Page 37 - WhyAsInY

Chapter Three
Who Are These People? (Part 1)
FROM LATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Wherein the author attempts to tell what little he knows of his mother’s antecedents and describes his mother as he experienced her when he was her (only) child.
Now, with my parents having been reunited, I think that it is a good time to tell you some things about who they were before they united in the first place and started the, according to them, near- impossible job of contending with their only child. I would also like to devote this and the next chapter to giving the reader some feeling for who my parents appeared to me to be when I was a younger child and they were a young woman and a young man, not just because of their importance to me and the fact that they will no doubt reappear as we plunge forward in time but also because I feel that I owe that to them. Unfortunately, we all too often best remember our parents when they were older and have lost some of their vivacity, but, if only for my own sake, I’d like to preserve some of their youth.
This chapter will be devoted primarily to my mother and her for- bears; the next chapter will be devoted primarily to my father and his.
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