I am reading a letter Wallace Stegner 30 years ago wrote his mother after she had been gone 30 years, on the brink of his 80th. At the suggestion of Wayne Horovitz who also has an evening-length through-composed oratorio about Joe Hill based on “the preacher and the slave”.

I admit I futzed around on the Internet thinking about fantasy football and Kailua, Hawaii before actually settling down to page twenty-two. And this, which I guess is like a procrastination from actually doing the heavy lifting – – reading .

But I am reminded —and did I already say I lost my mom exactly 3 years, or three years and three weeks ago? —Of visiting my father’s business, an auto lot in Cupertino, Calif., now about a mile from the Apple spaceship and it is a grocery? Well, big box fancy grocery.  And I got separated and went to the receptionist and asked where everybody was and she held the intercom to my face and I yelled

MOM WHERE ARE YOU?!

All the salesman leaned into the show room and craned their respective necks and bemused faces in my direction. Sure enough my mom reappeared.

Mom, where are you?