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.