Columbus Day weekend caught me by surprise again this year, as it usually does now that I work exclusively at home. I’ve been deeply immersed in newspapers from the Civil War, scouring editorials from the spring of 1861 or the summer of 1863, so I tend to forget even what year it is, let alone what month or day. Emerging around noon on Monday from concentration on that project, I wondered where the mail could be. A day earlier, I had been reminded that it was a holiday weekend, but my wife was hard at work and so was I, so I had already forgotten.

Then I looked out at the foliage and remembered that it was October. That reminded me of my mother, who was born exactly a century ago, four days after Columbus Day. That circuitous sequence of mnemonic triggers brought me back to the present.

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