A touching, sometimes hilarious memoir of the 1950s when southern propriety was giving way to bourbon, Elvis, and sexual discovery. With rueful wit the author artfully renders a youth of hunting and fishing giving way to brawls, debutante parties, and literary exploration. The story is told against a wistful background of the poignant portrayal of a father struck by Alzheimer's.

(Originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin)

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Prologue:

ABSENCES

LATE AUTUMN — monsoon season. Ragged skies rolling out of Arkansas would have dropped tornadoes on a city less blessed than Memphis. I arrived in a little jet, owned by an east Tennessee bank, filled to capacity with successful dealers in estates, real and fabricated; one of these men would soon be indicted and sent to prison, but for the moment they were merrily chasing deals around the South, and I was to write about them for the Washington Post, my employer at the time.

This part of America was so different from what I had left behind as to seem irrelevant. That the Deep South is another world has often been observed, but the fact that it remained so struck me, once again, as remarkable. I had grown up in Memphis and had been going back for more than twenty years. Much had happened since I had left for good, in the sixties, and yet Memphis retained its palpable otherness. But some of the anomalies of time and place persisted in the mind of the displaced adult I had become, one who was married, solvent, and recognizable by profession.

My wife and children had remained in Washington this time, as they often did when I returned "home," an event with a familiar pattern: anticipation fractured by present reality and the unfulfilled promises of childhood, vague but tenacious, and the observation that home has not been sufficiently chastened by one's absence. Returning, I had always felt the poignancy of time passing, a comfortable melancholy full of the evidence of my own lengthening existence, but I had reached the point where the self-congratulation I felt at surviving would be replaced by an entirely different emotion.

My father waited on the street where the bankers' limousine left me, sitting at the wheel of his small car. I knew immediately that something was wrong. The face beneath the snap-brim hat seemed diminished, the eyes full of misgiving. The neighborhood should have been familiar territory but he  regarded it as alien.

"Hello, sonny boy," he said when I got in.

I put my arm around his shoulders and gave him an awkward kiss on the cheek, not common practice among males in my family — men don't kiss each other — but in this sad, befuddled moment I felt bound to console him. In truth, I had known for years that my father was slowly losing his mind, had seen the signs spread across the sheets of graph paper on which he, an engineer, occasionally wrote to me in a hand so crabbed that the letters grew increasingly brief, and finally ceased. I had accepted this and his hesitancy on the telephone, his difficulty with numbers — for years he had calculated how much refrigerated air Memphis's buildings need to remain habitable — and his slight stammer as the mental perambulations of an independent old man who lived within the bounds of propriety and had known some disappointment and hardship. I should have put off the concerns of my own life and thought more about these little routine absences that would lead inexorably to a larger one.

Dad wore the shoes he always wore for yard work, of rough suede darkened by contact with dead leaves that in the fall became his preoccupation, moved from beneath the canopy of trees to the curb. I could — still can — see the slightly stooped figure in windbreaker and khakis, the brisk strokes, the pauses to reckon the size and grudging direction of his load. Raking was one metaphor for Dad's life and not necessarily an unhappy one, since he enjoyed work and the supply of leaves was inexhaustible.

He drove without talking, concentrating on the task at hand, running a stop sign, turning a corner without regard for the oblique stream of oncoming traffic or horn blasts, passing a pedestrian who wisely decided not to challenge our passage because otherwise he would have been killed, not by the violence of the initial blow but by the car's dogged persistence in running him over. Dad, it seemed, did not intend to stop until he had returned to the shelter of the car port, attached to a house that had been sleek and modern in the sixties, when he and my mother bought it, set back among the mass of trees and shrubs that precipitate Memphis's botanical exuberance every spring. That November, the house seemed enfolded in drenched, near-tropical profusion.

My mother met us at the door in bathrobe and slippers — the uniform, since looking after my father had become a constant endeavor. Together we got him out of his hat and raincoat and seated on the low couch in the living room, where he watched the evening news on television without interest. When Mom and I were alone, I said angrily, "He shouldn't be driving," and she said, "It's all he's got left."

My father's life was as different from mine as were our aspirations and our selves, but the past was mostly a common one. From that point on it required a kind of dead reckoning. I and the rest of my family were for the foreseeable future caught up in Dad's misfortune, but eventually I would realize that the questions I had meant to ask him wouldn't be answered, that the stories and rumors I had absorbed as a child, scoffed at as an adolescent, and wanted more of as an adult were in a sense lost. In many instances I would never know where the actual left off and the amends began, and by that time it would matter more than I had thought possible.

Most of what I knew of my family came directly from them, and from letters and photographs that act as much as light to the inner eye as absolute delineators of what people looked like and did. I would decide, years later, to fill in a bit — a version of the examined life. Much of this life belonged to others but remained tangentially mine. Even so, such a venture could easily founder, for there are reasons for what went before, freighted with every protective interpretation between past and present.

I know now that reality must be, at least in part, imaginary.

Like any fond or desperate family involvement, this one had no frontiers; the more I looked, the more I wondered. About perceptions, theirs and mine. About what they had chosen to tell me, and each other, and what we all chose to forget....

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