Garret Keizer

Our daughter talked early and walked late and was a lover of books even before she could talk. So it is not always easy to reconstruct the chronology of her enthusiasms for the stories we read to her and the make-believe they inspired, especially now that she is a few years older than her mother and I were at her birth. The difficulty has not deterred us: “Storytime” has become a story in itself for our family, a mythology all our own, though the telling calls up emotions any aging parent might claim.

The Perennial Pull of a Mysterious Direction

Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-​engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his barbed fork, which strikes a boy as so much more interesting than a shepherd’s crook or a prophet’s staff.

Once the fastest-​growing city in America and its fourth largest, the cradle of Motown music is now the country’s leader in urban decline. Its population peaked in 1950; since then, it has lost nine of ten manufacturing jobs and 63 percent of its residents.

Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.