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.