A Story About Time

1.

At the Roxy, an old movie house in Philadelphia, Anne turned to me, her mouth close to my ear, and said Does this remind you of John? And it did. But I didn't say that, I just nodded and watched the rest of the film.

2.

Of course, calling him John was a bit of a stretch. He was her father. Anne liked to switch things to see how I'd react.

3.

When he was a child, he'd sing in Latin to his doctor father. He memorized medical terms and sang them: encephalitis, spina bifida. This was hard to explain when relatives came to visit.

4.

He showed me once, how to plant trees so that their growth would mimic a forest. He taught me to play Scott Joplin on the piano, using only three fingers on each hand.

5.

His most important moment: his father moves the family to Tucson. They live in a house at the edge of the desert. He climbs into the low hills and watches the sky, sometimes for days. A school official calls and says Your boy should be in school. He is eleven, has read War and Peace, and can identify rare desert plants. School makes him backwards.

6.

Pennsylvania, 1964. A woman named Margaret sees him in the German House. This is Anne's mother. Her first recollection: John sitting on a blue couch, eating yogurt. Her second memory: him playing Scott Joplin with six fingers. He teaches her. This is important he says. If you don't learn, what happens when you lose your fingers in a farm accident? She starts to laugh, but he is serious.

7.

Even then, Margaret tells me later, he was carrying a shotgun in the trunk of his car. She asked him what it was for and he paused, then shut the trunk.

8.

Last June, he drove all the way to the desert and stepped out of the car. He told Anne about how when it rains in the desert, it floods turning the desert into a landscape of flowers. He broke the bud off The prickly pear, removed the spikes, and fed it to her.

9.

He took us in his car to the hills outside Manchester to show me where he'd planted trees twenty years earlier: they were the beginnings of a forest. Driving home he won't talk. I watch the sky turn from orange to blue to black.

10.

His suicide. In the will, Anne gets the hills outside Manchester with his almost forest. Margaret finds, cleaning out his study, that he was in the midst of five projects. The largest, an illustrated history of the desert, is called A Story About Time.