As I write I can hear the rumble of fireworks. There were fireworks on Wednesday, and I thought I heard them last night as well. Tonight there was a concert by the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra given from a barge anchored just off the east bank of the river at about mid-town. The barge concert is always followed by fireworks. The display ends the city's Fourth of July celebration. Tomorrow morning Front Street between Forster and Market, which has been closed since Tuesday, will reopen.

We didn't go downtown to find a vantage point for any of the events this year. Lynn was at Hersheypark one night, at the movies another. This afternoon we took her down to Camp Nawakwa, the Lutheran camp she has attended for eight previous summers. She'll be there a week, and then Saturday we have a very busy day -- pick her up at 8:30 (the camp is near Gettysburg, an hour and a half south of here), and then deliver her to Penn State University (an hour and a half north of here) for a five day field hockey camp.

So she'll be gone nearly two weeks. That's the longest she's ever been away. It will be almost like being home alone. Ron and I can move about our daily activities without engaging each other unless we want to. With Lynn there is more tension (not in a bad sense) since she is still dependent on us for transportation and for some direction of her activities. She also tends to favor using my computer in my study for her daily surfing needs. So my schedule and my work patterns are in a sense directly affected (if not actually determined) by when she needs to be some place or when she'd like to have a chat session with her friends.

And her energy is so vibrant. When she's in the house, even if she's sitting quietly in another room, the air crackles with her presence, and I find that distracting for a sustained creative project. I am not complaining at all -- she is the great joy of my life, the only endeavor I ever undertook where I got exactly what I bargained for.

Recently I was talking with another mother, an acquaintance from a writing group, about our children. I happened to mention that Lynn is not an avid reader, especially of imaginative literature. "I'll bet that just broke your heart," said the other mother.

That irritated me -- the assumption that I would be disappointed (unto heartbreak!) in my daughter because she's not exactly like me. The woman went on to make several suggestions about how I might get Lynn interested in reading fiction and poetry.

I wrote about this topic before, about how Lynn is not the voracious reader I was at her age, and my feelings about that. Rereading it tonight, I do detect a faint whiff of a desire that she read more. But it's faint. Given the opportunity to go back forty years, I think I'd like to spend more time at the pool with other kids and less time with my nose in a book.

Not all of my hours with my nose in a book were solitary, however. As it happens, I did have a reading companion, and I had occasion to think of her today.

Malka lived five houses up from us on Fifth Street. Her father was the rabbi of the city's Orthodox congregation, and she attended the local Jewish day school that her father founded in the late 1940s (when we were infants). I attended the local Catholic parish school, but we were great friends, spending many summer days sitting in the old fashioned wooden swing in her back yard, sometimes reading aloud to each other, sometimes reading different books silently. Occasionally we were joined by a third neighborhood girl, a Methodist who attended the public school.

I cherish those summer memories. I had "diversity" in my upbringing before that was even a concept. One day when Lynn was about five I looked out the window and saw her in the back yard with the girls next door (who are Catholic and biracial) and a girl from around the corner, who is Jewish. This is my childhood, I thought, only this time I'm the Protestant!

After eighth grade Malka went away to a Jewish boarding school (since the day school did not go beyond that), and then we both moved from that neighborhood. She married a rabbi and established a home with him in Rochester, New York, and we lost touch except for some widely spaced communications. I would see her father from time to time through the 1970s, when we took world cultures students to his synagogue for a tour.

I saw her last in 1994, when her mother died. It was in the spring, near the end of the grading period in the classes I taught, and I had papers due that week in both of the classes I was taking. I looked at my schedule and felt overwhelmed, and knew suddenly that it was extremely unhealthy to be too busy to work in a call to a traditional week-long shiva.

I assessed my priorities and got over there. It was the first actual shiva I had ever attended. A neighbor went with me, to help me not blunder so much through a tradition not my own. Though we hadn't seen each other in nearly thirty years, Malka and I recognized each other at once. I had a little more trouble finding her sisters. They were both more than ten years older than I, and I remembered them as slim college girls whose young energy filled the house those summer afternoons of my childhood. As has happened to me before in such situations, I looked for them among the wrong generation, completely ignoring the two grandmotherly women at the dining table until the older one said my name.

The last time I saw the rabbi was in the Giant, on a Friday afternoon about two years ago. You see a lot of the Orthodox that time of day on Fridays, getting ready for the Sabbath. I knew that he still lived alone in the family home where I'd attended his wife's shiva, that he still walked three blocks to shul every day, that he still saw private students for Torah study and counseling. I greeted him, using my maiden name. "Yes," he said. "Malka's friend. You were a musical family." Not long after that he moved to a nursing home in Rochester.

He died there Friday night. The funeral was held here this afternoon. Ron and I didn't get back until after six, but I probably would not have gone anyway. The report of his death rated a front page two-column article continued on the back page of this morning's paper. I suspect the number of attendees would strain the limits of his small synagogue, and I would have been even less able to navigate a Hebrew-language ritual than I was the Spanish Mass I attended back in April. Better to put my thoughts in writing for his daughter.

In the previous essay in this space I quoted Frederick Buechner on what it means to remember someone. Buechner is a Christian theologian and teacher who by definition believes in the idea of an afterlife in heaven and a resurrection in Christ. Yet what he expresses in that excerpt is close to what Judaism teaches, that we live in the memories of those whom we have touched. And I find myself turning to Buechner again today.

"How they do live on, those giants of our childhood," he writes, "...[and] although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them...it is beyond a doubt that they still live in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer, it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is still in us."

Much food for thought on the first day of my longest separation from my daughter.