In high school, students wrote religious inscriptions in each other s autograph books. One inscription read A place for me in your album, A place for me in your heart, A place for us in Heaven, Where true friends never part. Each story my mother tells represents a victory over time, a fragment of the old world she has snatched from oblivion to give to her grandchildren. Yet her e-mails convey a still more decisive victory. It lies not in what she writes but in her voice.
Mom is now eighty-two.
She uses a cane indoors and a walker outdoors. On good days, she paints she s working on portraits of our children but she has to tuck her walker under her easel for support. On bad days, she sits in her easy chair. Her age presents itself in the quavery handwriting in her letters, the phrases she misses when we speak over the telephone. The exception is her e-mails.