Take Us Away, Roger

These names are best kept in mind rather than boxed and put away somewhere. Old letters are engrossing but feel historic in numbers, photo albums delightful but with a glum after-kick like a chocolate caramel. Home movies are killers: Zeke, a long-gone Lab, alive again, rushing from right to left with a tennis ball in his mouth; my sister Nancy, stunning at seventeen, smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette aboard Astrid, with the breeze stirring her tied-up brown hair; my mother laughing and ducking out of the picture again, waving her hands in front of her face in embarrassment — she’s about thirty-five. Me sitting cross-legged under a Ping-Pong table, at eleven. Take us away.

There are a few moments in Roger Angell’s essay about life at 93 in this week’s New Yorker that registered as a gut check for me; this was one of them. [TNY]