The day my father died, I was a long way from home. I was a long way from any place familiar, or even recognizable. But to be factual, I was five hours away from home by car or 257 miles to the northeast, according to my parents’ Triple A Trip Book, which they had consulted on the occasion of driving me upstate to college a year and a half earlier.
My father died at the end of my sophomore year in early May 1966. Right on the heels of one last grueling tax season, as befits an unwilling and unhappy accountant. I would have dreams for years in which I visualized my own private version of what I had not been able to witness. In these dreams, my father would enter our house through the front door in full working attire: in a Brooks Brothers suit and tie, handsomely hatted, carrying a well-worn but expensive leather briefcase swollen with papers. He was a dark-haired man, still slender in his early fifties, with only a little softening at the midriff. Here my dream would depart from reality. The antics of our family dog, a dachshund, were pointedly excluded. In reality, this ill-trained little beast, which reserved all its enthusiasm for the one person it feared, would complete several excited circuits of the interior of the house, sprinkling drops of urine in its wake, until landing on its back at my father’s feet. But my dream didn’t allow for comedy.
In...
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