It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
—G. K. CHESTERTON
My boyhood is autumn. The sky is snap cool and azurite blue. My boyhood is elm-lined streets. Every house was white with dark green shutters, American flags affixed to wooden poles waving from their porches. It is riding my ten-speed Raleigh down Ridge Street so fast that it left small tornadoes of dried leaves twisting in the wake of my rear tire. My boyhood is Saturday mornings, standing across the street from the barbershop, spying fathers playfully mussing their sons’ hair to get the last remnants of stubble off their heads. Most of all, my childhood is Irish Catholic.
It’s difficult to explain to the uninitiated the experience of going to Catholic grammar school in the 1960s. A veteran asked to describe storming the beaches of Normandy probably faces a similar dilemma. For a minute or two, you forage for words; you stammer and whiffle; finally, you shrug and say, “You had to be there.” Whenever I meet someone and we discover that we both went to parochial school, we shake hands firmly, nod, and lock eyes for two seconds longer than we would with normal people. We survived the Big House.
When I see St. Mary’s Grammar School in my mind, it’s always September. I can’t recall the copper gutters dripping with winter ice or the front lawn of the rectory dappled with April crocuses, as they must often have been. It’s always September, the air hazy blue from the smoke coming from the neighbors’ humpy pyres of grass clippings and dead leaves burning in their backyards. There were two maples on the front lawn of the three-story, red-brick schoolhouse. The lower branches of those trees were never pruned back. They whisked the slate roof with the sound of a great broom that could be heard through the windows of our tiny school library, each pane of glass so old that it swirled with age. It was there that I often sat cross-legged in the corner and read Roald Dahl books.
Every morning starting in first grade, my governess, whom my family called Nanny, would walk me to school, holding my hand as we crossed Greenwich Avenue. I loved Nanny’s hands. Sometimes sitting at the kitchen table, drinking afternoon tea, she would let me turn her hand over to examine her palm, tracing the lines that crisscrossed it with my index finger, as if I were a boy swami pulled from the pages of a Rudyard Kipling poem. The fleshy part just below the thumb was ruby red, smooth, and warm. Nanny’s hands were sanctuaries, and I was loath to let them go when we arrived at school.
When the great church bell rang at 8 a.m., the principal, Sister Rita Marie, would come out and stand on the front steps to greet mothers and children. With every passing year her face crumpled deeper and deeper into the shadowy recesses of her black veil held in place by a white band. My brother told me Sister Rita Marie was so old that she had been a personal friend of the Virgin Mary. It made me stop and think, How could the Virgin Mary be such a poor judge of character?
As Nanny and I walked up the sidewalk to the front door of the school, Sister Rita Marie looked down her aquiline nose through her frameless round glasses and asked Nanny, “How are things with the Cron family, Nanny?” Everyone called Nanny “Nanny.”
There was something in the way Sister Rita Marie sniffed after she asked the question that made my stomach knot. One school of psychology says that children under the age of twelve are only capable of concrete thinking; they can’t discern what’s truly happening behind an adult’s exterior. That’s true for kids under the age of twelve who don’t grow up with alcoholics. At seven years old, I could look in adults’ eyes and know immediately if they were fraud or friend. I could tell whether they were hiding some long-held sadness, whether they were lying or telling the truth, and whether they themselves could tell the difference. Maybe it was the way they kept one hand behind their back, or the way they evasively looked at their watch before answering a question. My antennae were so exquisitely attuned to atmospherics that I could walk into a roomful of adults and before my second foot crossed the threshold I knew instantly what I would need to do and say to get out of there in one piece. This isn’t talent; it’s a merciful charism God gives to kids who grow up with alcoholics. Without it, you’re an accident looking for an intersection.
All this to say I may have been seven years old, but I knew Sister Rita Marie was fishing around for smut about our family. On Saturdays when I went downtown with my mother to do errands, I would see her in front of Finch’s Drug Store, whispering to tight circles of churchwomen. They were a parliament of black owls clutching their handbags, shaking their heads, and clucking their tongues in mock horror at the latest news of some poor family’s misfortune.
Greenwich was a small town in those days. It was probably the most affluent community in America, though we would have thought it tasteless to brag about this sort of thing. Greenwich is where you moved when you’d finally “made it” or if you had inherited a fortune from someone who had “made it” but then croaked. It is home to a staggering concentration of power and influence. You didn’t blink when you met Wall Street barons or people whose family names would be recognized almost anywhere in the world. It was home to America’s aristocracy.
Greenwich was a community where old money and pedigree were valued. The nouveau riche were held in contempt. When I was ten years old, I remember my mother and me pulling up to a light when a man in a Ferrari convertible, smoking a big cigar, pulled up next to us. The car was pristine, as if he had just driven it off the lot. Looking very pleased with himself, he glanced around to see if other motorists or passersby were taking notice of him.
“Mom, look at that cool car,” I said, gawking.
My mother looked over and quickly returned her attention to the view out of the front windshield. “Don’t look at that man,” she said.
“Why not?”
“He’s being ostentatious,’” she replied.
“What’s wrong with that?” I said, still gaping at the car.
“He’s uncouth. Our people don’t do that sort of thing,” she said.
This was a strange remark, given that it was hard to figure out who “our people” were, considering our circumstances at the time. We were seven people living in a three-bedroom apartment in the least desirable apartment building in town. We had a professionally schooled, uniformed English nanny; an unemployed father with a spiraling drinking problem who wandered around town in handmade Savile Row suits, bragging about having discovered the actor Roger Moore; and a beautiful mother who, wherever she went, held her head high, revealing nothing of the onerous burden of trying to hold all of us together against an avalanche of problems. No doubt word had gotten out that our apartment was bulging with expensive European antiques that until a few months earlier had filled our large Tudor home on Park Drive South overlooking the golf course of Westchester Country Club.
We were low-hanging fruit for gossips.
“The family is fine, thank you, Sister,” Nanny answered, kissing me on the top of the head, then gently directing me toward the door.
“I say prayers for the Cron family every night,” Sister Rita Marie said, nodding her head and sniffing again.
Nanny smiled. “Thank you, Sister.” As she started back down the walkway, she said in a muted voice, “I’ll pray for you as well, Sister.” She did not look back to relish the sight of Sr. Rita’s face puckering with contempt.
St. Mary’s Grammar School was a parallel universe. In my second-grade classroom there were posters taped to the wall above the blackboard depicting people in different postmortem states. There was one picture of people writhing in the flames of hell, arms outstretched toward heaven, mouths agape like open graves, pleading to be forgiven and offered another chance. There were others of babies who’d died before they were baptized. They were sucking their thumbs and floating out in space somewhere. This was limbo. Then there was an illustration of purgatory, where ghostlike people shuffled around, staring at the ground like depressed patients in the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital. They were waiting for their families and friends to say enough prayers and Masses on their behalf so that God would finally grant them entrance into paradise.
In the picture of heaven, Jesus was a Caucasian man with shoulder-length, reddish-brown hair and unnaturally blue eyes. His arms were outstretched in a gesture of inclusion and loving welcome. He had a strawberry-red heart, from which yellow beams of light emanated in every direction. It glowed so brightly, aflame with kindness and compassion, that it was visible through his flowing white garment. White boys and girls knelt before him, heads bowed, hands folded perfectly with thumbs at their sternums, wearing their Catholic school uniforms—girls in plaid skirts and boys with white shirts and blue clip-on ties—worshipping the Good Shepherd Jesus.
Every morning we came into our classroom, placed our books into the open slot in our desks, and looked up to see something like a montage out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting: people melting in hell, infants floating in the ether, catatonics waiting to get prayed into heaven, and an all-loving Jesus who looked more like Justin Bieber than Yasser Arafat. This mixed message about God and the afterlife had the same effect on a child’s mind as putting out a cigarette in his cerebral cortex.
My teacher was Sister Margaret. Every day she warned us that the communists were going to land on the shore of Greenwich’s beaches and storm our school. It didn’t occur to us to ask Sister Margaret why the Russians would consider seventeen Catholic second graders high-value targets.
“What will you do when the communists break down the door?” she would ask.
What are eight-year-olds to make of this kind of query?
“You will leap from the windows to your death, that’s what you’ll do!” she would say, looking out the second-story windows. “Otherwise they will force you to renounce your faith, and you will lose your salvation.” I knew that Sister Margaret yearned for this to happen, so she could show those godless Reds who they were dealing with. It’s too bad Sister Margaret is gone. There isn’t a place on earth Bin Laden could hide from her. She’d kick his crying keister across those mountains in Pakistan and leave him outside Guantánamo, babbling Hail Marys in the fetal position.
Even though my education was something out of the Middle Ages, I loved the Catholic Mass. Humans are the only creatures that require pageantry and ceremony in their social diet. (Ever met a squirrel that wanted a wedding?) When it came to pomp and parade, the priests at St. Mary’s were pros. Their homilies were lethally uninteresting, but they brought their A-game when it came to bringing the presence of God into the house. This was particularly true when it came to the big rites of passage, like the Holy First Communion Mass. This is the day on which the priest placed the literal body of Jesus on your tongue, and you drink the Savior’s blood for the first time. It’s the liturgical equivalent of becoming a “made man” in the Mafia.
In the months before the big day, Sister Margaret spent hours helping us memorize the answers to the “Questions for First Communion” from the Baltimore Catechism. She warned us that during Mass, Bishop Dalrymple could randomly pick a kid to test him on one of the questions from the Catechism as a condition for giving him his First Communion. She said that if we didn’t answer correctly, he would send us to the back of the processional line, and we would have to do it over again. I was an anxious kid whose imagination was fertile soil for this sort of visual to take root. It could keep me awake for days. What if Bishop Dalrymple asked me a question and I choked? What if I couldn’t come up with one right answer and got sent to the back of the line over and over until the only two people left in front of the congregation were the bishop and me? I could see my classmates, the taste of Jesus fresh in their mouths, watching while I failed to answer even one question correctly for the bishop. Hundreds of parishioners and guests would be looking at their watches and rolling their eyes, men irritably loosening their ties and yanking at their starched collars. I could hear my siblings’ and out-of-town cousins’ throaty groans after my every wrong response. I envisioned someone’s uncle finally standing up and yelling, “For the love of God, just get one right so we can go home for supper!”
I wouldn’t wish my excitable imagination on anyone.
In addition to the Baltimore Catechism drills, Sister Margaret took us to the church and walked us through the choreography of the First Communion Mass until we could have done it in our sleep. Mistakes would not be tolerated. You would think we were rehearsing for a complicated bank heist.
My classmates whined about Sister Margaret’s insistence that we learn our parts flawlessly, but something in me understood why it mattered so much to her. It was less about perfectionism than it was about devotion. I secretly shared that feeling with her. I never told anyone how fascinated I was by the Eucharist. Even I thought my fascination was a little peculiar, since none of my friends seemed all that interested. But I had always been envious of my family at Mass, when they left me in the pew and walked down the nave to receive the Host and wine from the priests. I would stand on the kneeler to see above the heads of the people sitting in front of me, so I could watch my family. Though I could not possibly have expressed it this way, the harmonic frequency that rings at the center of the heart of God made something vibrate in mine while all this was going on. Something numinous was happening, and I felt pulled toward it, like metal filings to a magnet.
The First Communion Mass was to be held in the small chapel, downstairs from the main sanctuary. The Roman catacombs were more cheerful. But behind the altar there was a brightly illuminated mosaic made with gold-and robin’s-egg-colored tiles of the Virgin Mary looking up at Jesus on the cross. She was mesmerizing. We were instructed to fix our eyes on the face of the Virgin as we processed, not as an act of reverence but rather to keep all our heads on an even plane. We were commanded to take small, dignified steps; we were shown how to fold our hands and where to position them so we were perfectly uniform as we came down the aisle.
In the Catholic Church of my youth, only the priest could touch the consecrated Host, so it had to be placed on your extended tongue. Sister Margaret demonstrated to us the proper amount of tongue to present to the bishop so that we neither extended it too far, making us look like ornamental Chinese dragons, or offered him so little tongue surface that the Host risked not sticking to our saliva and fell off. Dropping Jesus was really, really bad. Dickie Carter told us that an entire First Communion procession in the Ukraine instantly dropped dead when one little boy let a Host fall off his tongue onto the floor of the nave. Apparently one’s First Holy Communion could be considered a success if no one got hurt.
On the morning of my First Communion, my mother announced that we were going to the Homestead Inn for breakfast. We were speechless. The Homestead was the most expensive restaurant in Greenwich, and that was saying something. We were so financially strapped in those days that we had to stuff newspaper inside our disintegrating penny loafers to keep out water and snow. Earlier, I described our economic situation as a J-curve. In England, and for a year or two after moving back to the States, we had lived at the top of the J, the height of financial and social success. Then my father’s drinking and his apparent fondness for blowing himself up plunged us into the trough of the J.
We were now living somewhere under the trough of the J.
When we returned from England, my father had gone to work for NBC. The final chapter in our demise came when he and the president of the network had a world-class argument. My father had told him that a TV show they had produced was going to be a bust, but the president disagreed and let the show air. My father was right. But after the show was yanked from the schedule, the president called my father into his office and told him that NBC needed someone to take the fall for the show’s failure, and my dad was the designated patsy. Not to worry, the president told my father—he wouldn’t cut his salary, and he would give him an even better deal in a year, if he would go under the bus quietly. My father charged out of the president’s office and paraded the hallways of NBC, giving him specific instruction regarding what he could do to himself.
Publicly giving advice of this kind to the president of the National Broadcasting Company did not enhance my father’s career. Even so, Bobby Sarnoff, the son of the founder of NBC, loved my father and asked him to work directly for him, but my father thought the assignment was beneath him. So he went under the bus after all, only permanently. Afterward, his drinking became exponentially worse. He wouldn’t work steadily again for twelve years—not in the business world, anyway. I wonder why he didn’t think that was beneath him.
How on earth can we afford a meal at the Homestead? we kids wondered. Had my mother forgotten that we were forbidden to eat anything for at least one hour before receiving the Eucharist? What if the bishop smelled bacon and eggs on my breath? But we had no choice. Once my mother set her face like flint toward Jerusalem, there was no stopping her.
A friend of my mother’s who knew that our family couldn’t afford a car had given us her old Hillman Imp, a two-door British car. The model name accurately describes its interior. The backseat of the Imp was designed to hold two svelte Europeans, not four irritable kids and a diminutive English governess. We had never tried to get the whole family into the Imp before, but my mother was determined it would be done. The five of us tried wedging ourselves into the backseat in multiple configurations until we hit on one that worked. This took ten minutes. I sat on my brother Philip’s lap on the starboard side; my sister, Caroline, sat in the middle; and Nanny perched on my brother Connor’s lap on the port side, her face pressed against the fogged rear window. God bless Nanny; she was a good sport. Most sixty-year-old British women would rather die than endure this kind of indignity.
Once we were all in the car, we sat outside our apartment building, waiting for my father to emerge. My father scored low on the compassion index. Even if he knew there were six people crushed into a tiny car, waiting for him, on a muggy spring morning, it would not hurry him along. His appearance was more important than our diminishing ability to breathe. We waited. We waited longer. We waited until our eyes began to roll back in our heads from heatstroke, and my mother leaned on the horn until the battery nearly died.
When the front door finally opened, my fully preened father appeared wearing a freshly pressed suit with a carnation in the buttonhole and a starched white shirt with a bow tie. Despite the warm weather, he wore a stone-colored Aquascutum trench coat with the belt dangling around his midsection. The tip of his upturned mustache was waxed to a point so sharp it could poke your eye out. He was carrying brown-leather driving gloves and wearing a black bowler. Yes, a black bowler. He looked like Winston Churchill, only more.
I was fast learning that incredulity was a luxury reserved for those whose lives were rarely interrupted by the abnormal. I was a young boy, but I had come to expect anything. I feel sorry for my brothers now. They were much older and knew my father’s eccentric appearance and behavior would be fodder for taunts come Monday morning at school.
This, however, was nothing compared to what was to come.
It took my father a long time to situate himself in the front seat of the car, a laborious task involving great heaves and harrumphs. Only a few years earlier, he had been driving a silver twelve-cylinder Jaguar E-Type. Now he was getting into a vehicle that was only slightly larger than the Apollo space capsule.
The Imp was outfitted with a forty-two-horsepower engine that accelerated from zero to sixty in two days. This is a matter of historical record. When bearing the weight of four children aged eight to seventeen, one governess, a mother, and a Winston Churchill impersonator, the car’s engine was sorely tested. On the one-mile drive to the Homestead, it whined. Nay, it screamed. Blue smoke spewed from the tailpipe. Despite a courageous effort on its part, the car could barely travel more than twenty miles per hour.
I would like to believe that the friend who gave my mother the car was kind, truly unaware of its condition. Yes, there were small rust bubbles visible on the outer body, but could she have known that the frame and undercarriage of the car were riddled with stage-four vehicular cancer? For her soul’s sake, I pray not.
There was one steep hill between the restaurant and us. I don’t think my mother had factored into her pre-trip flight check the kind of stress that the pitch of this hill and the weight of seven people might place on the engine, or the effect it might have on the frame of the car. We were silent. Without speaking a word, we all knew that this hill was a make-or-break proposition. If we made it to the top, we could breathe a sigh of relief, perhaps even wave flags and sing a chorus of “Rule Britannia,” since from there it was downhill to the Homestead Inn and a heavenly breakfast.
We were so preoccupied with the car’s ability to maintain forward motion, however, that we did not consider alternative threats—like the loss of structural integrity, for example. Just past the top of the hill, the seven of us were a nanosecond away from cheering when there was a loud thump, followed by my father yelling, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
This calling on the members of the Holy Family for assistance in emergencies has a long and venerable history among Catholics in extremis. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that it supplies a single ounce of protection or divine aid to the petitioner, but we believed there was no harm in trying.
It took some time for those of us in economy class to determine what had happened in the forward cabin, but it soon became clear. My father’s seat had fallen through the rusted bottom of the car. It was dragging along the pavement, shooting sparks up into the wells of the backseat, threatening to light our socks on fire. My father’s rear end was inches from the ground. The collapse of the seat had shot his legs upward, so that his kneecaps now nearly touched his face, and he was holding down his black bowler lest it be damaged. He looked like a fat kid shoved butt first into a wastepaper basket.
“Pull over, Anne! Pull over!” he demanded.
My mother faced a tactical decision. We could (a) admit defeat and pull over, (b) try to make it to the Homestead Inn, or (c) make a right at the bottom of the hill and head straight to the church and my First Communion Mass. My mother did not readily admit defeat. The Hillman had served us faithfully in our time of need, and this was clearly its last mission. It deserved a noble end.
“Jack, hold on,” she said to my father.
“Anne, stop this car immediately!” he said, trying to grab the dashboard.
At the bottom of the hill, my mother careened right. An eighth of a mile later, we lurched up in front of the church, more or less in one piece.
Mom was our Captain Sullenberger.
The seven of us, sweaty and shaken, slowly began peeling ourselves out of the smoking vehicle. It took my brothers several attempts to pull my father out of the car as bemused parishioners gawked and snickered.
Every time I thought my childhood had hit its weirdest ebb, a crazy experience like this one would come along to make me wonder if I knew what an ebb was.
The group of first graders receiving the Eucharist for the first time gathered in the narthex of the church.
“Remember,” Dickie Carter whispered as we were being lined up, “don’t let the Eucharist fall off your tongue or we’re all dead.” He dragged his index finger across his throat. This aide-mémoire did not help soothe an already quaking queue of eight-year-olds.
The procession commenced when the organ music began and the soloist started singing “Ave Maria” with a vibrato that could have been picked up on police radar. First down the nave came the thurifers carrying brass thuribles on chains. They swung them forward and back, smoke from smoldering myrrh incense pouring from their vents. After them came ministers with lighted candles, between them an acolyte bearing a cross with the broken body of Jesus still on it. Behind them was the lector, who carried the book of the gospels high above his head. Father Durcan and the other parish priests and deacons came next, and then us in our school uniforms and white dresses. Bishop Dalrymple followed in his blue and silver–embroidered cope and miter, carrying his crosier—an ornate staff hooked at one end to look like a shepherd’s crook—turning side to side, repeatedly making the sign of the cross over the congregation. As he passed, men and women—young and old, rich and poor—bowed as they received the blessing.
I remember nothing of the Mass itself, neither the prayers nor the homily. I only remember the picture of the Virgin Mary draped in her blue robe, emblazoned with gold stars. As we processed, her beatific smile and warm, brown eyes made my throat tighten, and I began to cry—I wasn’t sure why. I tried to wipe away my tears.
Dickie looked around us as if afraid my crying could somehow get him into trouble. “Why are you bawling?” he whispered.
“Shut up,” I said, wiping my runny nose with my sleeve.
The closer we came to the altar and bishop, the more difficult it became for me not to completely lose it. I looked at the aisle where my family was sitting and saw that my father was missing. I wasn’t surprised. The magician David Copperfield couldn’t compete with my dad when it came to putting on disappearing acts.
“I’m just going to pop in here to buy a pack of cigarettes. I won’t be a minute,” he would say to us, and then disappear into a restaurant that, lo and behold, had a bar. Today he had probably told my mother he was going to the bathroom and would be right back, slipped out—and wouldn’t surface for hours.
It wasn’t until I was within four or five kids of the bishop that I could really see his face. He was corpulent, his cheeks and jowls glazed with perspiration, and he was lightly wheezing like Kip Merriweather, a kid in our class who had asthma. The bishop looked like he would have paid a hundred bucks to get out of his clericals, go home, put his tired feet up, pop open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and watch a Notre Dame basketball game. As I stepped forward and stood before him, he saw the tears running down my face. For an instant, his pasty white face softened, his eyes sparkled just like the Virgin Mary’s, and the corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile of deep knowing. I suspect he knew that I was one of those strange kids who “got it”—who was hungry and thirsty for God, who longed to be full. Maybe he’d been one of those weird kids too. He placed the Host on my tongue and put his hand on the side of my face, his fat thumb briefly massaging my temple, a gesture of blessing I did not see him offer to any of my other classmates. And I fell into God.
I have spent forty years living the result of that moment.
I am told that, in years past, when a blizzard hit the Great Plains, farmers would sometimes tie one end of a rope to the back door of their farmhouses and the other around their waists as a precaution before going out to the barn to tend to the animals. They knew the stories of farmers who, on the way back to the house from the barn in a whiteout, had become disoriented and couldn’t find their way back home. They would wander off, and their half-frozen bodies wouldn’t be found until spring, when the snow melted.
That day, Bishop Dalrymple, sweat dripping from the end of his bulbous nose, tied a rope around my waist that was long and enduring. How did he know the number of times that I would stretch that rope to its breaking point or how often I would drift onto the plains in a whiteout and need a way to find my way back home?
A few weeks after that first Communion, I came home from school and my mother told me that my father had gone on a last-minute business trip to Northern Ireland. This was a surprise, since I didn’t know my dad was employed. As I look back, it’s hard to believe he was employable.
He didn’t come home for six months.
I learned years later that this was the year the “troubles” broke out between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Nationalists. I’m certain he was there on assignment for the CIA.
This wasn’t the first time my father left on a trip with only a few hours’ notice. My mother told me that when news broke of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, my father rushed home from the office, threw a bunch of clothes in a bag, and raced off without explanation to Austria with a close family friend who worked at the American Embassy. My mother isn’t sure but she thinks that same friend was killed in Mexico several years later.
I wonder sometimes if my father was one of those men who couldn’t be domesticated, one of those who couldn’t return to civilian life after the war to become a reliable husband and father who mowed the lawn and changed the oil on his car every three thousand miles.
I see him, instead, like a tiger at the zoo, always pacing the cage. Perhaps he missed the rush that comes with danger and spycraft so much that he could rein in his drinking for a few months, albeit with white knuckles, if it meant getting a temporary leave from a beige suburban existence.
I have a postcard he sent me from Belfast on which he wrote, “Do you want to know a secret? I love you.”
I would have given anything for my father’s love to not be a secret. Anything. A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure.
A young boy needs a father who tells him that life is a loaner, who helps him discover why God sent him to this troubled earth so he doesn’t die without having tried to make it better. Most of all, a boy needs to be able to look into his father’s eyes and see admiration and delight. Frederick Buechner once wrote, “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.”
To see delight in your father’s eyes is to see his belief that the party of life would be a bust without you. He may not know it, but from the moment he first glimpses his baby boy’s head crowning in the delivery room, a father makes a vow that with stumbling determination, he will try to get a few of these things right. Boys without fathers, or boys with fathers who for whatever reason keep their love undisclosed, begin life without a center of gravity. They float like astronauts in space, hoping to find ballast and a patch of earth where they can plant their feet and make a life. Many of us who live without these gifts that only a father can bestow go through life banging from guardrail to guardrail, trying to determine why our fathers kept their love nameless, as if ashamed.
We know each other when we meet.