The one who studied is my sister, this is my sister's story, and when she was dying, my mother in a delirium ("My moon, your chinese secrets are all gone," I sang to her, sponged her, led her to death: "a coming and a going, two simple happenings entangled," as the poet says) my mother in a delirium wrote a myth of the old times and my sister coming home through a snowstorm in a yellow rented truck "with all her earthly goods." I still have the manila folder on which my Moon wrote this chronicle in her own hand. In it she calls my sister "the special one," it is my mother's story, she was the one who studied, she too always a special one: under the kitchen table the cardboard cartons of her texts (this chronicle too, it is called "Winter Odyssey '81-'82," once among them) "You won't know until I'm dead what I write all night about you," she would sigh (or, sometimes, hiss) at us - though I knew ( I was the eldest son and asked and so she told me) sometimes what she wrote were only simple charms - to ward off the breaking of bones among her children for instance, or to bring my sister, "the special one," home through the snow storm for New Year. Already in the delirium my mother made a feast for the new year, spending hundreds of dollars (she noted this in the chronicle as a sign of the delirium) on snacks which filled a long table. Days later, "so sick, wrapped in a cocoon of quilts and blankets, on the floor?" she questioned. "Time was running out" she wrote, "deliriums leave strange memories, like Cleveland all over again." When the Moon died my sister was away on a dig among her own people, not these Mexica but the Maya of the terminal classic as it is said. It took me days to contact her, I had to reach her through her professor on the telephone and he sent a driver out in a jeep through the Honduran jungle to find her where she watched over her crew of workmen at the dig. At the end of the chronicle of my mother's delirium "because the room was too dirty for anyone to see, so she must get out of the room," she dresses to meet the ambulance, gathers her things and waits in the front hall. Once it comes and she is inside the ambulance (the truck of the special one?), "the expertise of the paramedic brought blessed relief and relaxation for the first time." In the part where she says she dressed to meet them she says she did so "with help from him." It is the only mention of him here (though do not misunderstand she loved him, my father,but also knew how helpless he was in the face of all this, how helpless she would leave him). She was the receptacle of our lives. None of us has ever had a broken bone. On New Year's day two years after her death he died, unable to go on without her. "My moon, your chinese secrets are all gone," I sang to her.