him and smother my instinct to keep him alive.
#
In the end, he lived on in scrapbooks. Six of them. Brittle, faded pages bound with
string. Out of these fragments, over the years, I created his narrative. And my narrative.
I discover the scrapbooks when I’m eight, wedged in a cabinet beneath the bookshelf.
They are my father’s life, created by hismother. The books stop when he marries my mother. From boyhood to newspaperman, his
mother kept the evidence of a life lived. First-grade report card. Cub Scout awards.
Elementary-school class photos. Ticket stubs for football games (the scores noted
on them). Birthday cards. Mother’s Day cards he made for her. High school prom photographs.
The first stories he wrote for the Tribune . Stories about him from the Omaha-World Herald —such as the one from 1947 detailing how, as a boy of twelve, he delivered an award-winning
essay (“What New Horizons I See”) at the dedication of a Reclamation Bureau dam in
the Republican Valley. There is a photograph of him and his mother, the caption saying,
“Bob, a seventh-grader, says he hopes to be a newspaperman.”
I live in fear my mother will catch me. I have this idea that she will take my reading
of his scraps as a sign of disloyalty. I go to him in secret and in silence, and in
my time with him I try to make him whole again. Reconstruct him. The books are my
talismans, my way to conjure him. Maybe I could not raise him from the dead. But with
these scrapbooks, I could bring him to life.
#
What will be left of us when we are gone? My father? Bits of faded newsprint amid
sheaves of crumbling construction paper. Serrated-edged black-and-white photographs
shot by Kodak Brownies. A boy of six, on his back porch, hugging his black dog, squinting
into the great American Dust Bowl sun of 1939. A book of scraps. Brittle pages. It
was left to me to reassemble him. I learned to make sense of the remnants, to find
meaning in the missing pieces. A man of paper.
The more I touch it, the more it crumbles.
# # #
That fall, she signs up for figure-skating classes at the park district field house.
I ask why.
My mother tells me that if she could live her life over, she’d want to come back as
an Olympic figure skater. She says, “I just think it would be the best life ever.”
All through that fall she learns to skate.
“I’m learning the ice,” she tells me one morning. “Getting familiar with it. That’s
what we call it.”
I come home from school and she’s in her solitaire chair. But there are no cards on
the table. She’s just sitting there, her right arm before her, motionless and bright
white.
“I fell.”
She tells me she made a bad turn. Something in the ice. One of those things, she says.
“I tried to catch myself.”
She moves her arm. There’s a slight grinding sound, plaster on wood.
I ask her if I can sign it. She tells me no. She wants to keep the break clean.
#
Sometime after that, I’m reading the paper and I say to her, “What’s a mia?”
“MIA,” she says. “Missing in action. It’s a soldier who is not dead but not found.”
“So where are they?”
“Missing.”
“Are they ever coming home?”
“No. But no one will tell the family the truth. This way, the family can believe they
are still out there, somewhere.”
# # #
It’s Christmas that year. We’re at the mall. My mother goes her own way. My brother
and I head for the toy department. On the way there, I see a woman, dark-haired, in
front of a glass case. In it, she has metal bracelets. I pause.
“C’mon,” my brother says, and he keeps going.
The woman says, “Would you like one?” and hands a bracelet to me. A man’s name is
engraved on it.
“That’s the name of a man,” she says. “He might have a boy at home, just like you.”
She tells me that the bracelets are for men who are missing in Vietnam.
“Wouldn’t you like to keep a man’s
#
In the end, he lived on in scrapbooks. Six of them. Brittle, faded pages bound with
string. Out of these fragments, over the years, I created his narrative. And my narrative.
I discover the scrapbooks when I’m eight, wedged in a cabinet beneath the bookshelf.
They are my father’s life, created by hismother. The books stop when he marries my mother. From boyhood to newspaperman, his
mother kept the evidence of a life lived. First-grade report card. Cub Scout awards.
Elementary-school class photos. Ticket stubs for football games (the scores noted
on them). Birthday cards. Mother’s Day cards he made for her. High school prom photographs.
The first stories he wrote for the Tribune . Stories about him from the Omaha-World Herald —such as the one from 1947 detailing how, as a boy of twelve, he delivered an award-winning
essay (“What New Horizons I See”) at the dedication of a Reclamation Bureau dam in
the Republican Valley. There is a photograph of him and his mother, the caption saying,
“Bob, a seventh-grader, says he hopes to be a newspaperman.”
I live in fear my mother will catch me. I have this idea that she will take my reading
of his scraps as a sign of disloyalty. I go to him in secret and in silence, and in
my time with him I try to make him whole again. Reconstruct him. The books are my
talismans, my way to conjure him. Maybe I could not raise him from the dead. But with
these scrapbooks, I could bring him to life.
#
What will be left of us when we are gone? My father? Bits of faded newsprint amid
sheaves of crumbling construction paper. Serrated-edged black-and-white photographs
shot by Kodak Brownies. A boy of six, on his back porch, hugging his black dog, squinting
into the great American Dust Bowl sun of 1939. A book of scraps. Brittle pages. It
was left to me to reassemble him. I learned to make sense of the remnants, to find
meaning in the missing pieces. A man of paper.
The more I touch it, the more it crumbles.
# # #
That fall, she signs up for figure-skating classes at the park district field house.
I ask why.
My mother tells me that if she could live her life over, she’d want to come back as
an Olympic figure skater. She says, “I just think it would be the best life ever.”
All through that fall she learns to skate.
“I’m learning the ice,” she tells me one morning. “Getting familiar with it. That’s
what we call it.”
I come home from school and she’s in her solitaire chair. But there are no cards on
the table. She’s just sitting there, her right arm before her, motionless and bright
white.
“I fell.”
She tells me she made a bad turn. Something in the ice. One of those things, she says.
“I tried to catch myself.”
She moves her arm. There’s a slight grinding sound, plaster on wood.
I ask her if I can sign it. She tells me no. She wants to keep the break clean.
#
Sometime after that, I’m reading the paper and I say to her, “What’s a mia?”
“MIA,” she says. “Missing in action. It’s a soldier who is not dead but not found.”
“So where are they?”
“Missing.”
“Are they ever coming home?”
“No. But no one will tell the family the truth. This way, the family can believe they
are still out there, somewhere.”
# # #
It’s Christmas that year. We’re at the mall. My mother goes her own way. My brother
and I head for the toy department. On the way there, I see a woman, dark-haired, in
front of a glass case. In it, she has metal bracelets. I pause.
“C’mon,” my brother says, and he keeps going.
The woman says, “Would you like one?” and hands a bracelet to me. A man’s name is
engraved on it.
“That’s the name of a man,” she says. “He might have a boy at home, just like you.”
She tells me that the bracelets are for men who are missing in Vietnam.
“Wouldn’t you like to keep a man’s
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