The days pass, and now and then one stands out My father, John, would’ve been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal. He left us at the age of 88. He’d been through some miserable medical procedures and said, “No more,” and went home to his eternal destination. He was a handsome farmboy, and fell in love with my mother, a city girl. They met at a Fourth of July picnic and were both smitten but it was the Depression and they had no money and years passed and one day he wrote her a long letter. I knew him as a taciturn man who never told stories or talked about himself but he was in love and wanted her to know it. So he described how, two days before, he’d driven a double team of horses to spread manure on a field and on the way home the hitch of the manure spreader clipped a horse in its hind legs and it reared up and the four horses bolted in panic and young John hauled back on the reins but couldn’t stop them. He braced himself and held on for dear life as the team galloped home and turned sharply in toward the farmyard, overturning the manure spreader, as John leaped and landed on the wreckage, suffering contusions, abrasions, lacerations, but his neck was unbroken. He wrote this in a simple narrative style, excellent penmanship, and then noted that he would be driving to town with his sister Josephine to help her select a bedroom set and that he hoped that he and my mother would soon buy one for themselves. A narrow escape from death, followed by erotic intimations. I felt closest to him when I was 11 and accompanied him on a trip to New York. He’d spent the war years in Manhattan, sorting mail in the Army Post Office, in the building with the saying about “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” on the façade, and he wanted to go back and see the city again. It was the first time I realized that not all soldiers were heroes; some of them had had a wonderful time in the war, had gone to shows and were treated as heroes. Read the rest of the column >>> | 
