My father had a magic show when he was a teenager. He performed all over the place--talent shows, rest homes. He amazed little kids, stumped adolescents, intrigued old folks. I’ve seen a photograph of him at 16 wearing a cape and a top hat and pointing a magic wand toward whoever was holding the camera. He looks serious in the photograph, almost somber, like he knew important secrets. I think, in fact, he did.

But he doesn’t remember any tricks any more because he is almost 70 now and because he gave away the magic kit when he got married to my mother in 1956. Who did you give it to? I once asked him. A neighbor kid, he shrugged, as though it was no big deal, as though everybody has to grow up, take on responsibilities, and give up magic.

I like to think of my father practicing his tricks alone in the basement of his parents’ house in Crockett, not far from the C & H sugar factory and the Carquinez Bridge. I like to think of him polishing his black shoes and slicking down his hair in preparation for his shows. Maybe he neatly folded up his cape and tucked it inside the top hat to carry with his kit as he traveled to wherever the show was happening. I don’t think he would have just walked down the sidewalk in full magician regalia for all the world to see. My father is basically a shy guy. He once told me that the purpose for wearing a suit and tie to the office is so you don’t draw too much attention to yourself. He wore a suit and tie five days a week for nearly 40 years. He probably gave that same neighbor kid the top hat and the cape.

My parents had a small wedding in a Methodist church on a Saturday afternoon in San Jose, and they had a honeymoon weekend in Pacific Grove before they returned to their jobs on Monday. My father worked in a shoe store, and my mother, Barbara, worked as a secretary at Falstaff Brewing Company. They were married in February; it may have rained that weekend. They may have stayed inside their motel room instead of walking hand-in-hand on a beach. My mother was 25; my father had just turned 21 three days before the wedding. Barbara was his first serious girlfriend. My mother did not wear a white gown at her wedding; she wore a powder blue suit. She was instructed by her mother that white was reserved for virgins.

I bring this up because I am 44, have not yet married, and I wonder why. Sure, there have been boyfriends, getaway weekends, walks on beaches, but my romantic relationships seem to fizzle or flame out after a couple of years. And often I am the one who can’t commit. I believe that our actions grow out of the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories our parents tell. I want to look more at these stories. I want to take different actions.

I’ve been to Pacific Grove twice in the past year, once with my most recent boyfriend and alone, a week after we broke up. Both times, I thought about my parents and about their honeymoon there in 1956. I thought about how young they were, how broke and naïve. I thought about my mother’s breakdown the first year of their marriage. She was hospitalized for five months, and my father moved in with a roommate to save money while he continued to work at the shoe store. That period in their early married life—four years before my birth—is mysterious. There is virtually no story available to me. When I asked her once, my mother explained that she broke down because she had been trying to do too much: work, go to school, be a wife. But that explanation has never been sufficient. Five months locked in a hospital? Shock treatments? I’ve smudged that shadowy time by dismissing it as the 1950s, the Stone Age of Mental Health in America, a time of crude and rudimentary treatments, a time of relentless stigma toward people with mental illness. Ancient history.

What I think I comprehend more easily is my father’s steadfastness, his struggle to make the best of what must have been frightening and confusing and sad. There he was, 21 years old, with a wife in a mental hospital and the future stretching ahead of him—a future of wearing suits and ties, raising two daughters, and learning the shifting terminology that doctors would apply to his wife: manic depression, bipolar disorder, chemical imbalance.

It must have been around this time that he knocked on the door of the neighbor kid’s house and waited on the porch for someone to answer. He may have stood for a minute or two, fingering the brim of the top hat, the magic kit at his feet, a box full of secrets he would lose forever.

Kathleen McClung is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer whose work has appeared in Spirituality & Health, Poetry Northwest, Hawaii Pacific Review, and other publications. Winner of awards from the Academy of American Poets, Writers Digest, and the National Society of Arts & Letters, she has been a managing editor for small presses and has taught college writing courses for over ten years. A native of northern California, she is working on a book-length memoir.