His Memory

A tender poem from Ring Lardner's beloved "Bib Ballads" sequence, written from the perspective of a young child remembering his father. Lardnerchannels his son's innocent voice with extraordinary precision, capturing how children construct their parents in memory: through specific moments, through the way words sound rather than what they mean, through small acts of tenderness that become monumental in a child's mind. The piece operates on two registers at once the disarming simplicity of a child's view of the world, and the quieter ache of witnessing love given freely and completely from below. What makes the poem endure is its understanding that we spend our earliest years being remembered by someone whose memories of us will outlast everything else, and that those memories begin so small, so seemingly insignificant, and matter so enormously. Lardner's dialect work and ear for American speech find their most vulnerable expression here.