Memoir Revisited

Dear Readers:

During the decade of the 1980s I nagged aging parents to write their life stories, hoping to preserve their memories for posterity. No one complied. So, after my father and father-in-law died, and my mother’s memory had gone around the bend, I resorted to pestering Patsy. After all, she was a retired English teacher who loved to regale us around the dinner table with tales of her youthful exploits. Fast forward to the new millennium and our home in Arizona. It was the year 2004 and Patsy came for a Christmas visit. Keeping busy with an endless “to-do” list, I scarcely noticed a delivery for her arriving several days before the Big Eve. She promptly squirreled herself away with bows and wrapping paper. At the grand opening of gifts, each of us received a bound copy of The Freedom of the Open Road, A Memoir of Patricia Mary Schwartz Peterson. I was delighted and, in my enthusiasm, failed to read the disclaimer printed at the bottom of the cover “as told to Mary O’Brien Tyrell”. The plot thickens.