I study the picture of my own young somber face. And I now feel willing to send any monthly amount to keep this orphaned kid fed, housed, as far out of uniform and off the gusty lacrosse field as possible. It is in this strange context that—middle-aged, sitting amid the clutter of one daughter’s trimming new reeds for her oboe, another’s perusing works on Degas sculpture and fan mags showing the latest teen blond actor-sensation—I still marvel at the forlorn beauty (so up for grabs) of one stark parade-field boychild.

Back then, that much a kid, I as yet masterminded the resurrection of my father. Surely we buried the wrong person? A white man who only outwardly resembled my real Dad. Might Clyde not simply Packard through the gates of this pretentious prison camp for delinquent changelings? Couldn’t he abduct his child safely back to Falls, return me to civilian clothes, enroll me at a school so near our house that you could always hear the early, then the late bells?

Sundays in particular, at a window seat in the hall of the third floor, staring out the tilting fan-shaped Palladian window just under our roof’s central peak, I habitually watched all approaching traffic. I sat waiting for the next waxed black car to activate its blinker, turn in.

III.

… If it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.

John 14:2

The rest is one wing beating, when two wings are required for flight.

The rest becomes my own story, but ghost-written. I had not believed in ghosts. Till Clyde died.

I became, without quite knowing it, a somewhat conservative scholar. My enjoying any career at all still offers me a weekly source of wonderment. It would delight Dad. And yet, compared with certain stellar work in the field, my own can look, even to me, merely “respectable.”

I am not, as my daughters now indiscriminately use the term, a “sexy” scholar. All the same, I have published nineteen articles and the two books. Teaching’s made a dent in my output; but giving energy away to students isn’t something I regret very often. I’m regularly consulted by my peers. I like being a tie-breaker between warring camps. Clyde’s son, after all.