Your father sends you a book about trees, about how they talk to one another. Now that he’s retired, he is writing something like a memoir. He calls what he is writing “Dad’s Pointless Stories.” His father owned a jewelry store, and fixed watches. He was a justice of the peace and almost officiated the wedding of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, but instead of getting married in Connecticut, they eloped to somewhere else. A few years later, Monroe was dead. And that’s how myths are broken, your father writes, by reality. Later, the jewelry store was robbed. Your father’s mother and father were made to lay facedown on the floor while a man with a gun looted the store. Your father has told you that he regrets not visiting directly after the incident. How he believes that his mother never quite recovered. This element of the story is not yet in the something-like-a-memoir, and you wonder if he will include it at all. But he hasn’t gotten to that part yet.