Free Of Time and Memory by Don J. Snyder Page B

father met Peggy. It was a vacation for both of them. They drove in my father’s green Chevrolet convertible. They were carefree days, the two of them best friends, sleeping out at night under the stars.
    He has a photograph he took of my father when they stopped for a night in Bar Harbor, Maine. In front of a shoe store my father is standing in a pair of enormous shoes, size sixteen or seventeen. He is looking down at his feet and laughing.
    Tom’s sister, Lorraine, has written me from Florida to tell me about the days when my father was dating her. She was his first date after he returned home from the war. “He was very romantic,” she has written. “He wrote me letters after each date.” On one date they took a picnic supper to the Jersey shore. They stayed late after everyone else had left the beach. My father climbed up into the lifeguard stand and gave a Tarzan yell.
    There is another photograph, of my father and Tom and two young women at Greenlake Park where they had gone for my father’s twenty-first birthday. Tom is laughing in the photograph as my father sneaks behind one of the girls and puts up two fingers behind her head.
    I have no memories of my father as a carefree man. He was always kind, but never carefree. I remember when we lived onClearspring Road he had a push lawn mower and I would walk beside him as he mowed the grass. He always mowed from right to left and I walked along beside him, to his right, in the lane he had just made with the mower. There was only the clicking of the blades as they spun through the grass. I would ask him questions and he would answer me, but our conversation quickly lapsed into silent stretches that he never broke. I remember vividly how, on one occasion, he explained to me what a “perfect game” was in baseball.
    Then he bought a power mower, and the gasoline engine made too much noise for dialogue. I still walked beside him. I remember seeing his lips move sometimes, and I realized that he was talking to himself as the power mower pulled him along.
    Tom Pugles and I are the last to leave the diner. A young waitress is wiping off the tables around us when Tom tells me that after Peggy’s death my father confided to him that he was going to kill himself by driving onto the railroad tracks on Broad Street in Lansdale, in front of the express train from Philadelphia. In the weeks after Peggy’s death, Tom would sit up all night with my father, drinking coffee and smoking Salem cigarettes. Tom was working as a state trooper in those days. He wanted me to know about one night in particular. He had gone straight to my father’s apartment without taking the time to change out of his uniform. When he was walking to the front door he saw my father running from window to window, locking them, and then the front door. “Your father was convinced that I had come to arrest him and put him in jail for Peggy’s death,” he tells me.
    That night Tom had stood outside the front door calling to my father until he finally opened the door. Then he carefully explained to him that he had not killed Peggy. A fewnights later Tom didn’t have time to change out of his uniform before he went to visit my father, and the same thing happened again. In his sadness my father seemed to have lost his mind.
    I am sinking into the horror of this image of my father, and the words on my mother’s hospital record.…
    It is all becoming very real to me for the first time in my life. I can see the waitress standing behind Tom, waiting for us to get up so she can clear our table. Tom is talking about my father before Peggy’s death, his great optimism, his smile, and the way he could dance the jitterbug. People always loved to see Dick Snyder coming in their direction. Never a mean thing to say about anyone. Always forgiving.
    I am listening but I see him locking the door, running from window to window, locking them as well. Each day a