I can hardly remember my brother anymore. It makes me melancholy. In my mind, I can see him at age five or six, romping with me on Twenty Fifth Street. His name was Richard and, to me he was Ricci. He was stabbed to death long ago and now, I can scarcely remember him. I feel guilty for my forgetfulness. My mother has died, too, and so has my mother-in-law. I remember them better, but I feel guilty. Why didn't I make sure that my mother understood how much I admired her. She strived diligently to be a good mother under difficult circumstances. Mothering is the most demanding occupation. I was a bane when I should have been a blessing and I neglected to say thank you. Mother's name was Ruth, but everyone called her Jean and now, fifteen years after the fact, I can't even say, "thanks, Mom, thanks for everything! Good job!" Slowly her image recedes in my cluttered, selfish mind. It makes me feel guilty. And, Thelma, my wife's mother, everybody called her "Jake;" her life wasn't easy and Rebecca, my wife, loved her. I should have helped more and been a son. I've come a far road, from no place to no place through the crowded carnival of my days, too self-absorbed. Thank heaven for Rebecca. For over thirty-five years, thank heaven for Rebecca. That makes me feel guilty, too. I should have done so much more for her and made her life better and easier. I've been more than a burden. It's my abiding regret. Thoughts of her monopolize my mind, day and night. Being apart from her is an agony. I long for the opportunity to make her life better and fuller. In my sixty-three years I've come to nothing. I really tried to do good and to help people. I tried to express encouragement and happiness. Instead, for twenty-five years, I've languished useless, in prison cells. It seems to me that I've been treated much more harshly than others are treated. I seem to have endured endless Draconian bias with no rational justification. what ever I've done, real of imagined, I've paid for long ago. Now it's just torment. Something in my aura excites the deepest resentments and fears in officials. I didn't kill, or maim or cripple. I'm not violent or dishonest, but some flaw in my personality, like a lash caught in an eye, irritates the authorities so that they never get finished inflicting their animosity. There once was a fine girl named Sheliach, my cantor, who said that I behaved as if I recognized a person's deepest secrets. It made the person feel exposed and resentful. Sheliach is gone, too, dead these twenty years, long before her time. Her memory is slipping away from me like the departing tide. She was an exemplary woman who didn't even have the chance to rear her own daughter, Reward. I feel guilty losing her memory. I've even lost track of her daughter. Who blesses the dead upon the holy days? Who remembers the teeming trillions who have eaten breakfast and died, whose treasures litter the landfills and the auction barns? I try to recall Ricci and my Father, George, and Grandma Jean, but my mind is too old and too self-absorbed. Certainly I'm dying too and others will forget me. I've tried to cling to life by writing books and articles, stories and commentaries, but what does it matter? Being forgotten is only a question of degree; remembrance for another moment or two. Even the officials who say "good riddance," forget over their next beer and cocaine. When the young man in the cell next to mine was asked about Shakespeare, he had no idea who he was. He knew only "Da-Spear" from Fortieth and Diamond. So, it must be with us all, we decline into the morass of forgetfulness; who knows? who cares? Thank heaven for Rebecca!