I found another picture of my family taken in the early 50s, a candid shot in which no one is looking into or even seems to be aware of the camera. My mother crouches in the foreground, holding a camera of her own which she has aimed at something unseen that lies off to the side; my father stands farther back, hands on hips, his gaze following hers; my sisters stare off in the opposite direction altogether, oblivious to whatever it is that has drawn the interest of the grownups, and a fifth figure stands just out of sight, taking this picture of someone taking a picture, capturing four figures whose glances radiate outward beyond the fixed edges of the frame.

Because I cannot tell what kind of event is being recorded -- who took the shot, when, or why -- and because it is impossible to determine what anyone in the picture is actually looking at, the image seems oddly empty.

The more I study this snapshot, the more I seem to see an image on the verge of vanishing.

- from Always Missing Somebody (unpublished)

The earliest photograph I have seen of myself was taken when I was weeks old. My father is holding me almost effortlessly in one arm. He gazes into the face of this new baby, his third child, with what I take to be a kind of tender gravity. Or perhaps I simply wish it to be so, wish that his attitude at that moment might parallel what I feel now when I look at this picture of him. But whatever I wish, for all my invention, the picture keeps its secrets and, in the end, I can only gaze at it in wonder.

- from Always Missing Somebody

I still have the first book I ever grew attached to. The chapters have headings such as "Tom and Betty and Susan," "This is Pony," "A Surprise for Mother," "Something for Bunny." But the book opens, simply, with a chapter titled "Father": a tall man in suit and hat is pictured in late afternoon striding down a suburban street as his joyful children run to greet him. Nothing else happens in these first several pages, but nothing else needs to -- for the moment marks, in defiance of fate and dread, the miraculous reconstitution of a family made suddenly, magically whole.

I have kept that book for most of my life, and someday I may yet understand it.

- from Always Missing Somebody

My dear Son,

You asked me if I could feel a change in you thru your letters. Well, I can honestly say that your letters from the first have surprised me. I hope when we are together again we may continue the comradeship that I have enjoyed thru your letters. I think your mind is steadying. Of course you are changing but from everything I can read and feel, it is for the better. You know, there have been many times that I felt that you thought me just a little superficial. But I hope as you grow older you will realize that a giddy exterior often hides a lonely heart. And I hope, too, that you will never doubt the depth of my love for you or the intense pride I have in knowing that I have such a fine son. I only wish that your father might have lived to see you grow up. He would have been very proud of you too. You know that he was your age when he was in the last war and he would now be 45 years old...

The French scuttled their fleet today and I am glad to know that it did not fall into the hands of the Germans. I feel sure that the war cannot last so very much longer.

Good night, my son, and God keep you.

- from Somewhere in the Eighties (essay)

Of all these war shots I have seen, the one I like the most is a picture he took of two G.I.s in a clearing under a tree. One is sitting on an upended crate, cigarette in hand, towel draped over his t-shirt, helmet at his feet; the other is giving him a haircut. ("Joe Meccia doing cutting, Joe Ely in chair") Both of them are smiling, as if they take shy pleasure in posing for the picture. I have never seen a moment like this in a war movie. I imagine if I were ever to have talked with my father, he would have spoken of other such moments as he tried to convey what it meant to have gone off to war. And in that quiet conversation I might have discovered something about men that I have never yet managed to learn from a movie.

- from Always Missing Somebody

Dear Mother,

...This letter seems to be built on "ifs" but so is my life at this time. If we boys are not "iffing" about what we'd be doing in civilian life we are "iffing" about the army...

I want to say so many things but I cannot find the proper words. So far everything is all right. When I start to worry you should too.

Love, Son Bill

- from Somewhere in the Eighties (essay)

By the turn of the century my grandmother's family had homesteaded in Minnesota, and she was born there in a log cabin; within five years her father had constructed a 'big house' for his brood, as well as a post office and store. He named the whole complex after his first-born son. My father too dreamed of building his own home, and he and my mother moved after their marriage into a tiny place known as the 'pink house,' where they began a painstaking renovation. But work slowed as he began to sicken, and he died without completing the job. Within five years of his death the state had seized the property to make room for a new freeway. As children, we devised a game in memoriam for our house: whenever we rode that route we would try to guess the exact moment at which we were crossing over what had been our living room, or, depending on the lane we were in, our back yard. We lost those bearings too as years passed. But Leonard, Minnesota, can still be found on the map.

- from Somewhere in the Eighties (essay)

My Grandma Nelson was the slowest walker anyone swore they had ever seen, her two stick legs tottering down the street in ever uncertain relation to its surface, pure will hardly able to accept confinement to so frail a form. Her diaries, too, had this feeling of fitful propulsion, each day's events recorded with a doggedness that seemed to suggest, in its painstaking sweep, the exertions of a planet that must spin not at once, but degree by degree, as it laboriously traces its orbit.

- from Life in America (essay)

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...

- from Seattle & Vicinity (essay)

In the late 1930s my mother, then a young girl, assembled an album of pictures she had taken on family trips. Each photo is meticulously mounted on black paper above tiny captions written in white ink -- Our Picnic Table, Road Scene On Way Home, Bus Wreck. In later years, when she took pictures, she would throw the developed prints into drawers, loose, left to the hazards of history; but at least once early in life she devoted herself to painstaking efforts of preservation.

- from Always Missing Somebody

I examine her pictures again and again.

Suddenly, I experience a closeness that is unsettling. I am seeing the world through my mother's eyes, and it looms just ahead, an open expanse we are both about to wander into, with nothing to shield us but our expectations.

- from Always Missing Somebody

Along the way we were menaced by a daredevil who tried to run us off the twisty coastal precipice of Highway 1. The episode frightened us all, even my mother, who was clutching the wheel as if thinking this is what happens to women who are alone in the world. Somehow, we survived, pulled off the road and found a place where we could stay the night and wait for morning's light.

The motel we stayed at was overrun by crickets, as was the rest of the area that season, and my sisters and mother spent most of the night knocking the large brown insects off the ceilings and walls and away from our beds so that my brother and I, half-hysterical, could sleep.

- from Always Missing Somebody

There was a boy in the movie with a telescope who looked out his window and saw people swallowed up by the earth in his own backyard, and parents who didn't believe him but were soon discovered to be under the spell of the invaders themselves, and a happy ending that turned at the last moment into its opposite as the boy woke up from his nightmare only to see the Martian ship land all over again outside his window. It was a vision of reversal that I recognized and found reassuring.

- from Always Missing Somebody

Once upon a time I was someone's older sister... now, I have discovered that a whole set of relations disappears upon a death. What we think of as the roles that define us forever simply dissolve; we lose a way of being, and are faced with the task of shaping another life altogether out of what's left. Some fashion absence itself into a sustaining force, and in this paradoxical effort, I think, lies the truth of what we mean when we speak of living with loss.

Three months before my brother's death, he walked up to me and spoke quietly so that no one else could hear. Will you write about me? He paused, then elaborated, as if in response to my blank look. I don't want to disappear without a trace. I listened to these disturbing words and tried to remain calm. Of course I will, I whispered, but don't talk like that. He nodded his head and walked away, and for a moment he appeared almost peaceful.

- from Always Missing Somebody