Papa and me
I may be the luckiest man in the world. When I was ten, my mother threw my father out of the duplex we were renting on one of the worse streets in a washed-up mill town in western Massachusetts. She had me bar the door. Then she had a breakdown and I went to bed. I had to be well-rested for the first day of school.
The next morning my grandfather was sitting at our kitchen table when I came down for breakfast. The world as I knew it had just collapsed but instead of being buried underneath it, I was about to be rescued by Papa. He was there to instruct me in the ways of the world, to teach me how to be a man craftsman to apprentice. How To Become A Man is our story. What follows are excerpts that will be updated periodically.
Chats with Papa
During college, Papa and I talked more and more on the phone. Our relationship had always consisted of stories and the lessons derived from them. But not being able to sit across from him at the kitchen table or ride with him in a golf cart made me appreciate the link his voice had created. Soothing, funny, wise, whimsical, that voice had kept me going through bad years and befriended me when the trouble had passed. So, on visits home from school, I occasionally brought along my tape recorder. I wanted a greatest hits tape of his stories. I didn’t quite get that. But the tapes that remain allow me to dream that he is still sitting across from me.
