I was passing through the kitchen one night when my father, alone there, called me over. Then he did something very unusual. Well past the time when I thought such a thing could happen, he pick
ed me off the ground as if I was still a toddler and hugged me close. Then, lips to ear, he asked me a secret. “Tell me,” he said softly, so as not to be overheard elsewhere in the house, “that you will love me no matter what I do.”
I found his words more mystifying even than his lifting me off the floor. I didn’t understand them as foreboding. After all, he was my dad. I remember pausing to try to figure out what he was talking about before I answered him. Nothing came to me, and all I could think of to say was, “Sure I will, Dad.”
I was 10 years old. Continue reading “Father’s Day Fever”
