I once knew a woman who spent most of her life in one city, who spoke often of "taking off" but never did, who reacted to the tumult of that life by screaming, in what became an incantation, "I could write a book about it," but never did, who until the moment of her death was restive and unsettled and, I think, still screaming, still trying to take off. The woman was my mother, and the city she lived in was the one that I left, long ago...