Thank you, my dear, for the irises and 
for remembering.  If we weren’t all in 
thrall to decimal system I’d have 
forgotten myself, and maybe just as well.  

Threescore and ten’s a term with biblical 
authority. We forget the psalmist 
didn’t end there.  In case anyone should 
take pride in a reprieve, there’s this codicil: 
if…they be fourscore years, yet is their strength 
labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut 
off, and we fly away.  I can’t think of 
anyone my age I’d call strong.  Sorrow, 
sure.  But labor?  They’re all retired now, 
grousing about the gumment, the grandkids, 
or into a fresh childhood of their own.  
Do you think I’m becoming childish too?  
Well maybe, just without the innocence.  

All week I’ve been thinking about my 
parents, that I’ve lived longer than either
of them but how they’ll always be older.  
Even in an afterlife where precedence 
doesn’t count, I couldn’t sit with them as 
an equal.  Even if we lounged around 
playing bridge and watching Fifties re-runs, 
I can’t see myself claiming deeper wisdom.
Maybe this hard-and-fast seniority
is what’s behind ancestor worship.  
The father I adored and teased and 
rebelled against, the mother I relied 
on and neglected, this couple who 
set me life’s first problems and whom I loved 
irregularly, are forever fixed 
just like the snapshots in that album you 
pored over last week.  With Mr. P., it’s 
different.  We were used to arguing, 
agreeing, sharing.  We slept hip to hip, 
compeers, familiar with each other’s smells 
and tics, equals to the degree men and 
women can be, together though not alike.  
Podolski was laconic, a tightwad 
with words, while I’m garrulous to a fault. 

Your parents are still alive, dear, so changing, 
as are you.  Once you depended on them;
someday you may be their prop.  You’ll make a 
stout one.  I lean on you, you know, on your 
willingness to listen to maundering 
monologues like this, my self-indulgences.  
How old women talk!  If I thanked you as 
much as you deserve, I’d bore you even more.  

Apropos that album that so amused 
you, it tickled me that it tickled you.  
Someday soon I’ll be frozen in a square 
like that graduation photo for which  
I refused to smile or the wedding 
portrait with the forced smile and baroque hair.  
You must have noticed the way photographs 
displace the memories we tell ourselves 
they preserve. We remember what’s fixed and final.  
Death is as irremediable as that,
so we read backwards from the last chapter. 
  
Worse than my mother’s massive stroke in the 
Winn-Dixie parking lot is what I’ve never
told you about my father.  He was with me 
last night, you know.  Yes, the dead can come alive, 
pay visits—not in seances but in 
dreams.  I don’t think they’re waiting beyond some 
realm of fire but curled up in the limbic system. 
 
I’m twice the age of my father when he 
took out his Colt and weighed it in his hand.  
Last night I dreamed the two of us were in 
Delehanty’s Bar on Stenton Avenue.  
The place burned down decades ago.  I can’t 
recall ever going inside so it was how 
I imagined it—dimly lit, a sanctuary 
for weary men and couples on the town.  
It was a slow night.  Workmen in muddy 
pants and heavy boots slouched on the stools,  
griping about the Dodgers moving west.  
The barman cleaned glasses and let them 
talk, nodding when they ordered one more round.  
By the front window, a thirtyish couple 
sipped whiskey sours and sniped at each other.  
Father and I sat at the back, next to an   
unplugged Seeburg where it was shadowy 
and quiet.  An eighty-year-old woman 
across the table from a forty-year-old 
man—anyone would take us for mother and 
son.  I told him as gently as I could 
that the note he left wasn’t good enough.  
He seemed peeved.  He’d typed it out.  To Whom It 
May Concern it started, followed by a
list of assets and liabilities,  
then a perfunctory farewell.  Even
his name was typed.  I said I wanted a 
better explanation.  Was it money?  
Angst? An insufferable diagnosis?  
Despair?  Unhappiness with Mother or with
me?  Were we the cause or didn’t we count 
at all?  Was it just one desperate drunken 
impulse?  He shook his head the way a coach 
does when the batter’s let him down.  Even 
at my age, three decades after the Change, 
two after losing Podolski, that hurt.  
It was useless pretending that, being
now his senior, a widow and old crone, 
I could understand or help.  I’m still his child.  

My dear, nobody really knows about 
dreams, where they come from or why. I wanted 
to console him, lend comfort, solace, 
to say something motherly and wise.  
But what I absurdly wished for, what
I really yearned to do, was change his mind.