Collecting stories from John Taylor’s upbringing in Des Moines, these “charming evocations of a Midwestern childhood” (as the French film director Louis Malle called them), recall an “average” neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The death of the author’s mother gives rise to these sensitive reminiscences, which also conjure up first loves, playmates, and a motley assortment of true-to-life characters who express their modest joys and lasting secret sorrows. The Presence of Things Past (the title alludes to the eleventh book of the Confessions of Saint Augustine), is a tribute to a lost mother, a lost neighborhood, a lost city, and a lost childhood.