My father leans against the mantelpiece and begins to load his pipe with tobacco whose aroma bestows a presence on thirty vanished years. That aroma and the smell of the smoke that follows it are to me the quintessence of memory. But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows it. He is sixty-four years old now, and well deserving of deep chairs and care and dottle dreams and carping cronies — should he desire these. He might say, with ample reason: ‘I’m old now. I’ve earned my rest.’ But he doesn’t. He says: ‘You know, I like South
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