Like any working-class father, the life he lived was a blessed curse
I don’t have many memories of my father from when I was a boy. But one particular day almost 25 years ago persists with the pesky stubbornness of a garden weed. Around this stretch of the calendar, it pushes forth.
I feel the pitying eyes of others and I move outside and around the building’s corner. There, I pretend that I have left. That I am not this stranded child. That I have been picked up.My father worked a range of odd jobs. The one he devoted himself most to was that of “the guy” who sold and fixed people’s furnaces and air conditioners. People called whenever they needed him: in the sweltering heat and in the biting cold, in the small hours of the morning, or in the long dark of the night.
First, I’m embarrassed by how dense I still am about the general workings of commonplace things in a household. The other feeling is deeper. I could see in his eyes what I feel today in myself as a physician. The same conviction and lift in spirit when my finger follows the tracing of a sputtering heart, or when I pour over the tests of an inflamed liver. When all at once what you have been suspecting finally reveals itself to you. “There, that’s it!” we proudly point at and say.
In fretting moments I worry about barrelling toward a similar fate. At 33, I don’t have a son pulling at my pant leg. But I imagine the day I might.
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