I remember the first time my mother looked at me and placed me somewhere else in time. In her mind I was still young. Not a child exactly, but not the man sitting in front of her. She did not lose my name that day. She lost the date of me. She shifted me backward along the curve of her life and anchored me in a room that only she could see. She could still tell stories from long ago with the detail of a careful archivist. She remembered a laugh in a kitchen full of steam, the shade of a coat she wore to a winter market, the smell of newspapers that stained her fingertips. But the present slipped. It would not hold.
