As a child I thought of my mother and father in terms of centuries. This man and this woman had lived forever, it seemed, born wholly formed and unchanging, waiting patiently for my sisters and me to come along. Had someone told me my parents were, in truth, scarcely more than children themselves, I would have considered it a lie to rival the tooth fairy. Had the liar then taken me to the attic, opened the trunk that held my father’s dusty telescope and my mother’s moth-eaten Burano-lace baby dress, and told me those antiques were practically new, I would have laughed.