The past must have the greatest love/hate relationship of all time with writers. We poke around in it, refusing to let it sleep. And yet we memorialize it, so that people don't forget. The past treats writers like a drunken, abusive parental ghost might, haunting them threateningly when they trespass on volatile private territory, but then—

when the tender moments are recalled and given breath

—caressing us writers, slobbering kisses on our foreheads for making sure the world remembers. "Remember!" shouts the past, shaking its fist, and it lays back down clutching what we writers have written, crying itself back to sleep with joyful tears and murmuring self-assurances that all is not lost, all is not forgotten.

Well, something like that. My favorite thing to not leave alone is the incident of August 15, 1973, when my father tried to kill a gentleman named Walter Suhaka. Who was this man? What, if anything, did he do to deserve my father's wrath? What would I say to him if I ever met him? 

1. THE NIGHT I GOOGLED WALTER SUHAKA
2. DEAR WALTER:
3. PROOF I SENT THE LETTER