I was born because a man came to kill my father. If he hadn't showed up with a gun in his pocket and bad thoughts in his head, I wouldn't exist, much less have a story to tell. This tragic footnote to my conception left me feeling as if I had three parents: a father, a mother, and a murderer.

My father suffered from strange and temporarily paralyzing attacks of catatonia that my family, with characteristic discretion, referred to as Dad's "Sock Moments." You would walk past my parents' bedroom door on the way to breakfast or the bathroom and glimpse Dad sitting on his side of the bed, fully dressed, legs crossed, one shoe on, sock in hand, about to put on his other shoe. Perfectly normal, right? Trouble was, sometimes ten or twenty minutes would pass and you'd look in on him again and he'd still be sitting there, sock in hand, staring at the other shoe he'd yet to fill.

Once, my sister Lucy and I clocked him with the timer my mother used to make sure the roast beef was rare. Fifty-seven minutes passed before he got the other sock on. Frozen in time and space in his own thoughts, Dad would appear perfectly normal, except for the look he'd have in his eye. It wasn't a faraway, glassy-eyed stare, it was a perplexed squint, as if he were trying to see something he wasn't sure was there.

My father could have three episodes in a week, then there'd be a six month reprieve. Usually, but not always, these becalmed fits of melancholic introspection would come over him in the morning as he readied himself to set off for work. But sometimes, they'd ambush him in the evening, when he went upstairs just for a moment to put on a fresh shirt or wash his hands or bring my mother her purse. Occasionally, according to my mom, they'd even bushwhack him after midnight, when a dry mouth or a bad dream would wake him and he'd reach for his slippers with the thought of heading downstairs to make himself a cup of tea or a stiff drink. Only he'd never get there. Technically, those weren't sock moments because my mother would wake up and find her husband cradling a slipper. But the question remained the same: what was going on in Dad's head?

Once, when I was eight, and Dad was lost in his bedroom with nothing but a sock to show him the way home, I snuck into the room, tiptoed past him, and slipped into his big closet. He used it as a dressing room. It was the grandest thing about the house we lived in then; it was a long, narrow, wondrous little right-triangle of a room tucked under the stairs to the attic. It had a round window at one end that offered a view of nothing but sky and it smelled of cedar and shoe polish and dust from parts of his life that were none of a small boy's business.

I knew I was trespassing. The closet was Dad's private space, to be entered only at his personal invitation, and explored under his supervision. There were bone-handled pocket knives to be opened and closed, flyrods to be assembled, and a wooden crate that once held a dozen bottles of Chateau Y'quem but now was home to the collection of Indian arrowheads and stone tomahawks he'd found in freshly plowed fields and unearthed in serpentine burial mounds during what passed for boyhood in his hardscrabble, Midwestern youth. But his hospitality had its limits. Even when I was a baby, if I crawled too far back into his closet and tried to open the old steamer-trunk, latched, strapped closed, and too heavy to lift, visiting hour would be over. My father would pull me away from it as if it were radioactive and in the grownup voice he used with doctors who came to our house to talk to him, he'd announce, "Nothing in there pertains to you."

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