“I want to find the farm where The Prince fell off the silo,” I tell my father as we cross Route 8 and head into territory I haven’t visited in nearly thirty years.

“A farm like that won’t be there after all this time,” he says. Passing another new housing development, I see the sense of his caution, but I say, “Let’s find out.”

We drive for almost an hour, taking each of the through roads, looking for where The Prince, my grandfather, lived for nearly fifteen years in a sort of halfway house between a dissolved marriage and the...

“Party food” was a plate of “blind robins,” dried fish so heavily salted I thought I was swallowing ocean water. It was pig’s feet and liverwurst, olive loaf and summer sausage, three-bean salad and deviled eggs—all of it, even at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, preceded by a prayer that blessed our food and the wisdom of God that “passes all understanding.”

Always.

The earliest Saturday night get-together with relatives that I remember comes back to me because of something besides the food. My father scattered twenty of his records on the carpet of our living room and...

“You look like something the cat dragged in,” my mother would say, meaning the parts of me that were easily repaired—a wrinkled shirt, dirty fingernails, uncombed hair. “You look a little peaked,” she would say when my problems were difficult enough for the solutions of home remedies, her pick-me-up nostrums for paleness, listlessness, apathy, and the telltale look of down-in-the-dumps.

She had faith in what she prepared herself, tangible things to gargle or swallow or lay upon the skin, and when I complained, asking how they could work better than drugstore remedies, she said, “These things come from the...

When Mrs. Sowers, during the first week of sixth grade, showed us the canals of Mars, she traced the straight lines of them with the rubber tip of a wooden pointer. “Think of the Erie Canal,” she said, holding the stick against the poster-sized map of Mars. “Better yet, think of the Panama and the Suez,” she added, starting a list we were to memorize for one week’s worth of geography.

“It’s very likely,” she said, “there were countries on Mars that fought over their technological marvels,” and then she named, for our current-events lesson, the nations threatening war for...

The next spring, a boy named Jimmy Scharf dropped a pop-up lofted in an easy arc between first and second base during a recess softball game. “Butterfingers,” Charles Trout burbled, happy to be standing safely on first base instead of trudging back toward teammates who were anxiously listening, down two runs, for the bell that would say they’d lost.

Charles Trout didn’t say anything else, but Jimmy Scharf picked up the ball, got a running start, and threw it as hard as he could, from ten feet away, at Charles Trout, slamming him in the stomach.

Not one of us...

Old man Krause was one of those neighbors we thought we hated. Because he came outside to curse at us when a foul ball rolled into his yard. Because he’d hidden behind his shrubbery once and leapt out to pounce on a rolling softball, refusing to return it.

One afternoon, while we sat around complaining about adults, Charlie Schneider explained the theory of dog shit, how a burning bagful would draw the people we targeted to their front porches, where the men, especially, would stamp out the fire while we watched happily from a safely distant shadow. It seemed like...

Gottlob Lang, my grandfather, is locked out of his house. He tries each of the three doors and the four rear windows at street level, returns to the front porch and the door to the kitchen, where he knows his five children are sitting with his wife, her father, and two of her brothers; but he refuses to pound or threaten to break it down or shatter the glass on any one of the fourteen windows of the house on Prospect Street in Etna, Pennsylvania. He shouts, “You kids will regret this”—that he’s certain my grandmother wasn’t the one...

I sat in the audience, once, while a professor explained the Shroud of Turin to a hundred senior citizens. He had slides and sources. He waved a wand of light to trace the face of Jesus in case someone didn’t see it. “Look,” he said, “the eyes, the curve of lips exactly the same as in the pictures you know of Christ.”

He ran overtime with the possibilities of belief. Except for the professor and me, there wasn’t a person in the room under sixty, and I was betting myself that very few of them would stay for the second...

Church came first. God, then family—and my father was often furious with my failure to keep things holy. Silence was warm-up for worship. Sitting straight. And staying that way for an hour.

He told and retold the story of his father’s hand on his thigh, the tourniquet that clotted movement during church in order to make sure I understood that each Sunday began in discipline. Always, my sister and I sat on the left side, third pew from the back. My grandmother’s pew. Where she always sat on the end. Where my Aunt Margaret positioned herself between my sister...

Any Sunday morning, eight forty-five, from 1958 to 1963—my father sits in his Chevrolet station wagon with the engine running, my mother beside him, my sister in the back seat. I’m half dressed in my room, slowly buttoning my white shirt and hoping this will be the week he backs out of the driveway and leaves without me.

Instead, my mother, every time, comes inside and says, “Hurry now, before trouble starts,” and I finish knotting my blue or dark red tie, pick up my hand-me-down beige sport coat or, finally getting rid of that, my bought-new gray blazer,...

“This is where I fell and tore my arm open,” I say. “The time it got all infected.”

My wife smiles. She knows this story, how I scraped my arm playing with Keith Osborne, and because he was three years older, believed him when he said, “You’ll be OK,” after he ran water over it and covered the worst abrasions with Band-Aids so we could run back outside to chase a rubber ball we slammed against a wall to simulate a baseball game. I wore a long-sleeved shirt for the next two days, not telling anyone about my arm until...

Building a tennis court was a dream I shared with my father. Constructing it ourselves was his dream alone. But it seemed so easy, standing beside him in the middle of June near the edge of the twenty acres of land he’d just bought as an investment in his distant retirement that I estimated the end of July, August tops, and the two of us would be spinning out lime along the boundaries, getting things ready for play. He had me captive, because tennis was all I had wanted to do since May, when I’d reached the quarterfinals of the...

When I was in seventh grade, I stole things from stores. Second-hand.

A lot of seventh graders shoplifted. Sometimes I stood an aisle’s length away and watched them slip stuff inside their jackets, but I never touched one item. Other kids were eager to steal. A few of them, incredibly, were willing to steal for me.

What I coveted most in seventh grade were records—45’s. With my own money, I had to discriminate, make a choice between Buddy Holly’s “Maybe Baby” and Jack Scott’s “Goodbye Baby.” But when somebody at school wanted to show off, I accepted records by...

The first day I worked at the Heinz factory, near the end of the mandatory physical, I suddenly went cold and clammy. I started to stand, and a few seconds later, I found out I’d fainted when I snapped back to consciousness with the nurse screaming in my ear because I was sprawled on top of her after dragging her to the floor as I collapsed. It was less than half an hour since I’d punched in at 7:45 A.M.

Another voice calmed her screams. “Whoa there,” it said from somewhere overhead, and I felt a hand on my shoulder....

Frank Funovitz was throwing a rubber ball out the second-story window to the high school girl who lived beside the elementary school we were cleaning. “Look at that ass,” Funovitz said, so I nodded like I thought he expected me to. Her name was Doris, he’d told me, and she lobbed the ball up at us, but this time it bounced off the bricks six feet below the sill. “You wanna get in those pants?” he said.

I watched her retrieve the ball, admiring the way her shorts rode up tight when she bent over, but I didn’t want in...

My mother reused my father’s bakery bags. I carried my lunch in those bags, folded them, and brought them home for another use. Things were kept, according to my mother, because you could never tell when they might prove useful. All nails and screws. Every rubber band and paper clip. Adapters. Plugs. Buttons. String, wire, pins.

And every appliance that might be fixed when she had time to figure out its workings. Radios and televisions. Mixmasters and blenders. “She gets it from The Prince,” my father said more than once, “being so handy,” but after a while it seemed like...

The Prince, nearly every night, drank at the DOH. The social hall, according to my mother. The Hory-Gory, according to my grandmother—a name I was sure, even as a child, was a euphemism, something like gee-whiz or heck or dang. There was a time when my grade-school friends and I tried to guess what Hory-Gory stood for. What kind of whore? What sort of gore? And then I put it aside because my grandmother died, my grandfather was discreetly in a charity home, and I was capable, a teenager, of saying “Jesus Christ” and “hell” and “damn.”

All along,...

My father tells me to turn up Spencer Lane, the first time I’ve taken this road in thirty years. “Why?” I think of asking, but he’s sitting up so straight I know I don’t have long to wait.

“Look,” he says, after we make two right turns. The street is blocked by sawhorses with blinking lights. “Subsidence,” he says, “after all these years.”Road Closedis repeated on three signs, and I keep driving, allowing him to direct me through a loop of roads to the back side of Stoneridge, the housing plan that covers the hillside near his house....

Alcoholism is often called the “three-generation disease,” passed from parent to child to grandchild like hair color, dimples, or the shape of the nose.

“It runs in the family,” Aunt Margaret would always say when she talked about The Prince, citing the alcohol-related problems of my grandfather’s brother and the caution of her own brothers, how they avoided alcohol out of fear. Aunt Margaret and my mother and my Uncle Karl are long dead, but my father, at eighty-eight, continues to remind me about the evils of “the drink.” “I’ve never taken a sip,” he manages to work into our...

Our Hearts Keep Singingis the title of an old album I discover in a bin markedNothing over $2.99.The name of the group is Braillettes, who are pictured on the cover, three apparently blind women who beam their best version of good attitude toward an unseen camera. According to the jacket, they’ve been recorded by Heart Warming Records.

Last night I woke, saw nothing, and knew it was my Bill Nelson dream, the one where he makes change in the perpetual dark, handling each coin in his black purse until he’s satisfied which ones accurately pay for his...

Aretaeus, a third-century Greek physician, found enough anecdotal evidence for the cyclical nature ofdyspnea(labored breathing) to declare, “The evil is much worse in sleep.”

When I read about Aretaeus and his medical colleagues, the dark settles like an unshakable superstition. I nod assent to this ancient observation of evening’s threat. More than twenty years into full-blown asthma, I’ve suffered four or five attacks per year in daylight, one per week in the dark.

Circadian rhythms are the cycles our bodies go through over a twenty-four-hour period. We’re tuned to a daily clock; we’re cycled for strength and memory,...

In every one of my childhood comic books, the drop-from-heights victims always did more than merely fall. They needed to have an expression of absolute terror as their arms spread wide in panic, and they were always looking up at whoever was still standing at the edge of a cliff or the roof of a skyscraper or the doorway of a helicopter in flight.

They plummeted. For two or three panels, they screamed aieeeeee! or yaaaahhhh! as they vanished into a speck I knew was blood and guts and shattered bones.

Those falls were more frightening to me than being...

For three weeks, each time I’ve called my father, no one has answered. I’ve allowed the phone to ring twenty times. I’ve counted because I want to be certain I can tell him how far I’ve gone to account for his near-deafness, his arthritis. How long I’ve waited in case he was outside trying to fumble his house key into the lock, nervous because the floodlight that illuminates the front porch and the driveway hasn’t been replaced after months of being burnt out.

Altogether, I’ve called seven times, once each on every night of the week, staggering the attempts over...

One evening, when I was eleven years old, my mother wrote down everything I said, smiling as my sentences, spoken faster and faster, sped into a stutter of stupid phrases I machine-gunned out to keep her from recording every word. Minutes later, those fast-talk fragments made me sound like an idiot when she read each one exactly back from her perfect shorthand.

She handed me her soft-bound notebook to examine. On the two pages she’d filled was nothing but curves and loops and squiggles. Those marks looked like something you’d write if you slept in a crib. It seemed to...

By myself, late in the summer, I walk to the cemetery nearest my house, and for a moment, because I’ve traveled two miles into the country and I approach on foot, I look over my shoulder like an amateur vandal come to spray-paint the monuments.

The single-lane cemetery road winds up a small rise toward the beginning of a thick patch of oak and maple. Near the edge of the woods, I choose the grave with the brightest cut flowers, cross ten steps of perfectly mown grass, and pay attention to last week’s date below the name of a woman...

When my uncle, a son of The Prince, discovered I was writing about my grandfather, he sent me a long, handwritten letter that detailed “the good” in his father. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “your contact with Gottlob was in the later years of his life.”

He listed the jobs The Prince had held, including foreman at the Steel Spring Company (“a position of responsibility”), saying nothing, like my other uncle, about having to do his later janitorial work for years. “He cut our hair,” my uncle went on. “He soled our shoes and remodeled the house. He did all the carpentry,...