I carry this picture in my wallet all the time

"In this picture, we are already fading. His arm fits perfectly around me, and I am nestled comfortably in the crook of his shoulder. I am 10. He had his first heart attack around the time I was born, and has been “watching it” ever since. Every few weeks, he and I go downtown to the pharmacy and pick up some pills and a bottle of medicine. We don’t use salt or real butter. We have been in this house for 4 years. I am 10, and he is 45, in seven years we will be separated from each other, some would have us believe for ever. My mother will continue to live in this house for 38 more years and counting: same address, same phone number, same house key.

He has been talking to people about me, asking if someone knows a piano teacher that will be gentle with my love of music and not kill it with drudgery of scales and exercises. Occasionally, he will bring out his “bobcat” tenor banjo, or his clarinet from high school days, and my sisters and I will squeal with laughter. He will soon buy an Oldsmobile convertible, something he’s wanted for a long time and mom and all of us kid him about.

It is Christmastime. I have just started serving mass at church. At Christmas, we change from black cassocks to red ones with intricate, starched surplices. In a few months, he and mom will buy me a full-size bicycle. It will get full-size use. It will be a warm, sunny, late-April morning I will remember many years later.


He loves to whistle. When we go for walks, he snaps his fingers in time to his whistling. In the morning, he wakes me up with singing as he makes coffee.


It is seven years later: October 18, 1969. I come home from playing at morning mass. It is a crisp, sunny Autumn Saturday , and I hear crying---screaming, really--- from the basement. He has collapsed and mom and I cannot revive him. I can smell the morning coffee we shared on his breath. The ambulance comes and takes him away.




Our basement is unique. Large wooden stairs coming down from the kitchen almost connect with cement steps going up and out to the back yard, where clean sheets used to dry in the wind on the clotheslines. In my mind that is how I think of it: stairs leading down and in, steps going up and outside, where the breeze makes everything fresh."