An initiation story is one in which a young protagonist undergoes some kind of significant change as a result of a particular event in his or her life; he or she is, in some way, initiated into the real world as a result of this experience. The speaker of this story, now an older father talking to his son, explains, "My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933." Here, the speaker acknowledges that his perception of the world was forever altered by this time in his life.

He was a young man of seventeen, a senior in high school, and through the course of one afternoon, he learns a lot more about the world and the role of death in it. His mother lay on her deathbed, and the speaker had to work, delivering flowers after school. He thinks of a girl named Stephanie and how they had "necked" and "petted" one another one recent night. He has to make one delivery to a funeral of a girl, who he compares to Stephanie, and he sees the mourners, the funereal foods, and the mother. "I saw and I saw and I saw," he says.

After leaving, he decides to visit his brother-in-law, Phil, at his dental practice. When Phil isn't there, he checks next door and sees a naked young woman tied to a table at the gynecologist's office. Aroused, he releases her and helps her back to some apartment, thinking again of Stephanie. The woman's breasts also make him recall his mother's own "chest [which had been] mutilated by cancer surgery [...]. Its gnarled scar tissue." In short, these experiences seem to muddle death, sex, revulsion and desire, everything connecting together in a confused tangle.

When the speaker finally returns home, quite late for that matter, his father "hit [him] on the head [and] the blow filled [him] with gratitude. If [his] mother had already died, he would have embraced [the speaker] instead." The speaker welcomes violence rather than affection because it means that his mother is still alive: another strange effect of looming death. Even the title of the story, as well as the speaker's conclusion, allude to the fact that the speaker now expects to die soon, and he leaves this story as a sort of gift, an "addition to [his son's] legacy." But what makes it a gift? Perhaps that it teaches the lesson of the first line,

"When there is too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that you life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex."

It teaches that death is behind everything else that happens in life, even love, sex, or gratitude. This was something the speaker didn't realize until this time in his life, and that's what makes this an initiation story.