Russell Baker begins his memoir in his middle age, when his eighty-year-old mother has had a bad fall and begun to experience dementia. Being in this condition, Baker says, gives her a gift for traveling through time, from her childhood to his and beyond. One day, she asks for him by name. When he says that he is Russell, she denies it, gesturing to indicate that Russell is a child, only two feet tall. In her mind, she is a young wife with tiny children. Another time, she invites him to her own funeral.

Seeing his mother in the hospital, Baker perceives both her physical delicacy and the fierce determination he has always seen in her. He remembers a conversation they repeatedly had, in which she would proudly declare that she spoke her mind, regardless of how other people felt about it. While raising her children, she raced about all her household tasks, occasionally to the point of causing herself injury.

Baker relates a conversation during which his mother travels all over time, from his young manhood to his childhood to the day of his marriage. At that point, a doctor comes in and administers a dementia test, asking several simple questions that Baker’s mother fails to answer correctly. Yet somehow she remembers her birthday and the fact that it is on the same day as the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day. She judges the doctor harshly for not remembering his history.

Though the doctors diagnose her dementia as caused by “hardening of the arteries,” Baker believes that his mother is ill because being old makes her feel sad. Living outside of time makes her happy, in a way that she has not been for a long time. He describes a conversation they had by letter, in which he encouraged her to be happier and she said there was nothing to be done about it. Only after she loses her sense of time and place does she become happy again.

One day when Baker arrives to visit his mother, she tells him that her father, who has been dead for sixty-one years, is going to take her on a boat ride. Baker pictures his mother as a little girl, from a picture he knows, and the innocent time in history in which she grew up—before the World Wars and the Depression, among other scenes of human suffering. But there is only so much he can know about her life and his own grandfather, especially now that she can no longer tell him coherent tales of her youth.

Baker thinks about the limits on connection between parents and children and reflects that he has distanced his own children from himself by continually referring back to “in my day.” The problem with parents and children, he thinks, is that what was once the parent’s exciting future will always be the child’s boring past. He realizes that he wants to tell his children about his own life, which he thinks of as starting with his mother and her aspirations for him.