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years, gray as the hair and old corduroy cap the driver sports. He wears thick goggles that sparkle in the sun, a bushy mustache and a gleaming smile. It's as though he's emerged intact from a 1931 motor company advertisement. A Nash the color of glazed brick pulls up behind him and toots its horn, the driver waving a gloved hand. The Nash is joined by a four~door Hupmobile and a Dodge touring car driven by a man who looks asleep behind the wheel. In the passenger seat, a woman is all but hidden behind a floppy turquoise hat. They are all waiting for a Packard sedan to turn right, but the Packard is waiting for us to cross Trade Street and we are waiting to see what else emerges from the sun's glare. Another vintage car? Theodore Roosevelt? Here we are, alt frozen in time, the noon light like a gloss laid over what we've chosen to do with a Sunday morning, watching a past that none of us knew in person assemble itself before our eyes. From somewhere, perhaps a CD player hidden inside one of the cars, per~ haps from a fold in the ether, we hear the strains of Hogey Carmichael's "Star Dust," and take that as a signal that it's time to cross the street. If we stay where we are, pretty soon we'll have to start dancing the Charleston. In the small village park across from the cemetery, more than a hundred cars are crammed together. Beverly and I stroll among the drivers, finding ourselves caught up in the spirit of passionate play. The cars are organized by era, and while we are intrigued with the lovingly restored cars from early in the twentieth century, it's the cars from the 1950s and early 1960s----our years of childhood and adolescence-that keep attracting us. A '61 Mercury Comet, like the one Beverly's family owned, which was wrecked because Fritzi, the dachshund, got himself wedged under her mother's feet. An Edsel, like the one owned by my Driver's Ed teacher during the summer of 1964, which had its automatic gear shift buttons located in the center of the steering wheel; a black '52 Buick, like the one my father drove through Brooklyn summer streets with the windows shut and the interior radiating heat; a '57 Chevy Impala I remember my brother coveting. Beverly and I walked around the park for most of an hour, smiling. Back home, I begin an essay about the year 1957. What was going on around me during that pivotal year in my life, when I was ten and everything I knew began to change. The essay came quickly, which is unusual for me. Then I wrote an essay about the cities and villages where my four immigrant grandparents came from, and an essay about Achill Island, off the west coast oflreland, where Beverly and I spent the summer of 1994. The outward-looking focus of this new work, each essay a chapter of a SUllllller 2004