On Tuesday, the first of this month, I finally moved into the big room: the master bedroom. I slept in there a couple of scorching, humid, windless nights in August because it’s the only room in the house with air conditioning. My mother had A/C installed there years ago over my father’s objections. He was dead-set against air conditioning but I suppose in the interest of keeping the peace he caved on that one room. I hadn’t been able to…
As you know, my father was a journalist. In that role, he was a storyteller: he relayed information about lives and events that readers could use to make informed decisions about how to live their lives. What occurs to me is that what we remember about my father were HIS stories — stories that serve as signposts illustrating a truly amazing, well-lived life. There were anecdotes about growing up during the Great Depression — with which we would tease him…
Springsteen asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” but what happens to a story that doesn’t get told? Surely it disappears, right? Evaporates like so much dew as the sun warms the morning. But the events of that story, the lessons, do they disappear too? And the person who lived the story, who dreamed it up and made it a reality, what happens to that person, after he or she has passed on, if the story…