What if the past were gone? No, I can't imagine that would work. I fell off a sweaty pony once and knocked the past out of me. I had amnesia for an hour or two. Very strange and lonely.

Maybe it is the pretending that the past is known, maybe it is not fully celebrating the unknown, leaving room for the cracks it creates, like growing moss between stepping stones. It can be beautiful.

Drake sailed by what he could not see. My own father, partaking in the tradition of not being known, sat in his white chair in the front room. Sometimes with a dog on his lap, sometimes with a grandchild, sometimes mostly with a newspaper. I sailed by him.

Stories of the fathers fathers father: my father's father's father farmed and named Larkin Valley. He came to this country via the potato famine express. His wife died when the last son was born. It is said a housekeeper stayed with them after that. There were five or six boys. It could not have been an easy life. He lived not far from where Patricks grandfather went when he did not come home from the Korean War. My friend Patrick, not my bother Patrick.

We are made of history, known and unknown. I wonder if the mandate of not being seen, fear of being noticed comes from my great grandmother Anne Green. If she was seen for who she was, divorced, she would have lost her employment. I wonder if it just comes from being immigrants?

When I was in junior high school I came home from school and tossed my coat on the bed. My mother reacted urgently, Never put your coat on a bed! Hang that up!

She had that tone in her voice of one about to yell Fire! I think it startled both of us. I sure did pick up the coat with a tone like that in the air... We sort of looked at each other. like, what had just happened... Why? I asked her. Why can't you put a coat on a bed?

I don't know , she said. Your grandmother was always insistent about that. Never put a coat on the bed.

So we called her, my mother's mother and we asked... Why not put the coat on the bed?

Once when she was a little girl she went to a friends house and put her coat on the bed. She came home and put the coat on her own bed. And a bed bug infestation broke out. Bed bugs everywhere. It was terrible. Tons of washing to do, before they had washing machines, lots of bites and it took forever to get rid of them. The bugs were in their hair. It was terrible. And there was the guilt of she was the one who brought the creatures in. Guilt and bugs in 1911.

So here we were, my mom and me, in about the same year the first painting came into the house, 1966. Urgently removing a coat from a bed 55 years later. To this day I will not put my coat on a bed. It just has an uncomfortable feel to it.