Most striking: the adult-sized aprons on all the children. On the youngest, the apron’s skirt seems folded up and over four full times. Then its strings get knotted hard behind. However scared of the flashbulb the kid appears, he wears this bib with such pride. It could be armor in how he presents it: “Just like Dad’s. We own this whole store. Can I help you, Mister?”

As record-keeper, as sudden caretaker to my pals, tonight I feel weirdly identified with this solemn, unthanked kid. His sense of duty is already mapped out, it will be the death of him, and yet it’s the single way he sees to live.

At my most charitable moments (which seem fewer lately, given epic woes waiting back in boobytrapped New York), it helps to recall my father’s long climb, his dreary playless start. Instead of a treehouse, a grown man’s apron origamied to diaper size. No childhood, a Depression.

This might’ve convinced him to let his own sons have more fun. Instead, almost from our first efficient steps, he set us all to work. A witty older neighbor liked to call our house and its sons, The Works Projects Administration.

My first memories of Dad still involve his impossible commissions. Such chores would tax the stamina of a strong man twenty-five. A child aged three just cannot fake the manual skill required to wield a man-sized hoe. Concussions bruise young palms so new. The principle of leverage depends upon a figure standing at least five feet tall, not twenty-six inches long.

The tasks Dad assigned us seemed created to baffle and shame sons born lucky in a richer time. If the world had grown tail-finned with postwar luxury, handwork with old tools stayed baseline mean, and would always be instructive.

We lived in a beautiful house with a two-acre yard. The privet hedge that guarded it from neighbors was fully eighty-four feet long. (At twelve, I bought a retractable tape measure just so I could know this. I still know it.) One ideal home became our Parris Island. Dad only stepped into the yard with us, evenings after office hours, to check on our completed labors. We’d forgot one hula fringe of grass left undisciplined down the middle of the drive. Wasn’t that a one-inch dip in the hedge? Our work never really proved quite right. There seemed to be some high tax on a Dad’s ever uttering, “Good.”

Even as he grew more prosperous, his impatience with our country club friends (the kids next door) cast us all as softies, spoiled brats, the very crowd that must have sniggered at his homecut hair and outsized apron. I can see them, Faunderoys in green velvet, peering through the gold letters of his family name across store windows showing sawdust, a clock advertising a starch, flypaper clogged with its own regretted successes.