The Old Man’s Book

He is slouched over my kitchen table, a knit cap on his head though it is July; he is lost (thankfully) in one of his many books – a mystery of some sort, undoubtedly. He adjusts his thick, smudged glasses on the bridge of his nose and then continues his story.

I wish I could give him more – give him what he gave me, but I am not sure how that might come to pass. It’s not that I am heartless or unaware, but more that I am at my own wits’ end and have no idea how to summon the necessary strength. 

Father, you were far from perfect, and yet you were all I could ask for. You came of age in a different time and a very different world – that I am is proof of your abiding faith in a new day -- is not just miraculous but wholly unlikely, at least as I see it: in thinking back, examining the timeline, the family pathologies, I cannot escape the reality that I was likely at least six tenths a mistake, or at best an unthinking blunder or hubris on some humid afternoon in the San Fernando valley when the two of you stumbled blind into a life you weren’t really sure you wanted to make together. 

And now, fifty years on, you sit at my kitchen table, decades removed from that distant California summer, dying by degrees, reading a story you’re not sure you haven’t read before. 

Father, there is some little grace left in you yet, a guttering flame all but out of wick, a repeated story that I finally realize is your benediction against time, against lost memories, against a life you didn’t mean to lead, yet did so well after all, your love sufficient, your work completed, those tired old hands now finally ready for rest, the real story no longer really all that important.