past. I saw that my tower was made of stories in two senses of the word. I experienced this not as a pun but as an enigmatic metaphor. I assumed there must be a reason that buildings were said to be made out of narratives or, conversely, that narratives were seen to be the stacked components of mysterious towers in some way I couldn’t grasp. Maybe it had something to do, I thought, with the Tower of Babel. I wanted to ask my grandfather, but then I would have to explain to him exactly how my grandmother made use of the cards. I felt that he would approve of her telling stories, or at least the
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