Table of Contents
Author's Note xi
I
We Begin 3
Mommy & Me 5
Happy Chicken: 1942-1944 11
Discovering Alice: 1947 41
District School #7, Niagara County, New York 45
Piper Cub 55
After Black Rock 61
Sunday Drive 69
Fred's Signs 81
"They All Just Went Away" 85
"Where Has God Gone" 109
Headlights: The First Death 135
"The Brush" 141
An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend 145
"Start Your Own Business!" 183
The Lost Sister: An Elegy 201
Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time 223
II
Detroit: Lost City 1962-1968 269
Story Into Film: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" And Smooth Talk 277
Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, Nyc, March 6, 1970 285
Food Mysteries 293
Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988 299
A Letter to My Mother Carolina on Her Seventy-Eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994 325
"When I Was a Little Girl and My Mother Didn't Want Me" 331
III
Excerpt, Telephone Conversation with My Father Frederic Oates, May 1999 339
The Long Romance 341
My Mother's Quilts 345
Afterword 349
