greece for a bride. I know even less about my father's father. I have official documents that show him with his Swedish name, Nels Nelson, but we have always known him as Norman. I named my daughter for him. He was a naval officer, but not a military one, working for the merchant marines. From what I can see in the photograph he was ridiculously handsome. My grandmother was his second wife and ended up rearing the 2 children of his first marriage when he died young. His children seem to have taken after their cute Irish mother rather than their chisel-jawed father.

I have snapshot memories of the apartment on 15th Street. The entry door at the back of a dark common hallway. I recall her apartment as being dark as well, and that there was a window between the (dark) dining room and the kitchen. I also remember sitting on her nearly-nonexistent lap (because she was so overweight) in a front room that looked out on the street, which is inconsistent with my memory of an apartment at the back of the building. I remember her buttering bread with slabs of butter and thinking "this is why she's so fat" with the cruel honesty of children.

My parents grew up on these two streets in the Prospect Park area of Brooklyn--15th Street and 18th Street, just a couple of blocks from each other. They met during the war I believe at Coney Island. They had never encountered each other growing up. My mother attended the public schools and my father the Catholic schools. It's like marrying your hometown sweetheart from another dimension. When my son visited Brooklyn I asked my father for directions to this house. He sent what he thought was the address, but his comment was that it was more than 60 years and he was not really sure. The house on 15th Street, to me, is central to the mythology of my childhood. My parents' Brooklyn immigrant roots are the foundation of my personal narrative. That my father should not have retained this centrality of our family story was shocking to me. How much of the story have I made up in compensation for not having contact with its key figures-- my dead mother and my inaccessible father?

The brothers are on these pages too. The left page shows my father's younger brother Tristram, who died of leukemia in his 20s. On the facing page George Samios in his army uniform. The caption reads, "I don't know which war. George was in Germany in WW2 and then in Korea." I have an ivory-handled dagger with a silver swastika on it which he supposedly took off a dead German officer. There's a family story that George was nearly drafted into the Greek army as well, because he was in Greece on a Greek passport in 1967 when they overthrew the king. Don't know if it's true.

The other family story is that Alexander married an ethnic Greek girl from Turkey, whose family had been driven from their home in anti-Christian pogroms (I don't know when). This apparently got him disinherited. He came back to America with his pregnant wife and worked for the Ormolu company as a clockmaker. After his death my grandmother got rid of all the Ormolu clocks that they owned, as "junk." They were probably worth several thousand dollars.

He and my mother were close; I think my grandmother must have resented this, because he died while my parents were living in France in 1950 and she did not tell my mother. My mother came home to learn that he had been dead for months.

It's when one is trying to remember that one realizes, even with visual clues like photographs, how little we pay attention. I doubt as a child I ever squeezed my eyes shut and said "I must remember this." I know that there are things I want to remember that will simply fade. Perhaps as I age the early memories will come back and the photos will trigger them as I want them to.

Turn the page and see my father at war. Robert served in an army supply unit in the war; he dropped out of high school to join. In 1943, his senior year of high school, he got very ill and was sent to a sanitorium to recover. I don't know what the illness was, but because of this he was not enrolled in school and therefore was in danger of being drafted. To avoid this, which would certainly have put him in the infantry, he joined the army air corps to train as a pilot (he said he chose it because their jackets were so cool). A complex series of SNAFUs placed him in this supply unit instead; he thinks it probably saved his life, as late in the war air corps casualties were extremely high.

I heard the whole story only once. My father never spoke about the war. I can count on one hand the number of times he spoke of it in my presence, and cannot recall the details of any story, because I simply never heard any war story more than once. I know he saw little if any combat, but he did encounter Japanese troups at least once face to face.

This handful of snapshots is the only record I have, either physical or ephemeral, of this period in his life. These pictures are so exactly him-- in every one of them he draws attention to himself through pose or attitude or location in the picture. This is what my father did, although to be fair it was mostly that attention had a way of focusing in on him. He is one of those people you simply must pay attention to.

I turn the page and continue my journey through my mother's life. Strangely, the disconnect in time continues, despite the fact that I sorted and arranged these photos. They were not placed in this album in random order.

On the next page are just two photographs-- another shot of the polo coat, south of France 1951, and a picture that I took with my pocket camera on a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo with my father's best friend Gerald Weales. I've estimated the date as 1966. I don't remember this trip to the zoo at all, but there are lots and lots of photographs of it, or rather, the same photograph over and over, of Gerald and my mother.

Gerald was a fixture in our house. I probably saw Gerald more than any other of my parent's friends, I suppose he and my father must have gone to Columbia together, as Gerald was an English professor, not in the French deparment. Strange to think of my father as having a lifelong college friend. Just like a real person.

Gerald's girlfriend (what in inadequate term) was named Nora. She was not his wife, and I was well into adulthood before it occurred to me that they lived together at a time when this was just not done. After my daughter Nora was born, Gerald's Nora sent a stuffed mouse, also named Nora, that had been given to her as an infant to be passed on to another Nora, preferrably not related by blood. I hope that my Nora will honor this tradition and treat it with respect.

Under the slip sheet, on the facing page we hop around again-- my mother's high school graduation photo and a shot of her in the yard at Revere Road, dressed for my Uncle Lindy's wedding. I know that my mother made the red dress she is wearing, I think I have a memory of that. I remember Lindy's wedding very distinctly, in detail rather than narrative. The church, a big dark stone ediface on a slight rise. All the aunts--10 of them in 2 generations--in pastel lace and pillbox hats or church veils. Lindy was older when he got married and I remember this being something of a family scandal, but now I realize he was probably only 37. His wife was older, and must have been married before, or else was unusually honest for a bride in 1964, because I remember that she wore a light blue cocktail dress rather than a wedding gown. I can see that dress very clearly in my mind's eye: a New Look silhouette with a lace overlay and a simple catholic lace cap rather than a veil.

I also had to wear a lace cap to go into church, despite this being post-Vatican II. I know now that Lindy's wife (I don't know if I ever knew her name, or ever saw her again after this wedding) was a renegade Catholic who kept attending Latin mass and following pre-Vatican II traditions right up to her death 20 years later.

Lindy was the family scandal just in general-- certainly alcoholic and I recall as a child learning not to sit in Lindy's lap, which he usually insisted upon. Lindy was the baby of the family and was actually named Frederick. He was called Lindy because he was born the year Lindberg landed in France. I have no pictures of Lindy.

The rest of this page switches to my father. Again, like all my childhood memories, the album is disjointed and disorganized, flipping through time and alighting on random individuals. Here is my father as a baby-faced young man in a suit, standing in a Japanese garden, and more casually in t-shirt, caught off guard by the camera and looking rather goofily guilty. He also looks like my son in this photo, a resemblance I have not really noted since Julian was a baby.

On the facing page, under the slip sheet, my mother is an infant. A year old eating a slice of watermelon, slightly younger standing in her crib and grinning at the camera. I know that there are pictures of the intervening years, but here on this page her life shoots forward, undocumented, and there she is on a bridge in the south of France after the war, wearing a camel hair polo coat that I feel sure I recall. This can't be; surely not even my frugal mother wore the same winter coat for twenty years, and there are no pictures of it after the war.

After my mother died, I bought just two expensive items with the money she left: a guitar, and a camel hair polo coat.

The other pictures on the page seem unrelated. My father in buzz cut and mustache, holding a cigarette. My mother running into the ocean (at Coney Island? There's no way to know). My mother again, years and years later, playing gently with our new kitten, Eric, perhaps on the day he came home with us.

This is how I recall my parents and my childhood-- as a series of unrelated stills, without chronology, narrative or caption.

It starts with the time before me. The page is labeled: "1949? Maybe Central Park"

A picture of a smiling young woman, left profile, seated on a park bench by a concrete pond. Next to it is a photo of a young man in shirtsleeves, cigarette dangling, confronting the camera head-on and squinting, sitting on the same park bench. The poses are identical, except the young woman looks away from the camera and the young man takes it on.

They are my parents. If it is 1949, my mother is 26 and my father is 23. The poses say a lot about them-- both relaxed and confident, but my mother wore her confidence like a pair of comfortable shoes, while my father demanded head on that you acknowledge his.