Turn the page and visit the barber shop and the grocery store. What were we recording? A trip to the supermarket? I can't imagine why this was significant enough to take a picture, and somewhat suspect that this again is my father's pretension, a suburban Walker Evans talking gritty photos of the banality that was a housewife's life in 1965.

I know that my father would have been the grocery store and the barber shop photographer, because my mother was the only suburban housewife in the history of America who could not drive. My father always went to the grocery store with us. It was accepted wisdom that "Olga can't learn to drive."

This is one of the things that I want to know about my mother, that I cannot know. My father will change the history, or give me the public version, and I already know that. Why didn't my mother drive? It made her life difficult and dependent, but it also made her rebellious and unique. In fact, my parents, both of them, were rebellious and unique. Their wholesale adoption of the post-War suburban revolution was always a puzzling disconnect. They were people who should have lived in the city, and sent their kids to the black school, with the artist mother and the playwright father. I didn't really think about this growing up; we were different enough from our neighbors that this camouflaged somewhat how truly different we should have been. We were non-religious, and mixed ethnically; my father had a liberal's job (university professor) and politics.

As a child I didn't know that other people like us-- politically, sociologically and educationally liberal-- did not live like us. They lived in Europe for part of the year, or for several years at a time. The mothers worked, or made art, or marched with Martin Luther King. But my parents, with the same background, attitudes, and potential, bought the whole post-War suburban package.

Julian remarked when we were clearing out May's shop that this was a part of his life that his friends could never relate to-- the immigrant grandparents with the neighborhood-based working class existence. This seems to me like the same thing. There is a part of my life that makes no sense from the outside: why were these urban rebels trying to live like Ozzie and Harriet? You have to live it to relate to it.