I kept my maiden name because the person who created that childhood scrawl was too precious to me to let disappear. Fighting against entropy is one of my deepest passions. I refuse to allow the chaos of death and loss to win. Each person who would be gone must be saved by spreading memories of them to others so that, in some sense, they're not really gone as long as someone remembers them. It's my job to share the memories that bring these people back to life.

I created this website to do exactly that - to create a picture, in words and images, of the father I never knew. And each person who wanders by my site takes with them a small piece of father, so that he lives again in all of us.

Memories are a marvelous gift. When you've shared some experience with another person, reminding them of those times can recover for them a memory that they may have lost. When I build a website of my high school or my grammar school, I do it partly to remember for myself, and partly as a gift for those who may have forgotten. And to make sure that my classmates, themselves, will not be forgotten.

Whatever we were studying in school was a topic of conversation in the evening. And, as she did throughout my college days, mother was my tutor. I find within my packrat papers my mother's notes on government, and my own 8th grade paper summarizing those notes. Eight years later I can remember mother staying up through the night to help me with my paper on ancient Hittite pottery. And that was when she had to go to work the next morning!

I wasn't the only one to love dressing up. Years after grandmother had long stopped being a practical nurse, she still wore her nurse's uniform. And on New Years Eve mother would put on her black velvet evening gown that came from nightclub days with father, and I'd get to toast the New Year (if I managed to stay awake that long) with coke in a wineglass that still sits on my shelf.

As a third generation packrat, I still have mother's cape, and grandmother's furs, and mother's Betsy Ross costume. Not only that, but I still have my own long, brown braids, my baby curls and my mother's long, dark tresses from her own adolescence.

Forced to leave school after third grade, Daddy educated himself. A box of pamphlets on English grammar was always on the living room table, and he took for granted that we all shared his love of learning.

Grandmother was the emotional heart of the family, with a quick temper but a limitless supply of love. She would sit on the porch with me for hours, making toys out of folded newspaper and telling me stories and singing songs that can still make me cry as much as they did her.

Where I was kept close to the house, Bob was allowed to roam far and wide. As a result, he was rarely home and the age difference kept us from knowing each other well. Because I knew him so slightly, my brother was a figure of immense romance to me. His games with me were boisterous and sometimes scary. My most vivid memory is of his holding me over the trap door to the basement of a house under construction and threatening to drop me. Playing with a little sis was not his idea of a good time.

I understand they called out my name as absent at Bowen for several weeks.