...written to Mona July 19, 2000, in a journal I plan to give her in another ten years or so:

Mona, you have already discovered the ciphers and marks that make words and numbers. You point them out in books, on mailboxes and doors, in the street, and even on the leg of your father's blue running shorts, which I sleep in sometimes. "ABC!" you cry, and bouying that exclamation is the effervescence of new discovery. I'm remembering that one of your father's favorite words was frisson and a favorite phrase was corpus callosum--the thick cord of nerve that unites one side of the brain with the other, marries one side of the physical self with its mate. An experiment once was carried forward with a man whose corpus callosum was irretrievably damaged: he was asked to look at a simple object and speak its name. He couldn't.

Then he was asked to write it, and he could.

Was that the story? I can't quite tell now.

Your father told it, but he never wrote it down. He told it to me, but I also never recorded it. So now I can't say it. Such is the power of the written word, that it can capture frail moments in amber.

You are growing up in a world that affords us a torrent of words and memory through the Internet--if I could conceive of the right phrases to search, I could probably find an old abstract of the original study of this singular malady. But I'll come up with nothing if I search what I'd like, which is, "That oddity of science, the corpus callosum, Gil's version."

Such is the power of people, the way they light fires in their own words, the way these fires die down after, and burn only in memory.

Your words now, Mona, at not quite two years old, and the way you say them, are so precious, so fragile in time. One day last summer you had only one sound, a dove's cooing that you never seemed to tire of. When I brought you here July 4 you had a hundred fine words but then one day you were combining them in pairs and now you speak whole sentences with thrilling emphatic stamps. "Change the diaper," "Effanu [elephant] flying!" "I cooking!" "People's houses." All so emphatic, and coming at me so fast I can hardly record it, much less the little gestures so nearly impossible to describe...

...End of entry. What else was happening that day, where we were and what we did, I can't remember. All but this was excised from memory by successive days, and selves, that sever me from who I was in the name of going on.