The first memory I have of him—of anything, really—is his strength. It was in the late afternoon in a house under construction near ours. The unfinished wood floor had large, terrifying1 holes whose yawning darkness I knew led to nowhere good. His powerful hands, then age 33, wrapped all the way around my tiny arms, then age 4, and easily swung me up to his shoulders tomand all I surveyed.
The relationship between a son and his father changes over time. It may grow and flourish in mutual maturity. It may sour in resented dependence or independence. With many children living in single-parent homes today, it may not even exist.
But to a little boy right after World War II, a father seemed a god with strange strengths and uncanny powers enabling him to do and know things that no mortal could do or know. Amazing things, like putting a bicycle chain back on, just like that. Or building a hamster cage. Or guiding a jigsaw2 so it forms the letter F; I learned the alphabet that way in those pre-television days.