The Page

I started writing things down about my father when I was young. I did not do it on purpose. I would come back from an afternoon with him and write a sentence about a thing I had seen him do, because otherwise the thing would slip, and I did not want the thing to slip. I kept the sentences in a drawer in my room and then in a drawer in the rooms I lived in after that.

I did not think of it as a record. I thought of it as something like what a person does with stones from a beach she cannot return to. She puts them in a jar and the jar is on a shelf and she does not take the stones out very often but she wants to know the jar is there.

When he died I did not open the drawer for a long time. Then one afternoon I opened it and took the pages out and read them in the order I had written them. There were more than I remembered. Some of them were only a line. He folded the napkin into quarters instead of thirds. He stood in front of the window for the length of one song on the radio and did not turn around. At the market he asked what the fig tasted like and I told him and he nodded and we walked on. Some were longer. There was one from a hallway when I was nine or ten that I had written in the same week I saw it and had not looked at since.

I read them all and then I sat in the chair by the window with the pages on my lap. He was not in the pages. I do not think he had ever been in the pages. What was in the pages was the hand that had written them — my hand, moving across the paper, sentence after sentence, for years. I had thought I was keeping him. I had been keeping the hand that reached.

I kept them. I have carried them with me since. I add to them less often than I used to. I do not add a sentence unless a sentence is there to be added, and most afternoons there is not one.

I have the pages in front of me now. The words are correct.