Author of The Nearly Departed Or, My Family and Other Foreigners

“i have been in tens and tens of houses since aff-rica.”

When the weather's bad, Mom gets in the car and backs up to visit Dad. It's about fity feet in reverse from her house to his, behind the garage. I don't know which is more dangerous—her driving or her walking. A month ago, she hit a tree. This was right after Christmas. She says it got in the way when she swerved off the road to avoid a jogger. “A jogger with antlers?” asked Eric, my brother's fifteen-year-old son. Mom has a tendency to “see” things, not just because she wears three pairs of glasses, one on top of the other, but because her vision, her perception of the world, is so brilliantly impaired.

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Published by Little, Brown and Company