![]() He left life the same way he’d always preferred to commute: early in the morning, alone. My father died last November, before the pandemic, in a twin bed in a nursing home in Maryland, his thin legs bent and tented by blankets. Before the pandemic and this endless indoor season, I didn’t realize how much, in my desert city, I located myself in time-space according to quantum shifts in my environment: I know it is winter when the air goes thin and chill, perfumed with citrus I find myself in spring when the atmosphere thickens, when the skies bruise and spill hot raindrops the size of pancakes I am secure, if restless, in summer when the air is heavy and toxic as mercury, creosote crosswinds mixing with exhaust on the freeway, a dust storm coming, the premature night of the monsoon. ![]() Unattached, unanchored, I am nowhere in place, nowhere in time. Indoors, some remnant of sun moves across the floor each day, but my house may as well be spinning in a cyclone. Another day done.įrom inside, the sun is of less utility when it comes to marking larger units of time-weeks, months-because I live in Phoenix, where the sun is mostly static and unrelenting. In the evening, the sun sinks behind the block wall and the glare disappears from the television-lagoon-eyed Chris Cuomo or Anderson Cooper in full HD, the dust motes and fingerprints on the screen now invisible, forgiven, but the news so vividly bad-I count three more hours till bedtime. All morning, the cats laze in parallelograms of sun from the sliding doors along the back of the house around the time they migrate to the warm, westerly windows at the front of the house, I know I should eat something. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner jittering on the water to make a shabby imitation of the northern lights dance on my wall. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. The unique circumstances around the creation of this piece pushed me to do something formally I never would have done, beholden as I was to my sense of time.” ![]() Now old, now young, now here, now gone.” Where are her father’s memories stored? Where are her future memories of past experiences with her father stored? “This essay is as much about writing as it is about grief, my dad, the pandemic,” Avery writes in her author’s note: “I found my way back to writing, but with a new ability to refigure my experience, to fold it and visualize it differently than I would have before. “Around and around the one-sided loop we go. Time stretches and folds over on itself in an unending Möbius strip of memory and experience and imagined experience. During the pandemic, the writer finds herself “unattached, unanchored, nowhere in place, nowhere in time.” Her essay on her father and his death and her grief is anchored in figures and shapes and puzzles: the ambigrams that her father loved (“the kind where a word reads the same backwards and forwards, right side up and upside down”) the tangram puzzle that obsessed him (“if you could make fourteen different convex polygons, you could count yourself as a grand master”) the engrams or “memory traces” that fascinate her (“the physical structure-the neural substrate-responsible for storing and recalling memories”). Among the beautiful sensory details that open Andrea Avery’s creative nonfiction essay “Father/Figure” are “parallelograms of sun” from the sliding doors at the back of the house the passing of time during the day is marked by the migration of her cats from one space of sun to another.
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