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My mother keeps old age in the cupboards about her eyes, fragile bone plates waiting to fragment and resettle as dust. Service for a multitude she has been, now precious antiquity, deserving a museum but iInstead waiting the table of my father. Back from the links, he is very hungry; and she, as lively as possible setting down his heaping platter. A visitor to this castle now, I wail within myself like the ghost of a child: Who is this illicit tyrant in my chair? Freud, you got it wrong. My father has usurped my place. However, the felicity of their arrangement is clear: all their children gone, he is the perfect two-year-old; and they are happy, giving and taking everything.