"I've heard of getting an early start on Christmas, but this is ridiculous," I heard Lenny say.

"Hell, Labor Day was last weekend. Do you think he just put it up, or hasn't taken it down?" That was Gus.

"Too lazy to take it down. Look at the dust on it, and the bulbs on the floor," Lenny said. I left the kitchen and walked down into the den.

Lenny and Gus took a credit card number as soon as they arrived on my property. They made sure I understood they would check the lines to the box, but since I hadn't purchased the insurance on the lines--the insurance only cost a buck a month they reminded me--if the problem existed on my side, the charges for the repairs would begin immediately. After fixing the lines, they came inside to make sure I had a dial tone. Unseasonably warm and humid, even for September, the daytime heat gave no hint of the cooler nights we were having. Gus had crawled up on a copperhead while under my house. I heard his shouts all the way out to the horse barn.

"That tree was put up by me and my two sons last year," I said, "My youngest son has leukemia. He helped me decorate it."

Lenny and Gus said nothing. The moment of silence was long, and I let it hang a bit longer than I should have.

"The tree stays right there," I said.

Gus reached his big hand up and touched the scarlet ribbon that circled the tree. He had a well-trimmed beard and a friendly look and smile that reminded me of Tim Allen's partner on Tool Time. This warmth hadn't been present earlier. "We found your problem. Do you have any dogs?" he asked. Gus knew I had dogs. My Walkers chased their truck all the way up the driveway.

"Yeah, I got some coon hounds. The horses get after them and chase them under the house."

"Yep, that's what happened," Lenny said. "That's where the lines separated from the box. But we got it reconnected." He rocked back and forth while he spoke, shifting his weight from his left leg to his right.

"And we stapled the phone lines to the bottom of the joists so it won't happen again." Gus stood calm and patient, still looking at the decorations on the tree.

"Well, I'll have the insurance next time. Never had problems with phone lines before. I've always rented though, so I never worried about it. This is the first place I've owned." I walked past them as I spoke—a wide circle that took me to the tree--where I bent over and gathered the fallen bulbs from the floor. I found niches on the artificial branches and hung the silver, gold, and crimson ornaments again. They swayed slightly for just a few moments.

"Mr. Mitchell, there won't be any charge for this trip. The lines should have been hung better when they were first installed." Gus picked up his tools as he spoke, while Lenny glared at him.

"Thank you."

Gus and Lenny eased toward the door. Lenny stopped. Much younger, Lenny was a tall, heavy man, nearly twice the size of Gus, though Gus was in charge. The back pocket of Lenny's Levis revealed a perfectly round and pale circle from the can of Copenhagen exposed by the threadbare material. Lenny turned to me and spoke.

"It is a beautiful tree, Mr. Mitchell, and I would never take it down." Then they left. I heard an engine fire up outside and listened as Clara and Bandit chased the panel truck down the driveway.

I walked through the kitchen to the bar, poured a double shot of Jim Beam in a fruit jar full of ice and slipped back into the den. After I plopped down on the couch I took a long sip of whiskey. That damned tree. All the ribbon had settled into a mass of overlapping rows on the lowest branches. A dozen ornaments still lay on the floor. Many of them had shattered when they fell. Slivers of the silver tinsel that Clayton loved had fallen to the carpet.

But I didn't know what to do with it.

Built more like me, my oldest son, Clinton, resembles a stump, with shoulders nearly as broad as he is tall. Towering over his brother by a good foot, Clayton lost twenty-five pounds after he began the chemo and now wears a toboggan on his bald head to keep it warm. His naturally lean body looks frightfully thin and his face is swollen from the steroids he must take daily.

Clayton inherited his athletic ability from my family. He accepts that he will not play professional football like my brother, Verl, who signed with the Atlanta Falcons. His desire to play football his last year of high school motivates him now.

The summer before his diagnosis, Clayton built an obstacle course. He ran that obstacle course during the hottest part of the year, trying to develop more strength in his legs so he could stuff a basketball. By September, at thirteen years of age, he consistently slam-dunked the ball on a ten-foot goal. Then as the fall semester of high school started, he began to experience fatigue. Clayton's struggle to accomplish his goal became even more incredible when the doctors told us in October he had battled leukemia all that time.

The oldest of the three, Candice is a year older than Clinton, and six years older than Clayton. Clayton was more her baby than his mother's. After Arkansas Children's Hospital had made their diagnosis and summoned Clayton to Little Rock to share the news, Debbie, my ex-wife and the mother of my three children, had called Candice and left repeated messages for her to come to Children's Hospital, to Three Gold. When Candice got off the elevator, she read "Blood Cancer Unit" on the wall in front of her. She collapsed.

Back before my children had been introduced to the words divorce and leukemia, things were simple. Family events evolved around the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, Halloween Jack-o-lanterns and a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving--not around who would have the children for a certain holiday. The rituals we observed with each season never changed. My children received Easter baskets even after they were too old to hunt the eggs. We always took the children and let them pick out their baskets. Easter was never clouded with the shroud of secrecy generated by Santa's arrival.

At Halloween we would travel to the fruit stands out on 412 highway and search through hundreds of pumpkins scattered over a five-acre field till each child found the one they wanted. Then we'd take the pumpkins home and carve them on the steps of our front porch. Even after we left Fayetteville and no longer had the huge pumpkin patches to search, we still made an event out of going to each store and finding just the right pumpkin for each of the kids.

And every year--even after I divorced their mother—I took the children to find a live tree for Christmas.

Candice seemed to enjoy the excursions the most, even after she reached the age when family events were not supposed to be fun. She always made sure we bought the tree that Clayton chose. Clinton really didn't mind. He knew we couldn't buy three trees, like we did with the pumpkins or the Easter baskets, so he put up a half-hearted fight that he abandoned too easily to ever have been sincere.

Taking the tree down became as much a ritual as selecting and decorating it. We carefully wrapped the cheap ornaments like they were carved from gold and placed them in a box that we stored in the children's closet. They would eat the threaded popcorn and complain to their mother about how awful it was.

"Well, it's only six weeks old, and I didn't even butter or salt it," Debbie said, every year. Those kids knew that popcorn had rotted, but I believe they chewed on it just to complain to their mother about how bad it tasted.

The first time we went to a tree farm the children took over an hour to agree. They ran up and down the planted rows of trees looking for the biggest one they could find--thinking a big tree meant more presents. I used the saw the attendant gave us to harvest their selection, and I let the three of them drag it up to the sales stand where a man who worked there placed it in a shaker that shook the dead needles out from the branches. He wrapped the tree with a green net and helped us tie it down for the ride home.

During my college years at the University of Arkansas, we were always broke by Christmas. One year it had snowed just after Thanksgiving and the children were anxious to go select our tree. We didn't have the money to buy a live one, but we lived next to the Agricultural Experiment Station in Fayetteville, and they had a patch of Christmas trees on the far side of the school farm. I called Kerry Steelman, a friend of mine, and we went and cut two of the trees—one for each of us--in the middle of the night and dragged them back to my apartment, not realizing we had left a trail in the snow that led to my front door.

The children were disappointed the next morning. They wanted a bigger one. So I told them Santa Claus had delivered it during the night, and they needed to go sweep out his trail in the snow so no one could figure out where he had landed.

After that, I realized the importance the children placed on going with me to select the tree. The next year, I loaded our family in an old Volkswagen Baja and took them out into the White Rock Wilderness. We found a shaggy cedar tree, cut it down and tied it on the top of our rig. Then we took a logging road—we called them pig-trails--back down the side of the mountain, hoping the jolting, jouncing, jarring ride would knock the dead needles out of the branches of the cedar. When we got home, we strung popcorn on threads and decorated the tree.

As an undergraduate student with a family, we didn't go home as soon as school let out in December. My wife and I both worked part time jobs that never paid enough. We always made it to Paragould a day or two before Christmas, though, so the grandparents could buy presents for the kids. The year we got the cedar tree, the children absolutely refused to allow us to take it down before Christmas, so we left it up until we came back.

That old cedar tree dried out fast. A manager of a local tree farm told me we had cut it after the sap left the trunk. The day after Christmas of that year, we went back to Fayetteville. The tree stood in its corner, parched and dry. Debbie wanted to take it down then, and the children already had the boxes out for the ornaments. But I knew classes started in a couple weeks, and I'd receive my grant checks. So we waited on taking the tree down and pretended Christmas came late--with stockings and presents and ham and dressing. A match lit near that cedar tree would have burned the whole apartment complex down, so we passed on lighting any holiday candles. But as soon as we'd opened the presents, we took the tree down.

Every year thereafter we repeated the process of finding a tree. Then after I received my financial aid for the spring semester and celebrated Christmas again, we'd take it down.

Every year my wife pleaded with me to get an artificial tree.

"That tree is gonna kill every one of us," she said. "We'll be as toasty as your popcorn."

The kids laughed and reminded her that she always burnt the popcorn, and they pleaded for her to go with us to get the tree.

Every year she relented, until our divorce. My rituals continued with the children, only I had to pop the popcorn now, and the ornaments were stored in my barn.

Two months before Clayton's fifteenth birthday in March of 2000, after an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant, the oncologists told us Christmas that year would be the last we shared with Clayton.

The visits I made to Arkansas Children's Hospital always reminded me of the seriousness of the situation my son faced. Of course I knew cancer was a killer, but he looked strong and healthy as he ever had. That made it easy to just pretend nothing was wrong. Every time I walked through the halls of Three Gold, I walked past parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, embracing and weeping over the bad news they had received. As my son's bone marrow transplant and recovery had progressed, I felt guilty walking by the grieving family members. They were family to me also, because we all faced the same demon; we all sought the same miracle. We wanted the Angels of Three Gold to save and restore our children to us.

Nearly a year after his transplant, Clayton came down sick. This lasted for a couple of weeks, so his mother took him to Little Rock to have him checked out. At the time, I was building houses with my father. That day I had gone to work and made it till almost lunch. They call it "Mother's Intuition," but I knew something was wrong.

"Dad, I gotta go to Little Rock," I said.

"Go," he said.

"I hate to leave you with this. You know I'm not one to skip a day of work, but I feel it. I need to be there today."

"I know you don't need an excuse to take a day off. But here's the point. Anytime you do something that puts your children first, son, you'll never be wrong. Now go."

My father had lived by that motto. I had failed miserably.

Three hours later I walked onto the floor of Three Gold and bumped into my children's mother standing in the hall, crying. I never had a chance to say a word.

"I have some bad news I have to tell you."

I leaned back against the wall and bowed my head. I knew what it was; I knew why I felt I had to be there that day.

"He has relapsed again. They say they can't cure him, but they can prolong his life, and maybe science will catch up to him. The decision is his."

The last words she said brought my head upright.

"Is he gonna do it?" The chemo and radiation had ravaged his body. But as long as a hope for a long life had existed, the devastation was worth the payoff. But now, for the first time, I realized my son had a decision to make, that he had to make on his own.

"Oh, he says he's not about to give up."

People passed us in the hall, looking at us occasionally, mostly looking at the floor. One man lay his hand on my back as he passed and said, "Bless him, Jesus." I wanted to chase him down the hall and ask him to pray with me, to pray for me, to pray for my son. But he was on Three Gold. We all prayed for everyone on Three Gold. I wiped the water from my eyes, repeatedly. I didn't want anyone to know we had been given bad news. We had been one of the fortunate families. This wasn't gonna end like this.

"How are Candice and Clinton?"

"It was hard at first, but they're all in there playing Risk now. Do you wanna go in and see them?"

"Yes."

"I'll leave you alone with them for a while."

The room Clayton occupied had two chambers. A sliding glass door separated the outer and inner chambers. This was for sterilization purposes when the patients had low resistance due to their treatments. But Clayton hadn't been receiving treatments, so the door was open.

I walked into the outer chamber and began to wash my hands. They saw me. Clinton got up from where he knelt throwing dice at the foot of Clayton's bed, and Clayton rose from where he lay. Candice continued to sit on the far side of the room in the recliner her mother had slept in so many nights.

"Daddy, are you alright?" Clinton asked as he walked around the foot of the bed.

I tried to say something, but I couldn't. I acted like I was busy washing my hands, and then I made a sound like a frog that had been stepped on when I tried to say, "No."

Clayton had sat up now, with his feet on the floor. The IV lines ran in every direction, and Clinton continued to stand at the foot of the bed. Candice still hadn't moved.

I eased into the room with them. The weight of my divorce, the nights away from home, the many times I had broken their hearts, the promises I'd made and never kept, the days Clayton had battled for his life while I continued to work, every mistake I had made weighed on my soul as I entered that room. I thought of Christ hanging on the cross with the sin of the world on his shoulders.

I had taken for granted that I would have a lifetime to make it up to them. Now I realized those lives I'd taken for granted were fragile, like butterfly wings, and could crumble away before I ever realized it. I no longer had a lifetime with my son to atone for my mistakes. Kneeling at Clayton's feet, I wrapped my arms around his legs and lay my head in his lap. We reversed the roles we had both become so accustomed to. He ran his fingers through my hair and rubbed my back while I fought for composure. No one spoke.

Clayton hugged me tight. With his head on my shoulder and my body in his weak embrace, he said, "You're forgiven, Dad."

Those words erased years of my failures and gave me a future to correct my mistakes. I got up and began to talk with them. The nurses were taking them to Juanita's that night to eat. Would I come along? Of course I would. Candice walked out into the hall. Clayton went to the nurses' station to be unhooked from his IVs, and Clinton sat behind the door, waiting with me to go to a restaurant where we would all act like nothing had happened at all, and our night out was a family ritual--just like any other night.

I know rituals have a purpose. They are meant to give a familiarity to a season. Observing our rituals with my children after divorcing their mother had allowed us to continue as a family. But her absence was always felt. The activities of any holiday can be looked upon as events that bring families together and give us occasion to be thankful for what we have. But family rituals can also remind us of what we stand to lose.

Like we had so many times before, I wanted to cut a tree that Christmas; I wanted to share the experience one more time with my children and go back to a time when they believed the size of the tree determined how many presents they got, a time when they believed they could erase Santa's tracks in the snow so no one would know he'd come early to our house. But I didn't want the experience tainted by knowing it might be the last time we all went together. I didn't want a videotape of Clayton selecting his last Christmas tree. I didn't want to cut his last tree down; I didn't want to remove the last ornaments he'd hung.

That November I bought an artificial tree at Sears. I wondered why the children acted so funny when I told them about it. Candice even refused to come out and help us decorate it. But Clinton and Clayton helped me put it up. Clayton topped it off with an empty Budweiser can.

Clinton didn't like Clayton's idea for a star. "That's sacrilegious," he said.

"Budweiser's been Dad's Sunday morning communion for years. It has a religious significance," Clayton said as he grinned.

We started other traditions that year. Our family always took pictures, though we never videotaped any holiday gatherings. That Christmas seven video cameras recorded the event. I felt awkward about the situation. We all wanted to remember that time, to have it permanently recorded. I may not have videotaped any of our Christmas gatherings before, but I record them all now.

The oldest of six children, I have always remembered Christmas with my family as a bustling, crowded, and noisy time, with people taking pictures and opening presents and eating candy, nuts, and oranges from stockings. All grown now, my brothers and sisters have families of their own. But when we come together for the holidays, we still have personally monogrammed stockings stuffed with candy and fruit on Christmas morning--just like the grandkids. Some of our rituals never changed.

That year Christmas morning dawned on a melancholy house. All of my brothers and sisters came out, and both of my sons and my daughter showed up. Instead of the joyful laughs and loud conversation, hushed tones and covered mouths spoke of the genius of the artificial tree that would never be taken down.

With Christmas celebrated at my place, I had the responsibility for filling the stockings of all the others, and I just hadn't felt in the Christmas spirit. The grandkids received theirs. I couldn't disappoint them. But the rest of us did without, and no one complained. I knew Clayton felt it too, and he did his best to perform for all the cameras, trying to give each of his uncles and aunts a special cameo to remember him by. On his Uncle Bill's camera, he gave his Christmas list for next year. On his grandpa's camera, he said he wanted a colt for his sixteenth birthday in May.

"Shine your camera over here, Daddy." After I focused on him he said, "Graduation's only two years away, and you'd better start saving if you're gonna get me a four-wheel drive. But I'll settle for a Baja like you had if you can't afford a truck."

On his Aunt Donna's camera, he told her daughter, Casie, he wanted a date with her best friend.

"I know what you want. You'll just get her pregnant," Casie said.

Her mother stopped filming and looked at her. "He can't have any kids honey; he's had too much chemo. Watch your mouth." The room fell silent.

"See, she's safe with me," Clayton said. Then he laughed, and the moment was over.

"Don't you worry, brother," Clinton said. "You find you a good-lookin' wife, and I'll see to it you get to be a daddy." He got up and grabbed his brother and hugged him with that rough-house style I always used with them when they were little, when I grabbed them and tossed them into the air and caught them and turned them upside down, or snuck up behind them as they walked through the house in their underwear and grabbed the back of their shorts and shouted "Grundy," as I lifted them up off the floor, pulling their shorts up into the crack of their little behinds, and they scurried away, grinning and tugging at their Fruit-of-the-Looms.

I looked around the room for mother. Down the hall at the far end of the house, a closed door led to the master bedroom. I eased it open. Mom knelt by the side of the bed. Her Bible open in front of her, her kerchief crumpled in her clenched hand, she wept as she prayed.

I closed the door and left her alone.

The phone rang. I looked up from the statement Gus had left behind and saw my empty glass. I got up to answer the phone in the kitchen, grabbing the Beam bottle on my way past the counter.

"Dad, when you gonna turn that coon loose on the pups?" Clinton said.

"Is Clayton all right?" I'd forgotten his appointment that afternoon.

"Clayton's on his way back from the doctor's office. He wants to come out and see the horses."

"I still gotta go see Benny. I'll see ya when you get here."

I bought my hay from Benny Leuker. Benny gave me a discount for hauling off the coons he trapped in his cattle feed, and he had a big boar coon for me to pick up when I came by.

"We'll come out soon as he gets in," Clinton said.

I knew they'd take an hour or more to get there so I poured more whiskey into my glass and returned to the living room where I put one of the videotapes in from last Christmas. I watched our family and thought of how a cautious optimism at Easter had replaced the somber mood at Christmas. The doctors tried a new protocol for treating Clayton's type of leukemia, and the drugs had placed him in remission again, for the third time. Clayton had celebrated his sixteenth birthday that May with the hope for many more. I bought him a black stud colt for his present. But reality had battered our optimism. The doctors said they could prolong his life, but never cure him. The news of his remission did not mean he would live to be an old man. But five years of remission was considered cured. We counted every week as he continued to go and take his chemotherapy, and they continued to check his blood counts. Every week I listened for the phone to ring, expecting more bad news. The news--for a change--was all good.

As I listened to the tape, I stared at that tree. All summer long I had stared at that tree. That tree meant so much to me when we first put it up. As long as I had that tree, Clayton would be there. But that tree began to grow, it seemed, and took on a presence of its own, dominating the room, and the house, and every conversation I had with anyone who visited me. It no longer stood for an everlasting monument to my son. Its image grew darker as over the summer the dust accumulated on its branches and dulled the sparkling ornaments and silver tinsel that hung from its limbs. The tree reminded me of all my failures as a parent—of how many times I'd taken my children for granted. I began to feel ashamed for my lack of faith in Clayton. He knew why that tree was there--because he wasn't supposed to be, because I had more faith in my telephone lines than I did in my own son.

Clayton never said a word when he visited; he just looked at that tree and grinned. For me the experience was like being in the same room with my ex-wife and my girlfriend. They just weren't supposed to be together. Never once did my son entertain the thought that he could lose his battle. That tree stood as a constant reminder that I had, and somehow, I think Clayton competed with that tree, to see which would outlast the other.

But I didn't want to take it down. Afraid to lose his tree, afraid I could still lose him, I began to think of it as a jinx. Would he relapse two weeks after I threw it away? If I took his tree down, did it mean I was vain, or cocky, that I took for granted he would be there for all my holidays? I'd made that mistake before.

The tape ended and ejected as I finished my last sip of whiskey. I checked my pocket for the keys to my truck and left for Benny Leuker's.

Clinton and Clayton were waiting when I got back from Benny's. They opened the gate and I drove into the pasture. The horses saw and smelled the bale of Tifton Bermuda and chased the truck as I eased along. Every time he bounced in his cage in the back of the truck, the coon squalled. The hounds heard his cry and set up a ruckus, jumping up on the side of the truck and vying for position with the horses struggling to get at the bale of hay.

The boys took the live trap out of the back of the truck and set it out in the middle of the pasture. The hounds couldn't get to the coon, but it could get to them. Its long narrow snout and small, razor sharp claws could poke through the narrow bars of the cage. I pushed off the round bale of hay for the horses and listened to the melee. As the dogs pressed their noses against the side of the trap, the old coon took advantage of them, tearing at their noses and shredding their ears. The baying of the hounds became a medley of enraged yelps and frenzied howls of pain mixed with the squalls of the coon. Like yearling colts, the horses took off around the pasture, kicking and bucking and snorting. Then they raced back to the hay, nipping at each other's flanks as they vied for a position of dominance.

"Hurry up Dad, this bastard's eatin' the dogs alive," Clayton shouted.

I got out of the truck and came around to where the boys egged the hounds on. The pups jumped at the cage and howled like they had seen the devil himself. The coon squalled and growled and clawed at them through the bars of the trap. I hoped they knew instinctively to trail the animal once we'd set it free. Bandit and Clara had never seen a live coon before. Unlike me, I hoped they knew what to do with this new experience. Generations of Night Champions were bred into their pedigrees, though, and they would know what to do. This ritual would have to be repeated for years in order for them to become night champions themselves, but I envied those hounds. If everything in life could only be so clear.

"Turn him loose," Clayton shouted at me. He danced around the cage, first on one side with Bandit, then on the other with Clara, calling the hounds by name as he shouted encouragement to each. I hadn't seen him move so deliberately in a long time. He imitated the squall of the coon, pinching his own cheek and emitting a high-pitched squeal that unnerved the ring-tailed animal as it squalled back at him. Bandit lingered too long against the bars and the coon bit him, hanging its teeth in the end of Bandit's nose and tearing open a gash as the hound jerked away in an effort to get loose. Then the trapped animal spun in its cage and shredded one of Clara's ears, and she howled with pain and rage as she pulled away from those needle sharp teeth.

Clayton's mother would have donated my body to science if she knew he was in the pasture with me, about to set a coon loose on the dogs. I noticed the slight tremor in his hands—a side effect of the chemotherapy. I had nearly cried the first time I took him out to eat, and I watched food drop from his spoon as his hands trembled. He laughed at my concern, trying to set me at ease.

The doctors had good news that day--again. With the cancer still in remission, the chemo would stop for a while.

I managed to get in between the dogs and put my foot on the release lever of the trap. The coon snarled and reached through the cage to grab at my foot and bite at my toe. The fur on its back stood on end and made the animal look twice as big as he really was. I tried it again and made it, causing the front door of the trap to spring open.

For a moment, the coon continued to grab and snarl at the dogs through the cage walls. Then like a gray flash, he sprung from the trap. But instead of running off into the woods with the dogs trailing, he went up the nearest tree, with Clara and Bandit leaping at his tail.

"Who's gonna' shake him out?" I asked the boys.

"I am," said Clayton.

The tree--an elm nearly as tall as the house--stood a short distance form a massive red oak. Its leaves had turned yellow, and many had already fallen. The largest limb was no bigger round than my arm, the trunk no bigger than my leg. Dressed for the occasion, Clinton wore shorts and a sleeve-less shirt. He weighed 200 pounds, nearly fifty pounds less than me, but the branches of the elm wouldn't have held him.

So with Clinton and me giving him a boost, Clayton pulled himself up the tree. He didn't want the boost, but I don't think he'd have made it, even before he was sick. Then again, every time I think my children can't do something, they prove me wrong. Although tentative at first, he made good progress, disguising stops to catch his breath as opportunities to plot his path. The ascent might have been easier if he'd been dressed differently. Because of his increased sensitivity to sunlight, Clayton wore jeans and long sleeve shirts during the day

The coon climbed out onto a smaller branch. Bandit and Clara were Treeing Walkers, and their black, tan and white bodies stood in perfect form, with their front feet against the tree, their tails straight as rods and swaying like windmills behind them, their eyes skyward as they bawled at the coon above.

"Are ya'll ready?" Clayton shouted down to us. He'd gone as high as he could. His breath came in short quick gulps of air that made me think he had hyperventilated

"Give him hell," Clinton shouted.

"Get over on the other side of the tree in case he falls," I said to Clinton.

Clayton began to shake the tree and the coon looked like a trapeze artist. All four paws held onto a branch, and it refused to let go. Spread-eagled and clinging, the animal swayed back and forth as Clayton shook the tree. One paw shook loose and Clinton shouted, "Here he comes," but it managed to regain its grip. In spite of all of Clayton's efforts, he couldn't shake him loose, and my son was wearing out a lot faster than the coon.

"I got an idea," I said. I ran to the back of the truck and grabbed the braided lariat we used to catch the horses. I took it back over to the tree and threw it up to Clayton.

"Tie it around that biggest fork, up as high as you can reach it, then throw the other end down. And get your ass out of that tree," I said.

I got in my truck and backed it up. "Tie the rope to the bumper," I said to Clinton through the split glass in the back windshield.

Clinton fumbled for the other end of the rope. I couldn't see him for the tailgate, but I saw him bend over with the rope, and heard him slap the back end of the truck to signal he was through. Clayton was struggling to get down from the tree, so Clinton ran over to give him a hand.

I pulled the truck into gear and started to ease forward. The slender trunk of the tree gave easily and bent over as I increased the pressure on the rope. The dogs could see the coon now, as he moved back to get further up into the tree and away from the hounds. The tree was nearly perpendicular with the ground when I stopped, put the truck into park, and jumped out.

When I shut the truck door, the rope slipped off the ball on the bumper, and the tree slung back. The coon went air-born into the huge oak tree that stood next to the elm.

"I tied that knot as tight as I could get it. That rope must have broken," Clinton said.

"It's still in a knot, it just slipped off," Clayton said as he inspected the end of the rope. "I can't believe after all my hard work you just slung him over into another tree," he said between laughs.

"He may not have made it to the other tree," I said as I looked up in the branches of the oak. "He may have gone on off in the woods. See if the dogs can find him."

We tried to get the hounds to pick up the scent of the coon, but they couldn't. We made a wide circle around the tree, going out further and further, and joking and laughing.

"That coon didn't go high enough to land that far out," I said to Clayton, as he watched Clara pitching about and snuffling, searching desperately for the scent of the coon. Her ear left traces of red on the parched September grass.

"It's all downhill, Dad. He could've have rolled this far."

The hounds soon lost interest in an animal they could no longer see or smell, and for the first time since Clayton's initial diagnosis, I actually enjoyed his company and forgot about his sickness.

Scared of losing my son, I had expected the inevitable, the unthinkable. I tried so hard to prepare myself for what might happen, that I blinded myself to everything going on around me. There was no way to insulate myself from fate. No videotaped footage of a masqueraded Christmas celebration could ever replace the moments we shared that day. I had missed so much of their lives. I knew I would miss more, but I swore that day to become a bigger part of their tomorrows.

I also realized the significance of rituals, whether holiday rituals or simple day-to-day routines. Even when all has gone wrong, our rituals lend us a sense of normalcy—a feeling that tomorrow will come and all will be well. I had searched for a way to act around my son, a way to act in a profound manner that showed him I loved him and understood what he was enduring. The only way to do that was to act like nothing had ever changed.

With no cameras, no videotapes, we created memories so vivid I can close my eyes and still smell the horses, the hay. I can feel the course texture of the rope in my hands as I throw it up to my son. I can still see the tremor of his hand, the trembling bodies of the hounds as they reared up against the tree, the coon swaying in the wind as he grasped for the branches of the elm. I can hear Clara's jack hammer chop, the booming, bawl of Bandit. I can taste the salt from the sweat that trickled down my cheeks, the whiskey I sipped earlier in the day.

Clinton and Clayton sat beside me on the tailgate of my old Dodge pick-up, and we talked and watched the horses tear at the hay. The colt contested the other two horse's dominance over the food supply. A quick nip from Ahab, my big gelding, re-established the pecking order. The dogs continued to cast about for the scent of a coon already on its way back to Benny Leuker's barn. The sun had set on our fun, and the whippoorwills began to call from the surrounding woods. Their songs would soon be silenced till the warmth of spring brought another season of new life. The chill of early fall made us reach for jackets.

"I bet that coon thinks he's a duck," said Clinton as he shut the tailgate to my truck.

"He's flying south for the winter then." Clayton had wandered over to the hay and stood petting his colt. "He never touched down on this property," he said.

I backed the truck up against the tree. They both stood and watched, wondering what I was up to next.

"Which of you is going up the tree to shake that rope loose?" I said.

"Your turn, Daddy," Clayton said.

I hesitated for just a second before I jumped into the back of the truck and went up the tree to get the rope. The first branch I grabbed broke under my weight. I fell to the ground with the boys laughing at me like they'd laughed at the hounds.

'Let's go get the chain saw," I said. "We got too many trees on this place anyways."

I got in the cab of the truck to drive up to the barn, and I watched in the rearview mirror as my boys wrestled in the back.

I am four years old, awake past bedtime, and waiting for dad to come home. I hear his coal truck turn into the driveway and run to meet him at the door. After washing the soot from his face and hands and talking with my mother for a while, he changes clothes, grabs his keys, and signals "Come on son," but I have already pulled on my shoes and am on my way to the pickup.

Peanut's store is a mile up the road from our house. Inside, I take a Nehi peach pop from the cooler and a yellow bag of M&M's from the shelf then wonder through the empty aisles as dad and Peanut talk across the counter. When dad tries to pay Peanut pushes his money back to him. "I can't make a man pay on his birthday" he says with a wink.

On the way home dad drives slow, steering the truck around curves as I count circles of colored candies in my hand. The peach fizz fuses with the melting chocolate in my mouth as Randy Travis sings about digging up bones on the radio. The sky outside is pure deep indigo.

At seven, my family moved to a farm on the east side of the county. For generations my father's family has made a living from the land, so owning his own farm was the only dream my father ever imagined for his family.

The old farmhouse we moved into was different than the home I had always known, with its blue-gray shingles the years had worn hard and its pine floors needed varnish. The day we moved in I laid on my back and watched a granddaddy-long-legs prance along the edge of the front porch.

The openness of the farmland was most new to me. Rolling pastures and sloping hills surrounded each side of the house, a creek where deer drank ran through the meadow, and countless hidden coves nestled in the wilderness waiting to be explored.

When we first moved to the farm, dad and I would walk for hours through underbrush and briar thickets. My father's stories of Daniel Boone formed the mythology of that time. Daniel Boone, who built his homes deep in the woods, and he knew it was time to move when he could see a neighbors' chimney-smoke. In the remnants of those same woods, with no signs of neighbors for miles, it was easy to believe that my father and I were still living in Boone's time, seeing the hills of Kentucky for the first time before those places had names or maps.

By the end of our first year on the farm, my mother began to cry at night and my father began to stumble home late with whiskey on his breath. I began to worry more about my mother, and to loathe the days my father forced me to spend in tobacco fields, where the sweat bees stung and there was no shade from the beating sun. I began to create elaborate fantasies about the city, and to tell stories about how I would move there someday. My father would shake his head and say "You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the county out of the boy."

As I rush through the screen door, I hear my mother crying. She wipes her face and turns away, so I walk back outside and sit on the bank until my sister joins me later and wraps her arm around my shoulders.

We hear dad's truck turn into the driveway, and then we hear his door slam. I watched ants march across the dirt as my sister squeezes me harder. I stop crying.

We are sitting too far away to hear everything my parents yell at one another, but we know the routine well enough to imagine what we cannot hear. After dad storms out of the house and speeds away in his dusty Ford, my sister wipes her face and walks back to the house to console our mother. In the dirt I draw a picture of a man, woman, girl, and boy. Then, I wipe the ground with my sneaker and draw another picture, a boy alone on top of an empty world.

2. Hoeing
Dad stands at the far end of a freshly plowed field; rows of tobacco encase him in a grid. His hoe turns the rich soil around the plants as each green stem sways in his mercy. Nothing can distract him from his work. A moment's carelessness, a single swing of the hoe too far left or right, will cause the hoe to hit a bud and kill a plant. The survival of his crop hinges on his delicate attention to each chop.

Walking down a steep cliff Dad stops and says "For such a runt you sure make a lot of noise. You have to roll your foot. Put the pressure down with your heel and then roll."

I roll my foot in imitation but the sole lands against a twig that pops.

"And you have to avoid those. Now, come on. Try to be quiet."

It is Indian Summer and the Appalachia foliage is crimson and gold. Dad stops, holds his palm up, raises a finger to some trees in the distance. I squint but see nothing. My ears find the squirrel before my eyes, branches shifting without wind.

Dad cocks his rifle and hunches into it, his face wrinkling as he squints to focus. I hold my palms over my ears and clench my teeth as I watch the squirrel pause on a distant branch. Dad waits for the right moment before firing a shot that drops the squirrel through a cascade of leaves.

"Got the bastard," Dad exclaims as he lowers his rifle and I wait for my ears to quite ringing from the shot. We approached the squirrel which is squirming desperately on the ground, a bullet hole having ripped through the neck muscles, nearly separating its head from its limp gray body.

Dad points, says "Go ahead, finish it."

The gun barrel is cold under my armpit, but I pumped it and point it at the squirrel's head. My hands shake and I have trouble centering the bead.

"It's in pain, you have to finish it."

I focus and squeeze the trigger, forgetting the safety catch. My father rolls his eyes as I push the safety catch and try to center the bead again. Sweat slips into my eyes as I pull the trigger and a pellet ricochets off the ground a foot from the squirrel's head. The squirrel flinches again. Dad grabs my gun, pumps it quickly, then shoulders, aims, and fires a single shot.

The squirrel is dead; I wipe my face.

Dad grabbed the squirrel by its tail and shoves it into the camouflage carrying bag.

"Here." He extends the bag to me.

"No! I don't want it."

"You're going to carry it." He shouts. "And stop crying!"

I slip the bag over my shoulder. By the time we cross the last ridge and see the truck in a clearing ahead, four more squirrels line the bag. I feel them squirm on my back, their paws claw against my skin. I follow dad, crunching every twig I can find, hoping to scare the rest of the squirrels away. Stalking through the autumn leaves, I am as heavy as the squirrel's weight across my shoulders. I try to keep pace with him, but the distance between us widens. By the time he reaches the truck I am far behind, walking with my eyes on the ground and trying not to think about the pack of little deaths strapped to my back.

By the mid 1980's the coal boom that swept through Eastern Kentucky in spurts from the turn of the century to the 1970's had all but dried up, and Dad lost his job when the trucking company he had worked for since hw was a teenager went bankrupt. The coal companies closed mines and left the strip-mined land. Men like Dad, who had believed their futures were secured by the land's endless supply of coal, were left without a way to support their families.

Dad threw himself into the farm, and to earn extra income he began logging. When I helped, pine rosin would mat my skin in a thick dark layer that made every bit of bark, dirt, and pine needle cling to me. In his t-shirts, ripped jeans, and cloth bandana, my father never looked more desperate to me than he did that summer. I was filled with pity, but ashamed to be seen with him.

At ten Mom walks to the back door, separates the blinds and looks across the empty driveway. Dad is still not home, and supper is cold. An hour later, we hear his truck outside and mom unlocks the backdoor and begins putting dishes away.

"John Henry! Watch what you're doing! I just mopped that floor." My mother begin as soon as he steps inside.

"Ah shit!" Dad yells, picking up his boots and throwing them outside. Mom bangs pots as she warms his meal.

Dad is tired and dirty, and expecting a warm dinner. But it is milk and bread again, the same as the night before. He crumbles the bread into his bowl, pours cold milk over it, adds three dashes of salt and one of pepper. I sit in the adjacent room and stare at the flickering television. Over my shoulder, Dad sits alone at the table over a cold bowl of milk and bread.

3. Cutting
The swoop of dad's blade cuts each tobacco stock. He holds the stocks over the spear and thrust them down onto the tobacco sticks. The fibrous stalks tear as they spread onto the sticks. A rhythm develops: prick of the spear then the swoosh and the splitting. He works forward in silence. There is an imminent safety among the plant. They will never stop needing him.

The first night my father hit me, the bathroom mirror was cold to my neck as my father pressed me against it. He held me there with one hand and drew the other back into a fist. He is ready to land another blow when my mother bursts through the door and anchors herself onto his crooked arm. His eyes flare and I glare into them, unable to see how I came from this man.

He drops me and my back slides down against the mirror. My mother lays against the doorframe; I run past her into my room, lock the door, and cower in the corner with my father's red stain across my face.

Hours pass and I hear my father return. I lay in bed paralyzed, thinking that if he doesn't hear me he will not come to finish what he started. I listen to him piss then brush his teeth, turn off the light, and walk down the hall. Alone in my room I laid under the sheets wanting to be held and comforted.

Years later, I carried that desire out into the world. At night, holding men too tight, I lay down by their bodies in willing surrender. But a calm among men is never stable, and even harder to trust once you have seen the violence which lingers at their edges.

Ancient waters surround me as I flip through the yellowed pages of a family photo album. With each page, arms and legs and breasts are in the tide of memory. I come across a photograph of my father and I at Myrtle Beach on a day I still remember.

On that day my father launched me feet, face, and belly flat into the air. Water burned my skin, flooded my eyes.

As I look closer, I realize I had been too young in the photograph to have such vivid memories of

that day and I recognize my memory for the forgery that it is. Photo album in hand, I try to retrace the root of the memory. Years after the photograph was taken, I would have encountered the same photo album and created a story about a time when my father's touch held a tenderness I longed for. I would have retold the story to myself until the retelling became a memory.

In the picture I am smiling.

I turn the page, the child in the photograph a stranger to me, an ocean I swim against. His feelings are less than memory, a fiction I'd created. My father's hands under my belly, my mouth touching the salty sea, my mind and body open to the cool of the water.

When I call home my father answers. At 5'10", he is barely larger than me, but in my mind he towers. I long to feel like a part of my family again, but to do that I cannot be who I am. We say hello; he asks about my car; I ask about his crops; we exchange observations about the weather. Then, one of us fakes an excuse to go and he hands the phone to my mother.

Three weeks before my twenty-first birthday I am sitting on the front porch with my mother and father, talking about random things: family, old stories, grandparents living and deceased. My car is already packed with everything I will ever want from home, just in case this is the last time I will ever be here. Packing my car had been my own quiet and somber way of saying goodbye. All through the day my mother had asked "What do you want that for?" as I packed another forgotten knickknack to my car, and every time I had replied "Just because."

When we went inside, I came out to my parents.

Instead of rage, tears. I thought I had prepared myself for countless possible scenario, but I had not planned for tears.

"I'll pray for you," was my father's only response after I had found the courage to reveal myself for over an hour, like Salome removing the last of the seven veils. We hugged, the only hug he has ever given me like that. "You don't have to live like this," he said, squeezing me.

Southern Evangelicals believe the waters of redemption wash away the past. Their faith allows them to step into the glistening pool and be absolved. The Lord knocks on the heart's door and the one who is saved allows Him to enter. The summer before that evening, my father had stepped into baptismal waters; in his ear he had heard the rapping--more subtle than a pulse--and he had cracked the door. Away went years of cruelty and coldness, away went a lifetime of his demeaning and dismissals, away went the red stain he left on my face years ago. I don't know what replaced those things. I never had the chance to know him well enough to ask that question.

Yet, there stood my father, crying for the first time I could remember since his own mother's death. There he stood, and I had to believe it was from love that he offered his prayer, but my own worth as a man would not let his offer to stand without rebuttal. I was not a sinner to be shamed.

"I don't need you to pray for me about this."

My father trembled. Maybe he wanted to break through but didn't know how. We had spent a lifetime constructing barricades between us, and there was little room left in these constructions for communication. Rather than struggle with the truth of who I am, my father accepted me that night as the shamed phone call that comes during supper.

4. Stripping
Each leaf has aged, cured and browned, and is now ready to be torn from the stalk. To strip burley, we run our hands along the splintered stalks to unjoint the stems. The stems are clean, smooth, and dark brown.

It isn't too far from Lexington, Kentucky to Columbus, Ohio. I-71 shoots straight through the buckeye state as the landscape flattens, rolls, and flattens again. Two hours into the trip--just north of Cincinnati--my legs tingle numb, and I am drawn to remember how my father had driven three hours to work before sunrise, following the black back of the road as the day broke through the bug-gutted windshield of his old Ford pickup. He drove against the lull of the night, the pull of the hills, and the call of sleep as I grew tall without him. When he came home at night, coal dust still clung to his hair, face, and clothes. I only saw him on the weekends; we never talked. He was there, but never with me as I helped him hoe or strip tobacco.

I didn't understand the weight my father carried, couldn't imagine how it must have felt to be on the road for 18 hours a day, five days a week, never considered those things until hurling through Ohio many years later, under a sun setting down over a vast horizon of grain.

Driving, I thought of him after so much time, hate, and indifference had passed. I couldn't pretend to I know him, or that I ever would, but I thought of him that evening with unexpected emotion. I was part of his legacy, whether or not I chose to be. That evening, I was finally able to see the sacrifices he had made to keep our family together. I was humbled, and maybe that was the most I could hope for.

We walk across the snow carrying bundles of stripped stalks bound by rope. The load my father lifts to his shoulder is more than I can carry. I follow his muddy trail across the virgin white. Pockets of our breath billow out to mingle with the smell of burley. My father's back buckles as he heaves his bundle over the fence, and the stalks make a thud against the frozen earth that casts dust into clouds around him. I stumble over a rock in the snow and try to stand before he turns in the twilight. Bending to gather my fallen load, I cradle the crisscrossed stalks in my arms and rise back into his shadow.

Chapman, a friend, who saw that I was flagging, decided I needed a cat. Although she had a handsome live-in boyfriend and two Siberian huskies, she assured me that a cat was preferable to a man. Frankly, I did not believe her, nor did I believe my luck was ever going to change.

I was adamant--no cat. But she invited me to her rented house, anyway. The cat--who had been rescued from underneath a ratty Chevy in the Winn Dixie parking lot--was now bunkered in an empty room. The tips of his ears were chewed up; his eyes were rheumy. Her two Siberian Huskies sniffed at the door.

I weakened.

Once he had sufficiently recovered from trauma, the cat, now named Al Franken, pounced on my face at five o'clock in the morning to remind me it was his breakfast time. When I didn't respond, he bit my toe. After he had gorged himself on Gourmet Tuna or Anchovies Delight, he threw it up on the kitchen floor.

I wondered if Al really needed wet food; this was another place I could economize. (The week before, I had cut my Bama cable.) As it was, there was a nasty sheath of bills on my dining room table, I could not even begin to pay. I asked Dr. Cole, my vet about the expensive Mr. Whiskah canned cat food. "Naw," he said. "He doesn't need it. Too rich. The dry will do."

The best bad-luck story that year, even better than hitting myself in the face with a car door, or being stalked by the social worker who was supposed to be counseling me for depression, was cat-sitting for Glenda, my boss at the "Success Center."

The "Success Center," a remedial Writing Center at Shelton Community College, housed in a defunct mall, was one of my many enviable part-time jobs as a graduate student. Truly, a more humane workplace than Dominoes Pizza, where I spent hours, trying to figure out how to fold boxes and studying maps of trailer parks. Glenda, who was not like the good witch in The Wizard of Oz, donned black, rarely smiled and hated everyone. Naturally, I had a soft spot for her. Since Glenda had two dogs and two cats, she could never go on vacation because she couldn't afford to pay the kennel bills. A few of us at the Success Center banded together and agreed to cat and dog sit for her so she could go on vacation.

My turn on cat and dog duty came in the last three days of the ten-day vacation, when the troops were getting restive. Because I wanted my picture taken with Mother Teresa, I had also volunteered to feed and walk her dogs, a randy Lab named Rudolph and an old terrier named Marina, who dragged her rump along the ground.

Just as I had finished putting Rudolph's leash on, I saw thirty-pound Lurch, the cat, nudge open the door and squeeze through. Was Glenda feeding him fried oysters?

"Hey!" I shouted, with Rudolph pulling me forward. Marina was choking. She could not inch forward much faster.

By the time I reached the stairs, Lurch had vanished. After I walked the dogs, I scoured the neighborhood. No sign of Lurch.

I drove home and called Denise, who was the Assistant Director of the "Success Center."

"Lurch will probably turn up tomorrow. Don't worry," she said.

Given my luck, I was not so optimistic. I appeared the next morning at Glenda's, ready for duty. A note had been pinned to Glenda's mailbox. In lovely cursive: Dear Glenda, I am sorry to tell you this, but Lurch ran out into the street yesterday and was hit by a car. I know how much you loved him. I buried him near the fir tree in front of our building. Petra. Apartment #3.

"No!" I shouted. I ran down the steps into the front yard and stood in front of the tall, fir tree. Sure enough, there was a patch of fresh dirt in front of the tree. It looked suspiciously like a grave.

Because Glenda had few friends, I had also volunteered to pick her up from the airport in Birmingham, which was an hour away from Tuscaloosa.

When she got off the plane, she said, "How are my animals?"

"Fine," I cheeped in a high falsetto, which sounded false. "How was your vacation?"

I would have to wait until we were closer to Tuscaloosa to break the news. Otherwise, it would be a very long hour.

As I drove by Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds on McFarlin Boulevard, I knew that the moment I had been dreading, had come.

After I told her the story, she said, "I knew it. I knew it. Petra's been waiting to get me back. She poisoned Lurch."

"Come on. How could anyone be so mean?" I asked.

Glenda had quarreled with all of her neighbors.

"I'm really sorry," I said, making myself promise never to cat sit for anyone again.

"I brought you an ashtray from Florida. But now, I think I'll keep it," Glenda said.

I did not smoke.

I parked the car and helped her take her luggage upstairs. "I'm sure it was an accident. Bad luck," I said, trudging up the stairs. I felt defeated.

"I knew Petra would get me one day," she said, pulling a shovel from out behind the door.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to dig up Lurch. Find out if Petra murdered him."

"How?"

"Take him to the vet on Monday."

"You're going to exhume the corpse?"

"I have to know how Lurch died," Glenda said.

"I better be going," I said, not wanting to stick around for Lurch's exhumation. I already felt guilty enough.

The next week, I saw Glenda at the "Success Center." A failed cat sitter, the silence was terrible. I wondered if she might fire me. Actually, even working at the Success Center was a losing proposition when Social Security and taxes were deducted from my pay. Ten hours of tutoring students on comma splices and subordinate clauses equaled about forty bucks.

"I'm sorry about Lurch." How many more times could I apologize? Should I prostrate myself on the floor?

"That will teach me never to go on vacation again," Glenda said.

I vowed never to help Glenda in any way again. She was a miserable person.

"The autopsy results came in on Lurch," she said.

"Oh?"

"Pelvic and vertebrae crushed on impact. As you said, hit by a car. No sign of poison," she said. She seemed disappointed by the news.

Glenda had been hoping for a crusade against Petra; she relished crusades. She had declared war on Shelton State Community College. "They don't pay us enough to read this garbage." She had declared war on the adult students who attended. "They're stupid." She had declared war on her colleagues. "They're lazy. No one works harder than me." She had declared war on men. "They want brainless bimbos."

Glenda declared war on her neighbor, Petra, anyway.

"Did I tell you? I sent a letter to the landlord about her. She had no right to bury my cat," she said.

"What should she have done? Leave it on your doorstep? In the middle of the road?"

"That would have been better. Anyway, Lurch has now had another burial."

I wanted to strangle Glenda. She was tender with animals, but didn't mind smashing people. Like a rattlesnake, she was best left alone.

The next year, I quit working at the "Success Center." I focused all my energy on a rambling novel, which I named The Cleopatra School about the adventures of a young woman from Texas in Cairo, very much like myself. The first chapter was published in The Texas Review--in retrospect, I was sweetly hopeful that Knopf would snap up the novel. Recently, I fished my darling Cleopatra out of the drawer. I am glad that Knopf, or no one else, fell in love with her. She looks a little fat: her legs are wobbly, her breasts sag and she has a distended tummy.

Shortly after I finished Cleopatra, the year that I celebrated my thirty-sixth birthday, I was awarded a Teaching Fulbright to Syria. I felt giddy, as if I had just won the tiebreaker in a grueling tennis match on a hot day in South Texas.

No doubt about it--my luck had changed.

I agree with many of the claims Jason Sanford makes in "Who Wears Short Shorts? Micro Stories and MFA Disgust" particularly concerning MFA programs and the drab writing they produce. As an MFA participant and a fiction editor of over five years, I have come across a plentitude of bland writing in workshops and in submission piles. But I would not say that such blandness is any more prevalent in shorts than it is in longer stories. As Sanford states in his blog, "While I'm a firm believer in Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap, the remaining 10% can be an amazing thing to behold . . ." This is true of short shorts as it is with novels.

Sanford also claims that "no matter how excellent and mind-blowing a regular-size short story might be, it still takes an author several days to write it. In this same time an author can write any number of mediocre short shorts." Likewise, one might only write one good short short in the time it takes someone to write a mediocre regular-size short story. I'm not sure the point: bad is bad, good is good. It seems unproductive to compare apples and oranges--or perhaps in this case, apples and grapes.

As fiction editor of RFD, I received story after story--generally 10 to 20 pages long--from authors who were proficient in terms of grammar and paragraphing, but consistently sent predictable, boring stories. At another journal, my co-editor and I read many traditional-length stories which we could tell within a page was a product of an MFA.

The worst writers, it seemed, were so set on following the traditional story form, they wouldn't think of writing a two-page story. And so, by contrast, more of the short shorts I received as submissions or read in workshops were not only a faster read, but more a interesting one.

Short short writers I've encountered have generally been more experimental and more imaginative. They have many ideas they want to explore, and only so much time to get to all of them. Often, I've found, they like to test the edge of form. In fact, Charles Baxter, one of those MFA teacher/writers who writes short shorts, regular length fiction, and novels, claims, "With the noise of the contemporary world increasing . . . and people trying to drown you with words alone, [short shorts] have managed a neat trick: they put up and shut up."

I think this is true even for Amy Hempel. As much as I initially disliked her story, "Housewife," which Sanford discusses in his essay, it is one of three stories of hers that I remember vividly.

"Housewife" has a poetic, incantatory quality. Before it was reprinted and frequently discussed, several writer friends and I discovered we all had that last line, "French film, French film," stuck in our heads. It's a funny line, but it also captures a nostalgia for existential romance that those raised on Camus, Sartre, and even Sagan hold dear.

Of course the story irks me, as it does Sanford and others, partially because it asks the question, What constitutes a story? But this is the type of question all experimental art asks, from pointillism to postmodern architecture. In fact, its value, its purpose, is extended by being included in Sanford's, and now my, essays. Over time, Hempel's story may prove unimportant, like some claim of e.e.cummings' work, but for its time it served (and serves) an important function. It provokes, which all good literature does.

Sanford claims that short shorts are enjoyed by a literary audience alone, and asks, "How many anthologies of short shorts ever make it to a second printing (let alone a bestseller list)?"

Well, I can think of three right off the bat. While I couldn't get a number of reprints from Norton, I know that Flash Fiction (ed by James and Denise Thomas), which was published in 1992, is still in print and has sold 54,000 copies as of 2007. In fact, Norton has deemed it successful enough to publish a sequel: Flash Fiction Forward. Sudden Fiction International (1989), which sold 61,000 copies, and Sudden Fiction (Cont.) (1996), which sold 26,000 copies, are also both in print. Norton now has a new addition to this line, New Sudden Fiction.

I went through an MFA program and now teach creative writing at the undergraduate level at Richard Stockton College of NJ. In my three year MFA program (1996-99, the heyday of short shorts), I was never taught the genre or encouraged to write in it. In fact, it was still seen as a step child of literature, something you did for fun. The idea that stories had to be long to be serious prevailed, as if this form were some trick pony instead of a viable genre, which Sanford seems to reluctantly acknowledge.

Yet I often teach from the above anthologies in my undergraduate courses. Assigning such short stories allows us to compare a number of stories for plot, point of view, character, or conflict, etc. in a single class period. I also find young writers tend to learn more by writing new stories than by revising, something they are not yet prepared to do. Therefore, I assign them to write a number of short short stories, which allows them to take on different challenges and generally demonstrates their progression as writers over the semester.

Sanford starts his essay by making a rather bold claim: "Poetic vision rarely shows up[in short shorts]. After all, how can you express vision in 100 words?" I wonder then if he was excluding poems in his claim? One of the most powerful short pieces I've read--sometimes identified as prose poem, sometimes as flash fiction--is Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel," which clocks in at under 350 words. The point is, I would hate to ever play the numbers game with literature. Ask students to write a 10,000 word essay and see if the result is better than a 5,000 word one.

I strongly believe that short shorts are a genre unto themselves. It should be noted that it is not a form exclusive of this generation: One of my favorite stories of all time, "The Story of the Hour" by Kate Chopin, was written two centuries ago. It is scarcely over 1000 words. As Sanford claims, MFA programs have glutted the market with good writing full of bland content, but it's true for all genres, not just the short short. While a few writers these days may try to get more publishing credits by writing shorter stories, in the end, editors must weed out the mediocre no matter how long or short the piece is.

What I like about this genre though, as Antonya Nelson once pointed out, is that it challenges the best poets to give up some of the ethereal qualities of poetry, and it requires prose writers to give up some of the bulky, large canvas qualities of traditional stories. The best writers will rise to the many challenges of the short short; the worst, as with any form, won't.

She was arriving from Penn Station on Crescent Train, #442—on time today. The hour was 10:20 AM. While waiting for Miss Welty, I was so excited I paced and thought about what it would be like to spend the afternoon with Eudora Welty, writer genius, voice of the Old and New South, author of fifteen beloved novels, short story, and photography collections. I noticed the Indian man in the kiosk was going ‘bout his day, moving newspapers, making coffee, ignoring passers-by like me. A baby across the way broke into that nerve-wracking jangle only a parent can listen to; the girlish mom clutched and hushed the infant with ease. I wish I’d had the nerve to stand up and shout that one of America’s greatest living writers was about to step off the train, but of course I could never do such a thing. I’d been raised right and modern politesse doesn’t allow for such outbursts. Anyway, I wanted Eudora all to myself.

Note: How did an unknown like me come to know Eudora Welty? Well, truth be known, I’d never met her before, but my grandmother had been friends with her mother Chestina while my grandparents lived in Mississippi. How the original connection was made has died with my relatives though my Uncle Richard always said my grandmother made a point of never knowing a stranger. A few years ago my mother gave me some old photos of Mrs.Welty and Granny and on a whim, I wrote Miss Welty, enclosing one of the photographs. She appreciated the gesture. Letters were exchanged. In one I told her I was an aspiring writer. Last summer she accepted my invitation for a visit. “It has been a king’s age since I visited the Capital of the Confederacy,” she wrote.

The loud speaker blared the train’s name and number, only five minutes late. A crowd moved towards the door to file through, bunched up like some strange, dark, undulating creature. An old man in an Amtrak uniform, saving his hellos for the youngsters, smiled as we streamed by in the sunlight.

I recognized Miss Welty as she stepped off the train. Hesitating for just a moment before she let the porter’s hand lead her off the small stool. She looked like my favorite picture: whitish hair slightly curled, eyes bright, looking ahead. Attire: flannel grey skirt, blue blazer, navy scarf tied around neck, practical raincoat draped over an arm. A somewhat new looking suitcase, I remember it was tapestry, made its way down behind her.

It gave me an odd feeling to be with one of literature’s greatest writers, especially since we were virtually unnoticed in the crowd. Unlike Hollywood stars, great writers can often move along as quietly as a small breeze. Writers are known for their words, not their miens or the swish of their perfect figures.

“Miss Welty?” ”

Her glance fell on me and I waved. We hugged shyly.

She could only spend the day with me so I didn’t want to clutter up the hours with fawning family and friends and didn’t plan much. Like most Richmonders, I started our tour on Monument Avenue. Richmond’s veil of spring feathered across the lawns and trees like a crocheted shawl. Remembering my school day lectures, I told her about the bronze of Robert E. Lee. She liked the detail the statue had been transported through the streets by the locals and the ropes used were later passed down in families. I suggested she write a story called “Inheriting the Rope.” I continued driving down the Avenue and we passed Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury (I had to look him up after she left because I didn’t know what “Pathfinder of the Seas” meant—he was an early historian, astronomer, and the father of modern oceanography. He also invented the first torpedo.). The car sailed by the last monument—Arthur Ashe.

“Seems a bit out of place," Miss Welty observed and we both agreed, with all due respect to Mr. Ashe, it was the ugliest statue we had ever seen: He was holding a racquet and book above the heads of clamoring children.

How do you entertain a famous writer? I’d read the Suzanne Marrs biography, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” One Writer’s Beginnings, The Optimist’s Daughter so I knew more than I was willing to admit. Neither favorite dishes nor colors yet I’d learned about broken hearts (over John Robinson); least favorite people (Margaret Millar, wife of great friend and love Kenneth Millar). I knew she was passionate about the arts. Loved parties. Didn’t think much of going to church. Wasn’t big on Prokofiev. In fact I knew more than I was comfortable to fessing up to. Since she’d just been in New York, hobnobbing with the intelligentsia, I figured she’d had enough of crowds and splashy affairs; since she lived in Jackson, I decided not to bother with too much local color though Richmond certainly has its share. Miss Welty was an enthusiastic gardener so I invited her to have lunch and spend the afternoon at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, 40 acres of blooms, berries, and bridges over little ponds with a Japanese tea house, children’s garden, and Kew-style Conservatory. She laughed when I pointed out that local wags say Richmonders have more time and money for their gardens and abandoned animals than the poor.

A quiet trip to the garden was my way of not making too much of a hoo-ha over her. I confess I planned on asking a few questions about writing, however, I’d made a mental note not to make a nuisance of myself. I did have a modicum of self-respect and never intended on joining the long lines of hopefuls I see at readings, books in hand, shyly asking for quick words of encouragement from the master because after all, they were more talented than the others in line—they were real novelists or poets or painters or actors, not just a bunch of wannabees in sensible shoes and bifocals.

It was a cloudless Friday with a light soothing breeze. The Garden was not crowded. We agreed on a walk before lunch in the Tea House.

Miss Welty was a sturdy walker as we made our way down to the lake. It was the time in Virginia when tulips have just started to fan out, a last breath before dying, and the daffodils have already gone brown except for the late blooming doubles. We walked in thought and admired the flora, reading the cards marking the flowers and trees. In front of a grandiose purple azalea, I read “Karen’s Azalea.” She said “Ericiacea,” admitting as a teenager she’d often memorized many Latin names and recited them while weeding. She still remembered a few.

A school group twittered in the distance as they made their way up a mansion of a treehouse which had been built to much fanfare and cost last year. Miss Welty was silent for a minute then said she wished she’d had children and asked me if I ever thought about becoming a mother. Tulip: Tulipa pulchella. . . Fringe Tree: Chionanthus pygmaeus. . . Hyacinth: Hyacinthus orientalis. . . “Yes, but does it have to be babies or books?”

“No. No, it doesn’t. All that didn’t work out for me and by the time I started to focus on it hard, there were other distractions. You can have both,” she murmured.

We stopped to admire the purplish, blue, wide strip of Virginia Blue Bells (Mertensia virginica) running along the walkway. Miss Welty said she loved these, but they didn’t like Jackson. Too humid.

She admired the garden greatly, but seemed pleased when I said perhaps it was time for lunch.

The Botanical Garden has a teahouse style restaurant, but there are no kimonos and no one eats while sitting on pillows though the surrounding gardens are Asianesque and the serenity is more Far East then Down South. The menu has chicken salad and its various and sundry relatives. We ordered two salad plates and glasses of Pinot and sat outside, the Mondo grass (Opiopogon japonicus) and Heavenly bamboo (Phyllostachys aurea) tumbling down to the edge of a circle pond.

Miss Welty and I chatted about family and she remembered my grandparents vaguely, whereas she didn’t have any wonderful memories for me to retell the next generation. It looked like none of my people were in her stories—perhaps a good thing. We discussed Richmond’s black mayor taking on the Establishment and changes in the South (“It’s disappearing!” I said. “It will always be here,” and she pointed to her heart.”). I admit there were other questions I really wanted to ask her: Why did you hold on to the dream of John Robinson for so long when surely you knew he was gay? Why did you insist on cultivating a deep friendship with Ken Millar when he was married? No wife likes her husband to have close women friends! Wasn’t that a little devil may care on your part? And most importantly, the question everyone was asking: Why didn’t you write the last twenty years of your life? Yet, these were not questions the young could ask the old.

I decided to err on the side of good manners. After all, what if someone had read a biography about me and then over lunch asked me questions like: Why did you marry your first husband when you knew it was a mistake even as you walked down the aisle-- you looking so pretty in that fancy white gown? Why did you work all those godawful odd jobs when you decided you wanted to be a writer? Wouldn’t it have been easier to become an editor?

I did ask Miss Welty this: “How have you achieved so much?”

“My writing?”

“Your writing.”

“Are you asking me as a writer or a reader?”

“A writer.”

“I just did it. There’s no magic.” She sipped her wine and lifted her eyebrows to punctuate the sentence. “I quote Guy de Maupassant, “‘Put black to white.’”

“Where do you get your ideas?”

A question so often answered. “I’m always watching. It could be a sentence. Or I like the look of someone. Or I see a couple sitting next to each other on the train and I simply make the whole damn thing up.”

Later, we sat in front of the Conservatory, a tiered glass palace full of orchids and fountains where Richmond’s bluebloods attend some very grand white-tent fundraisers. A small girl in a pale green dress trotted by while singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” And then, like most ladies at the end of a visit, we treated ourselves to the giftshop. Behind the counter, the dark haired woman widened her eyes and when it came time, read Miss Welty’s charge card, fumbled it, got a funny look on her face, and blurted out she loved her work. Ten thousand compliments later, the face still breaks out in a smile. I heard a quiet thank you.

Of course, on the way to the station, Miss Welty told me to keep writing. That I would prevail. And she told me to keep in touch. The dramatist in me hoped she’d press some keepsake into my hand, a gold cross from childhood, a favorite pen, but of course she didn’t. The last image I saw as she was climbing aboard the train, to borrow loosely from The Optimist’s Daughter, was the twinkling of her flat hand. There were a few more short notes and one Christmas card before cardiopulmonary failure laid claim to Eudora Welty on July 23, 2001. I’d like to think she’s gone on to her Maker, but I do believe she had a few other ideas on the subject.

The tornado ripped up buildings all around Brookhaven, tore the tops off tall magnolias and pines. Mammaw’s house, the house in which Daddy was born and where I first became aware of the world, remained in tact and empty.

Daddy said, “That tornado was mama leaving.”

I’d been beside her earlier that day, brushing the hair back from her hot forehead. Mom and Daddy had driven to Mississippi from New Mexico and sat in chairs at the foot of the bed. Mammaw gave little incoherent pleas from her fevered dreams. Her breath came fast and shallow and I could feel her rapid pulse there in her slender neck.

I said, “It’s all right Mammaw, Daddy’s here.”

Her breathing slowed to peaceful. My dad had that hound dog wounded look, eyes welling.

I wondered did she know I meant my daddy, her son, or did she think me a sister, maybe Elsie, telling her our own daddy was there because I was thinking how the mind turns strange when we get old or lonely or go crazy and we start longing for home. I was wondering what Mammaw was dreaming. I was thinking about Elsie being found walking in the woods when she was eighty some years old.

“Elsie? Where are you going?’

“To Mama and Daddy’s house.”

Mama and Daddy’s house had been torn down for years and years, but Elsie who no longer recognized her own children stood in the spot where her childhood place had once been. She’d walked fifteen miles to get there.

My great grandfather’s image came to me from a picture I’d seen as a child sitting in a floor in a room in Mammaw’s house, the first house I ever remember being in, the home place I spent my childhood aching for. His picture had stopped me—he’d been dead since before I was born, but he looked so familiar, something like my own daddy and something so wild and hard in his eyes I couldn’t stop staring. He looked a little, maybe a lot, crazy. What I remember hearing about him is that he was full of meanness.

His skin was so dark and his hair so light. I asked my dad once, “How much Indian are we?” He replied, “Don’t talk about that, it’s as bad as being black.”

My Aunt said, “We’ll never know what happened to Mama when she was a child. We’ll never know what happened to make her like she was, so hard and untrusting.”

As my mammaw lay dying and I felt so grateful that my touch and voice seemed to comfort her in dreams, did she remember me as her only granddaughter and think me a sister at once, time losing relevance as she slipped away?

The last thing I ever said to her was, “Sweet dreams, Mammaw. Sweet, sweet dreams.” Then I drove back out on that Mississippi highway watching the clouds get darker and darker and roll in fast, wishing I hadn’t been so separate from her for so much of my growing up, wondering where I’d ever be able to wander if I was looking for home.

My mother talks about a house in Simi Valley. I don’t remember this house. I was two or three, the only child then. An interior decorator came in and helped Mom decide on furnishing. Can you believe it? She asks me. That’s how good we were doing, and your daddy left it all because he missed his mama. My mother and father had left Mississippi and headed for California to find more opportunity in life. They were tired of being poor. My mother has told me she had to mash beans sometimes to feed me when I was a baby, that she found a rat in the crib with me that was as big as I was.

When I returned to Mississippi on my own as an adult I had a recurring problem in my dreams. I would try to walk and my legs would ache more and more until I could hardly take a step. I went there to spend some time at my Mammaw’s house and get reacquainted with extended family. I went there because when my mother was seventeen someone shot her in the head and she lost much of her memory. I wanted to know more about who she had been. I wanted to know why no one ever was arrested for the shooting. I wanted to know more about who had inflicted violence upon her. I went there looking for home.

I found a beautiful picture of my mother at my aunt’s. She looked so confident and pretty. I took that picture to my mother in a pretty little frame. She studied it for a moment and turned it faced down. She said, “I hear you’re going around asking about when I got shot. That’s private. It doesn’t matter what happened. What matters is that I survived.”

I'm writing about this as I fly to Austin, Texas, a town I've dreamed of living in. My first love, my once husband, my daughter's father, lived there when he died. Once I reach the town, I walk the streets past the bars and restaurants and music and know he must have visited those bars when he lived here. I don’t think I feel his ghost, but I have the urge to call my daughter over and over. I’ve never been here though my daughter has and this is where she found heroin for the first time, looking for her father’s ghost when she was fifteen. Still when I have a dream, a nightmare, it’s about him. There is so much horror and turmoil in the dream. I cannot name it now. I hear a voice before the nightmare is over—do you think if he had hard feelings, …I don’t remember the last part, you wouldn’t feel them or something, something that let me wake up peaceful.

When we lived in Simi Valley, Daddy worked on a golf course caddying for Michael Landon and Ernest Borgnine and people like that. He says, Michael Landon was an asshole to him, but Ernest Borgnine very nice. Many movie stars tipped so well he would come home with wads of cash. Daddy has told the story often of the encyclopedia salesman whom he let in the house. When my father told the man he wasn’t interested in buying the encyclopedias, the man asked him if he wanted to be ignorant all his life. Daddy started throwing encyclopedias at the man, one by one as he ran out the door, with the rest of the boxes to follow. He tells the story of the insulting encyclopedia salesman he threw out of his house often. He has many stories that he tells over and over again. When he’s finished, he smiles and then looks haunted as if he hasn’t quite found the resolution.

My first memories of Mississippi are not of poverty, though there would come a time in my childhood that we returned for a while to Mississippi when I knew what it was to be so hungry my thoughts became foggy and I could not think in school. What I remember first though is my dad driving up my mammaw’s gravel drive in a ‘57 Chevy. I loved that drive, the way you left the highway and became surrounded by trees, the wonderful sound of that gravel and earth beneath the tires, the smell of rain and shade as you rode that curve like a half moon snaking and then the garden and the house came into view. We were sitting out front, beyond the porch, by the driveway waiting for him and when he appeared in that car, I rubbed my eyes and said, “Am I dreaming?”

Mammaw said, “All of life is just a dream, a dream until you’re gone.”

Mammaw never flew but what would she think on that plane traveling to Austin with a storm outside the window, electricity bright and fast? A doctor tends to a man a few seats before me, while his wife cries and a stewardess rubs her arm. Another stewardess flips through some huge guidebook and talks on a phone receiving advice from down below. It’s a six hour flight and I wonder if we’ll have to land somewhere else, but after a time, the man must be all right because people who have been cleared and standing return to their seats. An hour must have passed with all those people standing in polite respect for the possibly dying. Then a woman passes out in the bathroom and the doctor heads back there. At the end of the trip they are both all right, being ushered out of the plane first, to continue their dreaming.

When we lived in Simi Valley, my uncle Don, my mother’s brother, someone who had traveled with us from home, who had that way of talking that I loved like music, would come by in the morning and tell me he was taking my legs to work. All day, I’d drag myself around. I’d refuse to stand. I don’t think I believed him, but I loved him so much, I let him have my legs until he came back to see me. I’d wait all day long for him to bring them back. He’d say, Come give me some sugar, baby. Come hug my neck.

It was my grandmothers who gave me such an imagination. My dad’s mother, my mammaw, tried to make sense of everything while sitting on the porch. All the birds had messages she tried to understand. So did the sky. She talked about what things meant. When the sun shown and it rained at once, it would rain the same time the next day. A butterfly on the porch meant someone would die. I asked about the dirt dabbers nesting in the ceiling, but she said they were just building a home and I was grateful that though she scrubbed everything else, she didn’t tear down their homes until they were through with them. I confused those dirt dabbers with wasps, and didn’t trust that they wouldn’t sting, but I didn’t want them to lose those terrific mud homes.

When we lived in Simi Valley, there was a pool table in our house and the house would fill up with people in the evenings. My uncle would be there for sure and I’d have my legs back. I’d walk around watching the men play pool while the women talked. Other than me, I think it was a childless neighborhood. The other families not started yet or never to be. It was here that I believe I learned to be vigilant. Alone with my mother one day, I watched her have a seizure and then I waited all day for her to wake up. I stayed right beside her. I believe that this happened though no one ever talks about it. I wonder if anyone even knew how long I waited. I don’t remember seeing my mother’s seizures. My brothers have seen my mother coming out of them. She asks for water. She looks at my daddy like she knows him but like he is someone other than himself. She told my brother she sees the hand holding the gun, that she is wearing a ball gown. She says just when she will see the face of the person who shot her, a person she knows she loves, that she comes back to. My mother had many seizures back in California while they tried to get her medicine right. And maybe this is one of the reasons Daddy wanted to go back to Mississippi, something more than wanting to go back where his mama lived, to take me back some place where I didn’t have to be vigilant.

We went back only to leave again and spend our lives traveling. Mammaw did lament his leaving Mississippi and let it be known. I wish your daddy would come home, mammaw would always say to me. Why won’t he come home? Every time he tried to go back we’d sink back in to poverty. Something made him restless. Sometimes he’d stand in the kitchen looking out the back door with full eyes. I’d imagine what he was remembering. I saw him once sitting on the porch swing holding his father with a look of horror on his face. When he saw me he said, “Go on, baby, don’t look. Go on to the other side of the house. Papaw’s sick.” Papaw had had a stroke.

We were living in New Mexico when Papaw died and Daddy hated that he had been away. He almost killed us all in the car driving so fast to get to Mississippi. We rode right up on a bridge abutment sideways and instead of flipping it felt like something lifted us and set us right back on the road to Mississippi. Later, watching him stand in the doorway of that farmhouse he grew up in, I wondered if he was missing his own daddy. Maybe he was remembering the woman he always told about who came to that kitchen door. “She always came to the backdoor,” he’d say. “She was as good to me my own mama. She wouldn’t have come to the front door if you’d asked her. That was respect. That’s just the way it was.”

Then he’d tell of the day that woman never came back and he’d gone through the woods to her house to see what was the matter. He describes the thin boards of the house, how he peeked through a crack in the wall and saw that woman laid out of the kitchen table, head draped back over the edge, staring out at him with dead horrified eyes, a bullet hole in the center of her forehead. He gasped and fell back. I always imagine it as one of those terribly humid days with the locusts calling and the sun burning the air. He made himself look again. He says he watched the sheriff talking to the coroner. He watched them pull the dress back down over that woman’s legs and say, “Death by natural causes.”

Maybe these were some of the memories that filled him with anxiousness in Mammaw’s kitchen. I saw Mammaw watching him once and frowning. He was standing in the kitchen looking out the back door. He couldn’t stay sitting. Something ate at him inside and it hurt Mammaw to watch. She took it personally. Mammaw said, “He cain’t wait to leave.” My brothers tell me he has switch scars all over the back of his body and thighs, that that’s why he doesn’t like to be seen even without a t-shirt.

I’ve tried to bring my own child home. I want her to feel warm in my apartment like it’s home. I’m sorry I’m pretty much all she’s got. She’s only fifteen minutes away and she hardly comes here. I worry about the reasons. She says she’s going to be in a Punk band. She has the dress, the look, the mood. Maybe practice and instrumental skill are not as necessary as disdain for sentimentality. She was 12 when I packed up and headed back toward Mississippi. Somewhere in Texas I was talking about the thirteen grade schools I’d gone too, when she said, It’s not your mom’s lost past you want to discover. It’s your own.

In Simi Valley, on one side we had a neighbor who was gay but married to a woman, on the other a man who beat his wife. It was the early sixties. Movie stars lived in the neighborhood too, and TV stars. Mom said all the men on our street decided to get vasectomies, all but Daddy. Imagine how different our lives would have been, she laughs. We both imagine the limitations and possibilities in our world had I not been blessed with my four brothers, two of which sit incarcerated in a New Mexico prison. On our street in Simi Valley, all the men straddled around in bowlegged pain for days.

Dad had a collection of cars outside that house in Simi Valley, even an Edsel just to have it in the collection. All I remember growing up in trailers was junk scattered in the yard. When he decided to go home to Mississippi, he gave the cars to the neighbors. He left our house and stopped making mortgage payments until the house in Simi Valley was repossessed.

The night Mammaw died I sat outside a house in Mississippi. We’d gone to the farm, but none of us had been able to go inside Mammaw’s house and face it without her. I walked around the yard, looked at the sandstone my papaw used to sharpen knives, the laundry shed, the chicken house, the barn. Everything decaying on that beautiful land where my family had lived for over a hundred years. My uncle would soon sell it all. He’d stayed close to home and wanted some compensation for all his taking care, so he took everything and left his brother and sister nothing but memories. He walked around in the yard spouting Bible verses. I thought how Mammaw always spoke in terms of nature, Papaw in terms of the Bible.

The night after she died, I sat on a porch in Mississippi. I thought Daddy was probably right about that tornado. I looked up at the strange blue moon in the sky. I had never seen a blue moon in my whole life.

Mammaw told stories all the time, and finally on her sick bed she told a story about me. She told me how I snuck up to the chicken house and eased the door open, how I tried to sneak my hand up under a hen and fetch an egg. “You came flying out backwards with chickens and feathers a flyin’. It was the funniest thing I ever saw.” As a child I scattered seed for them with her on that earth I loved to feel beneath my bare feet. “Biddy! biddy!” I sang along wearing a sun bonnet she made. I practiced wrinkling my chin when I laughed. I put my hands on my hips. I emulated her every move.

Here’s mine:

Jumping in leaves. Bammie’s pink applesauce. Snow days. Sour patch kids. Dad singing Beatles. 1986 World Series. Cold January mornings. Loneliness. Our two cats. Mom’s jewelry box. Chasing bunnies. Books. A new brother. Golf lessons. Guilt. Shrimp cocktail. Broken wine glasses. Jimmy-covered black-raspberry ice cream. Weekends in Gloucester. Body surfing. Strep throat. August thunder storms. Hard pretzels. Boys. Mixed tapes. La Herradura summer. Cups of tea. Wiggins dorm. Ani DiFranco. First heartbreak. My grandparents dancing. Madrid semester abroad. Diego. Hong Kong noodles. Transatlantic flights. Un buen Rioja.

What’s hard about it, though, is all the things you have to leave off the list. Like the first time your mom spanked you when you were looking over a stairwell railing and could have fallen and died. Or the birthday when Bammie gave you a suitcase full of little wrapped presents. Or when Bampie would take you to diners for breakfast at 7 a.m. and buy you Trident fruit gum after. Or your first kiss. Or your first lay. Or the time your stepfather fell down the stairs and you asked if he was OK and he just screamed at you. Or when Laney’s mother died. Or when your mom almost did. Or the day you got married and were so pretty and happy and dying of heat because it was 105 that day, and your cousin even fainted just after the ceremony, right as she reached the church door.

The truth is, once you start, you could go on an on. You could tell it all if you could. But you can’t. That’s the fun of it, really: choosing the right forty phrases, the forty points that can be connected together to create a You, a holey version of you, for sure, but we can tell it’s you even if it’s just a bunch of dots. Like a Lichtenstein.

If you actually had to tell stories, didn’t rely on mere three-word phrases and striking images, then you would probably readjust. You’d probably not elaborate on jumping in leaves, for example, since we all pretty much know how that goes: your mom rakes a big pile together, you jump in it, you laugh, your mom takes a picture, and three days later you have poison ivy. No, you’d probably tell different stories about the moments that stand out like pins on a map, the times that cut through your brain in a way so as to sear a memory there, a message, like the little red flags you can put on an email to remind you that it’s important, a plea to your brain: keep this one fresh. It’s part of Who I Am. These most-important moments, the defining ones, are the ones you’d tell about, weaving together in some kind of pastiche (a word that always reminds me of pistachios), to create a cohesive tale. The story of your life. No longer holey dots. More like those coloring books that Bammie used to get you that had little dots of color inside the outlines, and when you wiped a wet brush over them, they’d smear – magically – into just the right color. That’d be you: a smeary, bleeding wet figure as bright and abstract as a sunset’s reflection on the water. And you’d be glad that you were able to tell it all.

But you can’t really tell it all; writing is about whittling down, about embers and nuggets. Like pomegranate seeds strung together to make a beautiful, bloody necklace. So you try to extract those seeds with surgeon-like precision, careful to find the right ones, the perfect memories and anecdotes that, together, add up to a kind of whole. And if you squint, or step far enough away from the picture, you can see how those bits and pieces blur together into a deliriously rich whole; it’s all there, all of you, if you can just squint and imagine.

I have two memories of my mother and father together, and both are of fighting. In the first, I am three years old and it’s nighttime. Something has woken me from a sweaty sleep and I shuffle to the kitchen in bare feet, towards the crack of light below the closed kitchen door. My parents voice swirl higher and higher, like classical music, coming close to a breaking point. I swing open the door and in that instant, something loud smashes at my feet. A wineglass. My mother rushes over, sorry, so sorry, and my father stares bewildered, already distant from us, in a red flannel shirt. He crosses his arms and watches as my mom heaves me up into her fierce arms and carries me back to bed, trying to stop me from crying.

In the second memory, I walk into my parents’ bedroom and my father has my mother pinned down on the bed, his palms pressing into her shoulders, and he is screaming in her face. Literally, right into her face. He’s screaming, “You’re CRAZY!” He may have said it once or several times. I don’t know. I just remember him emphasizing that word, “crazy,” like it was the ugliest thing in the world.

I pretty much grew up without a father. Friends who had never been through a divorce would constantly ask me if I missed my dad. “You can’t miss what you never had,” was the glib response I came up with sometime around high school. And it was partially true. I didn’t miss him. The only memories I had of him before the divorce were of my parents’ fights, and the memories afterward blur together into a stream of weekend visits and Red Sox games.

My parents’ got divorced in 1980, before the VCR. But we had this videodisc machine that you could insert these giant, plastic records into and they would play a movie. Halfway through the movie, just like a record, you’d have to slide the disc out into the plastic case and flip it, slide it back in. One of the movies we had was Kramer vs. Kramer, which my mother had bought for me to help me through the divorce. She had also bought me a book called It’s Not Your Fault a black-and-white picture book about a kid whose parents get divorced and how the kid thinks it was his fault. She meant well, and I’m sure it was a weight off her conscience, but the book only gave me ideas. I had never imagined it was my fault, couldn’t have even conceived such a thing at three-and-a-half. But now I had the perfect excuse for acting up. If I was being especially bratty or wanted a particular Transformer and my mom said it was too expensive, or I didn’t feel like taking my clothes off the floor, I now had a reason: I felt bad. I missed Dad. Was the divorce my fault?

“Of course not, honey,” my mom would cry. Her face would crumple into a maze of lines. Worry lines. “This is between your daddy and me.” And she’d take me up in her arms and let me put my head against her neck and then she’d buy me the robot. It was so easy. And then sometimes when I had gone too far and acted up badly, talking back or pushing her buttons, I’d get a smack. Sometimes it was on the ass, sometimes on the cheek. Once she hit me with my science textbook, which made a terrible sound but didn’t hurt at all, and I teased her, “That didn’t hurt at all.” And she threatened to do it until it did, but she was already smiling. And a few times she’d grab me by the throat, just under my chin, like a bird of prey and seethe at me through clenched teeth. “Stop being a little bitch,” she’d say. And I’d cry. And she’d apologize. And I’d hug her. And this was the beginning of the rest of our lives as mother and daughter, sans father. We hardly even missed him.

When I was nearly five, my mom was twenty-nine, single, and broke. We moved in with my mom’s older sister, Carolyn, and her husband Richie. They lived in a small apartment in Brookline, MA. My mother ordered a silver dog tag for me that read:

My name is Alexis Shaak. I live at 4 Auburn Court, Brookline. Phone: 555 1212. If lost, please return.

She put a silver chain through the dog tag and strung it around my neck. “Where do you live?” she asked a hundred thousand times.

“Four Auburn Court,” I replied.

“That’s my girl.”

My mother was proud that I was such an independent daughter, and I was happy to be given so many privileges. Every day after school during my first year of kindergarten and first grade, my mom would make sure a taxi was waiting for me at the cul-de-sac entrance of Pierce Elementary School. I would get into the back of the car, which smelled of already-chewed mint gum, and the cabbie would take me home, a mile’s walk. I could have easily done it on my own, but my mother thought the cab was safer. I’d hand the cabbie a wad of cash, slam the door shut, and race up the stairs to our apartment. I had to open about seven locks before I could get in, but then I’d be home. Just me and the cats, all afternoon, until first my mom came, then uncle Richie, a gas station attendant, then my aunt Carolyn, a doctor in her residency.

I didn’t question why we lived there, why my doctor aunt had married a gas station attendant, or where my father was. I was too busy exploring the neighborhood, deciding whether or not to eat the berries off the bush out front (I didn’t), whether or not to eat the leaves sprouting out of the ground around the trees in the courtyard, which a neighbor girl swore were mint (I did, and they were), and filling my afternoons with sunlight, loneliness, water balloons, coloring books, and my new Madonna record, which I made up a sexy dance to.

It was like anyone else’s childhood, really: my imagination on steroids, while adults around me picked up the pieces of their mistakes.

My mother once confessed to me how she tried to take her own life, how on vacation with my father in Cancun she swallowed all these pills before going snorkeling. She planned to drown out there, but she didn’t. Instead, she saw the most beautiful fish she’d ever seen, so beautiful that she didn’t want to go back to land, to my father. But she did, and by the way she told the story, I think she felt special or something – magical, almost – for surviving. Like she had a secret, one I didn’t care to know.

How was I to know that there would be an end to all of it? I think we all know the time – as acute as a grapefruit squirt in the eye – when we realize our lives are pathetic, not halcyon or sweet or special at all. When we see our parents for who they are – sad grown-ups who had imagined something very different: Love. Stability. A mortgage and a Volvo. Sexual satisfaction. 2.2 children loving and hugging them with 4. 4 arms. What they got was something else altogether. It’s horrible to see your mother for who she is when you’re six years old. You know there’s no getting out for years and years. And years.

In my memory, the bad always mixes inextricably with the good, like one of those swirly, soft-serve ice creams: my mother’s love and her spankings; my father’s absence and his birthday cards every year; suffocating loneliness and adults always around; tears and dirty faces, my favorite first-grade teacher and homework; a new toy and my mother’s depression; my bike accident and my mother’s love.

And when you are finally old enough to see it for what it is – your life, no more no less – you can suddenly see the pixels, see the spaces in between the dots of memory and reminiscence. See the gray matter between them, matter that might have been filled with love, or happiness, or wholeness, or an equation: 1 parent + 1 parent = 2.2 children + chocolate lab = total American bliss.

But if I’m talking sums, then this is the most important one: what you’ve experienced + how you process it = Who You Are. Gray matter be damned; I am my memories, whatever dpi they may be. I’m not a sum of all the things that never happened to me; I’m not a negative equation.

It’s better to just step back a few feet, squint a bit, and see pink apple sauce, the fourth-grade talent show, the crush I had on Christian Saulnier, marbles, the smell of my mother’s lipstick before a date, mint growing in a rundown city condominium courtyard...

The road you’re now traveling is Summer Avenue.

At the headwaters of Summer is an adobe orange building called Summer Trading Post. “Oil Paintings. Bronzes. Furnishings and Decorator Items,” announces its front, but the Trading Post is abandoned, boarded up and fenced round so you can’t get in.

“Used to be a Mexican Restaurant,” says John Bain, the owner of MoonBugs, a Volkswagen repair shop on the other side of Summer. John has a modern, clean website, but long-dead Beetles, VW buses, and Karmann Ghia’s squat all over his property. On the side street, a yellow Bug with rusted, sightless light sockets is parked alongside a VW Bus, a white drop cloth shrouding its front. In the back, a penned-in area holds a jumble of VW’s waiting for repair, or to be scavenged for parts. The pen doesn’t have a name, but John, the man they call “Mr. Moon,” tells me he can come up with a good one if I want.

The repair area itself is two small concrete squares stacked full of car pieces. According to John, somewhere in the shop is a 1971 Beetle that still runs, but I can’t pick it out. A black and white Tennessee tag—TNMoonBg—hangs on the wall. A radio sitting on top of car parts keeps the handful of workers company. John’s assistant, Buddy, gets tickled when John asks, “What is that y’all are listening to?” The bossman walks over to the radio, lowers the volume on the honky-tonk music.

John asks Buddy to show me an original VW seat. Buddy—knit cap, old-man stubble, washed blue eyes—hops around and points to a front seat, face down on the hood of a car. “I put it so it’s not touching metal,” Buddy tells John, who upends the seat and says, “That’s an original seat.”

I’m not looking at the orange plaid fabric that seduced me on the website. I’m looking at black vinyl pockmarked like chicken skin.

“But look,” Buddy says and flips over the matching back seat. The original German Inspector’s ticket is lodged in the webbing.

John, who has long gray curls and a gray-flecked goatee, re-built his first motor when he was twelve, then, when he got old enough, he went to work at a VW dealership down the road, back when he and his friends drag-raced on Summer. Before that time, when John’s 1924 building was at the edge of the city limits, Summer Avenue was a prosperous street. John has seen black and white photos of Summer when it was gravel. In its heyday, John says, “Summer was it.”

John—whose website has hits from all over the country, who had a guy from Tokyo come by the store, who is, as he says, “kind of world famous”—still smiles at Summer Avenue. “We all have to be somewhere,” he says.

Buddy shrugs. “Beats South Lauderdale.”

When I moved to Memphis, Summer Avenue was my first favorite street. With its small shops, bright plastic signs and 1950s-style presentation, it beckoned. But when I mentioned Summer Avenue to Memphians, they shuddered.

How could that be?

I had seen Summer Avenue’s name in the newspaper, never in a good light. Memphis is a city of streets that run from the river eastward like fingers extending from a palm. Of these streets (Jackson, Summer, Poplar, Union that becomes Walnut Grove, and Lamar), Summer Avenue—three lanes west, two lanes east, a turning lane in the middle—is on the northern edge. Memphis is growing to the south and the east. Whenever there’s a dispute in the newspaper about how to handle this growth, you come across a quote saying, “If we don’t watch out, it’ll turn into another Summer Avenue.”

The most recent fight centered on an older Walgreen’s that wanted to move across the street from its current location and build a new store on the corner of Summer and Parkway. The neighborhood association that protects the Parkway corridor protested. In addition to objecting to commerce invading Parkway, the opponents argued that, besides, Summer needs more than a new Walgreen’s to help it.

The opponents won.

I don’t know which argument worked.

On February 13th, the day I’ve begun my quest to find out why Memphians hate Summer Avenue, the still-vacant lot that would’ve housed the Walgreen’s is filled with Valentine’s baskets wrapped in cellophane. Red heart balloons puffed with helium sway on short strings. About twelve blocks away, out where Summer becomes more “East Memphis,” a bulldozer clears a lot for a new Walgreen’s.

Down Summer, past the MLG&W branch where people clump early in the morning waiting for the utility to open so they can pay their water and electric bills before service is cut off, is the Paris Theatre. The Paris is X-rated, with Private View Booths, but it can’t be counted in the indictment against Summer Avenue. Yes, it’s an old movie theatre turned rancid, but no, it’s not a recent slide into sleaziness. My husband, a graduate of Rhodes College, says the theatre’s been X-rated since at least the late ‘60s, the same time period when Summer at Highland was known as the “antique Mecca of Memphis.”

More damning in their testimony against Summer are the churches. In a city where Reverend Al Green preaches and Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson teaches, where one of the largest Baptist churches in the world reigns supreme (Bellevue Baptist, whose website boasts 27,000 members), where the second largest Pentecostal group in America was born (Church of God in Christ, whose website boasts eight million members)—Summer Avenue has the Holy Trinity Community Church. The House of Glory Non-Denominational Church. The Memphis International Church. The New Tyler AME Church. In front of the tin building that contains the House of Glory stands a wooden cross, painted white. The House of Glory has no website I can find, no boasts that Memphis can hear. Small time churches in big time religion.

Where’s the glory in that?

The clerk at Gate City Hardware wants to talk about his hardware store, the 1925 building with its original green tile roof, the excellent service he provides to his customers. He doesn’t want to talk about why people don’t like Summer Avenue. When I ask, his face changes, stiffens. Maybe he’s guarded because he’s African American and all the customers and staff listening to his answer—including me—are white, and the reasons I’ve heard from storeowners for anti-Summer sentiment include, “white flight,” “the projects,” “low-income.” The clerk begrudgingly tells me that “parts of Summer” are the problem. “From here to downtown,” he says, pointing toward the river, “Summer is good.”

He’s pointing toward North Parkway.

Like everyone I ask, the clerk claims North Parkway as Summer. Also like almost everyone I ask, the problem area of the street is some other part. For the ha