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There are sides of our parents that most of us never see, the other people they are when they are alone in the dark. Like the passing through the shadow of death, in the realm of the memory, we are always alone. Only here and there, scattered throughout our adult households with the rest of the accumulations of chance, do we find tangible evidence of our parents’ favorite pastimes, their sins, their secrets. It is the nature of time to eat all such proof.

As my father was dying of cancer -- slowly, languidly, reclined on a rented hospital bed like an ancient Roman senator -- he began to lose his memory. Gradually at first, a name gone, then an anecdote, then accelerating quickly to wipe out most of the 1940s, often including the entirety of his first and second marriages. As he declined, his brain started throwing out anecdotes randomly, like rats leaving a sinking ship. Startling, unverifiable stories flew out of his mouth. The time he and his best friend from high school found the Lindburgh baby, for instance. My doctor grandfather’s retirement, when his patients lined up in the streets three deep to beg him not to go. The time my brother won the Nobel Prize. Told, then forgotten as easily as they tumbled out of his failing mind.

Who could say which of the tales were true? As a junior high schooler, I was just the open-mouthed listener, unable to weigh probabilities amidst the torrent of indiscriminate storytelling. Accounts of mundane days in his twenties, remembered with excruciating specificity. The day World War II ended, the day his neighbor was taken away to a Japanese internment camp. An affair he’d had with an older man, a New York judge, during a break from college during the Great Depression, a dapper man who had bought him his first bowler hat. And, increasingly, stories about my mother in her younger days, recognizable in the lascivious details even on the occasions when he mixed her name up with that of another flame. To the critical ears of a twelve-year-old, it all sounded dubious.

Yet after his death, I found the bowler hat in his closet, wrapped like a beloved mummy in layer upon layer of antique tissue paper. I have the hat still. Like his tales of paramours past, I kept that particular piece of verification out of sight of the rest of the family.

Years went by, and I pushed the stories my father had told me into the back of my mind. Then one evening, when I was in graduate school, my mother suddenly became communicative in the middle of a crowded San Francisco restaurant. Over Korean barbecue pork, so spicy-hot it made my eyes water, Mother abruptly began telling me what Daddy was like in bed. The same way my father had told the long-lost tales of his youth, in painstaking detail. The flowers he brought. The things he whispered. The ways they had sex.

I shouldn’t have been shocked. This was, after all, the woman who had held me captive at fourteen on a long car trip and described the loss of her virginity in glowing detail, regardless of my teenage mortification. The woman who filled my room in junior high with the works of Erica Jong and Henry Miller. The woman who would occasionally run into old lovers during our shopping trips to Berkeley, and embarrass us all by pointing out how similar my body was getting to hers. I always thought she was just a chatty exhibitionist.

But this time, as I systematically dissected my pork rib, there was something different in the way she related the facts, a quality reminiscent of my father’s near-death trances. She closed her eyes, trying to picture what the room was like the night they made me. She recalled what perfume she was wearing. She remembered the piece of furniture, now long relegated to the dump, where I was conceived.

With a jolt, I realized that I had heard this story before, from Daddy. It had not been a crazed product of a failing mind, but the truth, only slightly varnished by the glow of memory. Perhaps, like the long-defunct bowler hat, my very existence was a memento of passion past.

Watching her face, lit with the impassioned glow of a fifteen-year-old Juliet, it hit me with the force of a sudden sneeze that my mother was still in love with my father. He had died more than seven years before. The impulse to tell her the saga of the bowler hat died on my tongue.

“I never told you that,” she says now, fifteen years later, when I remind her of the Korean restaurant. Memories fade, and not all recollections are for sharing. Soon, I shall be the only person living who remembers the details of my own conception. The wine my parents drank, a heavy red from Medoc. The music that was playing, something by Brahms, whom I hate. My older brother, safely bunked down in the crib that would shortly be mine. And, of course, the sexual position from which I came, the one that shattered the already unstable kitchen table into smithereens, while a long-outgrown bowler hat, protected from dust by the wrappings of years, rested peacefully in the closet of another room.

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©2006 Anne Mini
Raconteuse, gourmet, and bon vivant Anne Mini is a native Californian and a recovering child of former bohemians. She is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago, and taught in the political science department at the University of Washington. She eventually saw the light, however, and chucked the politics of academia to devote her full attention to writing, editing and breathing. She is the author of A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick and the insights which regularly appear in her column. She lives and scribes in Seattle.