We even knew the dogs. The stray dog who came to my grandmother’s house and was named Wilkie as a joke because of course everyone was for Roosevelt. The dog Coco that fought with Wilkie every day until my grandmother came outside and poured a pitcher of water on them. Coco belonged to the Hanes family across the street who had four boys. The last one died in October and Mother went to his funeral. She called me afterward and asked: “Who was Jerry’s older brother? The one who was on Iwo Jima?”

My sister and I memorized mother’s book talks as well since they were the soundtrack of our lives. When mother cooked or drove or ironed or vacuumed she recited books on low volume. Friends, over for the first time, would stare warily and whisper, Your mother is talking to herself. That was our life. Mother down on her knees with a hammer tacking up a piece of loose upholstery, all the time intoning, “Grace Graham Vanderbilt’s dresses were so heavy with beads they couldn’t be hung but were laid on shelves in clouds of white tissue paper.”

Now when mother calls me she says: “Oh, Beth, I’m losing it.You can purchase Cheap Designer Celebrity gowns Online easily. What is the name of Edith Wharton’s house? I’ve been there. And that book I loved.Formal Wholesale Cheap Designer Long Evening Dresses and gowns will have you looking your best. I used to know it by memory. I want a picture of that house.”

When she first started “losing it,” I took a Buddhist approach.fashion styles of Wholesale Short Wedding Gowns, “Loss is the order of the universe, Mother. Don’t grasp at these memories; the memories are not you. The only thing you have is now.”

My sister bought her a statue of Buddha and I bought her a book of Buddhist meditations, one for every day of the year. But mother is not interested in shedding the identity she has enjoyed for so long. She Googles frantically and prints out reams of paper on all the topics she is trying not to forget. Then she Xeroxes so she can enlarge the tiny print, but sometimes she cuts off a part of the text and has to Xerox again. The papers pile up and slide off her desk and onto the floor where she trips over them. “Stop printing," I say, “Leave the information in the computer where you can find it.” But she won’t stop; she wants to hold everything in her hand.

And I dig through Mother’s hundreds of scrapbooks in her bedroom, on the porch, in her two storage units in the basement until I find a photo of her outside The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Mass.

I am suited to this role because I inherited my parents’ prodigious memories and love of stories. Friends can’t believe that I remember their mother’s maiden name or the name and escapades of their old boyfriends. They speak as if I can pole vault. It’s not a skill,Find gorgeous mother of the bride dresses in Wholesale Cheap mother of the bride dresses. I say. It’s not something I’ve had to work at. It’s a gift much like having blue eyes or nicely shaped fingernails. I appreciate it. I like remembering lines from plays so I can say them for fun. I love seeing a former student and being able to shriek out his name.

But I’m old now, too. My memory is slipping away and I have no illusion that my sons will keep my memories for me. Children no longer live their parents’ lives as my sister and I did. Parents live their children’s lives. Their activities become ours. When I look at the multiple bumper stickers on cars now I try to imagine my father having had any kind of bumper sticker on his car much less one that paraded my personal interests: drama, debate. It wasn’t his job to be interested in our activities or to facilitate our social lives. It was his job to pass on his values to us. And it was a full-time job. Oh, my father smiled at my friends as he passed them in the hallway of our home, but he didn’t cultivate them and adore them as I do the friends of my children or the friends of my parents. He didn’t memorize and savor their names. One of my friends in high school he always referred to as “the little girl with the broken leg,” though she had broken her leg when she was 3.

I care for the generations before and after me.Our dressestmall offer are large variety of Prom Dresses, I live the lives of both, and my head is full of names. I don’t expect my children will memorize every detail of my life and guard and conserve my memories for me. That is why I prepare myself now. I try to imagine losing my memory, my starkest talent, my most characteristic feature. I try to imagine who I will be without it. I try to imagine myself as my mother, alone without her partner who shared her memory, trying to sweep everything up before it blows away.

But I can’t imagine for long. Mother is on the phone. “Oh, Beth,” she said. “Ruth died.” Ruth Jones, mother’s roommate all four years in college. A music major, as Mother always said, from Bastrop, Tex.
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