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Show A PROPER INTRODUCTION-27 "Where are her dancers?" I'm standing, almost accusing. My father looks surprised. "How should I know? Your mother had then packed someplace." " I ' l l find them." I say. I feel eager, as if at last I have something important to do. I had no idea my parents' house had so many closets, so many boxes and cabinets, footlockers, and suitcases; nor, until now, going through the den, did I realize they owned so many books. In a box in the den, underneath the old set of The Book of Knowledge, is Mother's old Christian Science hymnal that her mother gave her when she was still following the religion of her childhood. I remember she told me many years ago, obviously before she joined Dad's Unitarian Church, how God could heal people, even raise them from the dead. She used to sing me her favorite hymn before I went to skeep: "Shepherd show me how to go o're the hillside steep, how to gather, how to sow, how to feed thy sheep." In those earlier days, Mother sang as she did the housework, with a sound held low in her throat so it was more a kind of moaning, like wind in a small valley. My most vivid memory of her singing was when she stretched the curtains after she washed them by hooking the damp, lacy edges onto tiny sharp edges attached to a big rectantular wooden frame. Looking now at the hymnal, I realize that she had always encouraged my singing, but she herself had fallen silent over the years. She used to sit at the kitchen table for hours with a cup of coffee, flutter her hand and make l i t t le sounds in her throat, nod, and t i l t her head. "I'm thinking," she had said, and she wrote notes to herself. When I was older I found one beneath a pile of old papers: "If God is love, then where is human love? Get Tillich. |