The Gift

When it was all over, this blast from the past, K. was put out. She wanted a do-over, or an un-do-over in this particular circumstance. It would have been better if he had never come back into her life, ruffled her feathers, caused a stir.

The trigger in this case was a movie, "Lord of the Rings." He said he was watching the movie with his girlfriend and thought of K. and her clique, a bunch of hobbit crazy 18-year-olds. But it was K. he couldn't stop thinking about. So he called her parents' number. And as fate would have it, 30 years later, she was there that day, helping her elderly parents.

He never expected to actually talk to her. He just called to see whether someone answered. To ask how she was, to see whether she was still married, truth be told.

This call set off a series of e-mails, phone calls, small gifts of books and music CD's. He admitted he had never gotten over K. She was reluctant. She was long married, with children. He was a parent too, but long separated. Their parting had not been a happy one.

Their courtship way back then was brief, but intense. He was a dashing senior, about to graduate. She was a freshman. Flighty, beautiful, pursued by many. They were together as much as possible, and talked on the phone when they weren't. But he omitted one pertinent fact. He was engaged to be married to his hometown girl.

She found out one weekend when a friend still in high school called. The engagement had been announced in the newspaper.

K. was devastated. In the way of an 18-year-old girl who thinks she's in love for the first time.

She saw him one more time. He showed up outside her house that summer, late at night. He begged her to tell him not to marry. She refused. She wanted him to make that decision on his own. Pride. She wondered about that refusal for many years.

Until that day at her parents' house, when he called. Out of the blue. Warning sign. Not particularly contrite, even then. Ready to pick up and be friends. All those years later.

After some hesitation, K. got back on the roller coaster. Emotionally speaking. They did not see each other except for a very brief visit, once. Their affair was not physical. But it turned her life upset down.

He followed the same pattern he had as a younger man. He reeled her in with intense professions of feeling. Flooded her e-mail and voicemails with conversations and flattery. Proof, he said, of how much alike they were, of their suitability. He intimated they were fated for each other. He stopped seeing the girlfriend.

Heady stuff for a long settled middle-age woman with children who were grown and gone or just on the verge.

And then, when he had his quarry right where he had hoped, he bolted. Back to his solitude. She was hurt. Then finally relieved, set it aside. After a long silence, he surfaced but she ignored tentative attempts to communicate.

She knows now he is a hermit, really. It's not even his fault, I reminded her. A tiger doesn't change his stripes, even when he wants to. It is what it is.

I don't think K. would have actually left her life, when it got down to it. Her husband is distracted and not particularly attentive too often. But he's her family now. I think this interloper was a lesson, a last gasp, emotional fling that came along to teach her that. And for another reason she doesn't even understand. Yet.

This blast from the past wasn't really a waste of K.'s emotional capital. Because that former dashing romantic gave her a gift. He brought back a part of her that she left behind on the campus quad, that big beautiful expanse of green that went on and on, the one we thought we would walk across forever and ever.

Most of us lost a lot of ourselves from those days, during the long, hard trudges through work, parenthood, illness and losing people we loved. Through the ravages of time. K. was one of those people. Tired, going through the motions. But she's not now. Old Mr. romance is gone, he absconded again, but he left K. a present.

Her sparkle is back. Always beautiful, her blue eyes are not the only things about her that are alive with light. Yes, she is burnished by time and experience. Now she looks like she has a secret and she does. She knows from B.S. now. And she's turning heads again. It is a joy to be with her. Because she is absolutely aglow.

A Boy's Long Strange Path Here

Motherhood never seemed real to me, a "maybe, someday" thing. A doctor said it wouldn't be a good idea, given my history. My first husband and I were married to our work anyway. The separations started early. But we couldn't manage the gumption to end it. Until finally we did.

Even during those bad years, D. was knocking on the door. Brushing against glass with bird's wings.

Once, I was in Georgetown with a gaggle of girlfriends having lunch. Wine flowed. We walked by a sign -- "Palms Read." Let's go in, I said. My friends pushed me into the closet-sized room first. I sat in front of a flimsy curtain while the woman of mystery read my palm. My friends peeked through the gaudy cloth and giggled.

The reader squinted at my palm, frowned, stared me squarely in the eye. I squirmed. What had one of my body parts done NOW? She stated that I was married to the wrong man. She asked whether I had children. Well, no. Obviously a mistake, she said. I would be a mother once I got rid of the wrong husband and married the right one. It was all right there in my palm. Mr. Right was already in my life, I knew him. No, no name available. But, said the mystery one, she could see a very vivid shade of blue all over my psychic profile. This blue was very important. Look for the blue. With that the reading was over, $25 please, and she went back to looking bored.

I was annoyed. What kind of fortune was that?

The session had been a lark. But still, it bothered me. I began staring too long at blue-eyed men of my acquaintance. Especially one co-worker, a man I liked, yet butted heads with fairly often. He reminded me of my father, the dark hair and blue eyes of black Irish ancestors. They shared the bull-headed disposition, but this man lacking the ameliorating southern charm.

But I kept thinking about the circumstances that led me to this workplace. Something had drawn me there.

I had applied several times. It wasn't a good fit, but the place had turned into a pest. I was called in for an interview when a new sheriff came to town because my name kept coming up over there. I felt I should give it a serious look. I interviewed once, then was called back for a second.

The session wasn't going well. Then the strangest thing happened. This boss man was winding up the chat, dismissing me, saying he was interviewing other candidates blah blah blah. I was already rising from my chair to make my escape. Relieved. Then I saw his face register alarm as he looked toward the huge glass window that made up one long magnificent wall of his office.

At the window was a very large dark bird, scraping and scrabbling against the glass as though trying to fly through it. Frantic, flapping, moving away only to crash back into the glass. We froze, the boss and I, unable to move. I caught my breath. The boss appeared to be in genuine pain about this bird's plight.

Suddenly, the creature got its bearings and flew away in a burst. We exhaled, the breaths audible in the still room. Then, the boss blurted a job offer, at a salary I could not refuse. He told me to go home and "prayfully consider" the request, terms I was not used to from crusty news bureau bosses. And to call him after the weekend. I thanked him and walked, stunned and shaky, down the long hall, out of the office and finally the building. I stared into the sky, thinking "WHAT WAS THAT????!!!!"

I took the job. Something unfathomable was at work. And I could not resist its pull.

Then came the first Gulf War. As Iraqi tanks stole into Kuwait under the cover of darkness, my first marriage imploded, this time for good. Sitting in the marriage counselor's office, after two years of circuitous talk that no longer covered up our relationship's torturous death, I said I just could not do it anymore. He stood, picked up his briefcase and walked out. Eleven years of marriage, 14 years together. Homes bought and sold, journalism careers pursued together, moves. An entire life rose from the therapist's chair and walked out the door.

The next weeks were a haze. Drums sounded around the clock from anti-war protestors sitting vigil outside the White House near my office. I moved into an apartment across from the soaring Washington Cathedral. Because my life was not gothic enough, a bat slipped into my nearly empty apartment and hid out during the daytime, coming out at night to flap about and terrorize me. Finally the elderly resident manager found it for me, threw it out the window, flapping back home toward the cathedral.

But none of this was nearly as strange as what I found out a year or so after the death of that marriage. During a long talk with another man, J., who worked in my office, I was surprised to find that his engagement had ended on the day of the Iraqi tanks, the same afternoon, in fact, that my marriage fractured a final time.

J. and I had not been friendly enough at that time to know that about each other. It had only come out during the intimacy of dating, which began six months after my marriage ended.

This sweet man from Iowa, the youngest of five, who I had thought of as a little brother because I was so comfortable with him. Who made me laugh. Who still makes me laugh the loudest and the longest, all the time, especially when he doesn't try.

There was a vivid clue but I didn't see for a long time.

After I accepted the new job, the boss asked me to come over during my lunch hour for a banquet with some newsmaker or another. I was still working out my notice at the old place. I said okay. I walked over and got into the elevator of the building where the odd bird had been flapping its wings against the glass just days before.

The elevator doors opened. And there he was, J., standing there as though he had been waiting for me. I didn't know him from Adam. But he stood there tall, friendly, welcoming and, well, cute. He started talking. It made no real sense but I understood him perfectly. Something about having washed his hands but the towel dispenser was empty. He was funny and warm and I relaxed immediately. I felt like I had known him forever.

J. welcomed me to my new workplace. He's so nice, I thought. And I couldn't help noticing his eyes. Like a certain mystery woman clad in veils behind a curtain predicted, the man I married a few years later and improbably had a son with was standing there staring at me with eyes a wonderful, vivid, shining shade of blue.

It just took a while for it all to fall into place. And even longer for me to see. A bird desperately hurling itself against the glass of a workplace where I didn't even want to be but felt helpless to resist. War and bats and sad endings, culminating in the beautiful, vibrantly healthy, yelling boy who was so easily born without incident and took away the breaths of every single person in the hospital delivery room.

But I was the most amazed of all, a 40-year-old first-time mother who wasn't even supposed to give birth. I held him, staring, and could not stop saying, "I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

The baby was so strong, he nearly hurled himself off the warming tray, alarming the veteran delivery nurse. "They're not supposed to be able to do that," she said, white-faced. I understand that now, nearly 16 years later. This boy had to wait a while to arrive, for an unlikely mother to open the door. By the time that happened, he was already an old soul. He had been on one very long, strange path.

The Fox Hunt

I shadowed my father on a few hunting and fishing trips as a kid. He also let me tag along "to the store" -- an excuse to loaf with his buddies, sprawled on benches around a wood-burning stove, sneaking smokes, talking about nothing.

But my begging never penetrated the iron wall of his resistance when it came to fox hunting. No. Never, not even one time. These forays, with his older brother and men they had known for most of their lives, are still burnished with mystery and ritual, decades later.

This was not riding to hounds, with horses and tea tables laid out under a stand of trees. The hunts led by my uncle were far more primitive. Still, rules governed them. And first and foremost, this was a masculine enterprise.

On hunt day, the hounds knew. I imagine they woke up, lofted those fabled noses into the sunlight and smelled what awaited them -- a long sweet chase through the unparalleled beauty of a middle Tennessee night.

Uncle H., a tough old bird forced to leave school and take over a man's roles at the age of 8 when his father died suddenly, trained his dogs with a firm yet loving hand. Once, a lunatic neighbor shot sweet Lucy for running across his property. It hurt her so severely she had to be put down. It nearly killed my uncle.

For these men, the hunt was all about the hounds. We drove up from Alabama, so the dogs heard our car coming first. My father descended the long familiar dirt and gravel road on my uncle's farm, following the smooth limestone-bed creek running parallel to the pasture. Hearing the car, the dogs yipped and howled first in warning, then in greeting after recognizing us from a distance.

I always made a beeline for the barns, which were filled with hay bails and many cats. From my perch in the top, I watched men converge as the afternoon light began dissolving into the treetops past the white farmhouse, making its way to the river and beyond. Men in overalls or jeans and hunting jackets climbed from cars and battered trucks. Some shouldered rifles and shotguns, others clutched flashlights and lanterns.

Every single time, I would ask my father to bring me the fox tail from the hunt. I had visions of fashioning a hat with a fox tail for myself. Or a stole. I'm not really sure. My father would say yes, of course. I made him promise. I badgered, confirmed it with Uncle H.

But at a certain point, they were beyond listening to my prattle. The men were animated, the dogs pacing, pulling, straining on leashes -- anxious to run.

Finally, a sharp whistle cracked through the murmurs and the roar of the barking. The men took off, barely able to hold the leashes of frantic, pulling dogs desperate to be on the run. The men and dogs swelled in the yard, around the smokehouse, spooking work mules and horses behind the house. A swarm now, they flowed finally through the gates of the south pasture along the creek, the one with the sweet cold water waiting to be cupped into dried gourd dippers hanging from nails on the well house. And then, with twilight settling into the hills, they were gone.

I tried to wait up, fighting sleep. I asked again why only men and boys could go. "Some of those men talk rough," my aunt would say, a quaint notion now. So I strained to hear the dogs in the distance. And I could, once they picked up the scent of a fox running a circuit in the night, looking for food.

That sound was a high-pitched howling that the men called fox-hound music. I knew the men were gathered around a fire, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, talking, listening with a faraway look in their eyes. Their minds were on the competition taking place at a distance. The dark, barbed wire fences, steep hills and gullies made following the hunt treacherous. But following wasn't the point. The point was the chase. The men were discerning the sounds from the dogs. They translated for each other, especially for the younger men and boys in their gathering.

They knew which dog was closing in on a fox. They knew who was bringing up the rear, or had lost interest. They knew how close the dogs were, whether the fox was outrunning or outsmarting the dogs. They could tell by the way the dogs "cried" that they had lost the scent. They talked about how much faster Lucy was this year, say, but that Sam was gaining on her. That the younger dogs would need seasoning. That maybe this was old Jack's last hunt.

They could tell by the music they were hearing -- the dog's singing voices. The howls, cries, barks, how long and how high the pitch. These things wove the tale in the mind's eye, painting a canvas of vibrant color and motion to go along with the sound.

They had an idea when the fox ran through a herd of cattle to throw off the trail. Or ran to ground. If the dogs found another fox to chase. And if a fox was cornered or trapped, the men whistled and called the hounds off, fired a gun in the air. These men who could seem so hard, so impervious to death on the farm, wanted the fox to go free. If the fox population had been leaving the farmers' livestock alone, that is. If the wild creature being chased that night was really a fox instead of a coyote that had been killing calves and pets.

There was no need for senseless killing. Or for taking a bloodied fox tail to a little girl who wasn't a hunter or fisher in any form or fashion, whose father amended those trips when she wanted to go, making them into nature strolls, really. Because that girl grieved for days when she found dead minnows in her father's fishing bait pail.

These were men who simply wanted to give free rein to the hounds. Letting them do what they were born to do -- catch the scent of a beautiful, clever, wild creature and track it, sing the fox-hound music. They were men reveling in the freedom and beauty of a deep dark night in the southern wilderness. In the easeful company of other men, they celebrated life. Blessed life.

The Non-Goodbye

--"I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow."
*John Keats


I guess I'm not done. I'm still thinking about my father here.

Some odd things happened right after he died. The death was sudden, an accident, so we were in shock. I kept thinking the emotional blow was behind my strange reaction. Then later, I found out a friend whose parents passed away a year apart following long illnesses experienced similar things. And those deaths had been expected.

So, I wondered, what the heck.

I was with my mother for nearly a week after the accident. The house was chaos for a few days. People stopped by with enough food to feed a battalion. The phone never stopped ringing.

And as I live and breathe, I could hear him, my father. The deep voice that sang bass in the Methodist choir, led countless closing prayers, instructed an adult class in that church for decades. The voice that settled a one-room schoolhouse of overgrown farm boys who accepted his authority only after wrestling matches at recess (my father always won).

His voice was strong, his laugh infectious. And I could hear both ringing bell clear in the hours and days after he died. I was so certain of this that I would charge from the room I was in, searching for him. But he wasn't there. He was never there.

I also could hear his pickup truck pull into the driveway. I would rush to the window and look. But the truck was where it had long sat, ready for the tailgate to be pulled down and his pointers to leap in, eager for a ride deep into the countryside in search of a quarry of quail. It had not moved, no one had touched that truck.

After a couple of days, I thought I was losing my mind. I slept with the lights blazing. I would dose, exhausted, and my eyes would fly open thinking "he's here" -- and of course, he wasn't.

I thought it was because I had not been at the hospital when he died, had not said goodbye. Because my mind was not accepting the truth. Because I had not seen the awful results of that accident. That I was "hearing" him even after the freakish experience of seeing his name on the town's funeral home sign, where the long wake had to be extended because people kept arriving, hour after hour after hour.

Maybe it was because I kept rediscovering him? At that wake, friends poured in, former co-workers, people I had never seen. One neighbor stood alone and very still, with tears in her eyes. She said my father was kind to her family when they moved there. "Everyone else ignored us. He was the only one in the whole town who made us feel welcome here," she said. I had no idea.

We gave him a funeral the next day and had lunch at home with all that food, asking everyone at the service to please join us. Then I drove my mother almost four hours to his Tennessee hometown for yet another funeral and the burial on that blazing hot July day.

My siblings went back to Alabama. But my mother and I spent the night in the house where she was born, a remote place of no streetlights and river rock roads. I saw only pitch black darkness from the window. And the sounds were a profound comfort for me -- a nightlong mercy symphony from fields and woods filled with crickets, katydids and frogs.

Before leaving, my mother, an aunt and I stopped by the cemetery. I placed a dime by the temporary marker, a private hello. That's because my dad would distract me from childhood vaccinations by putting a coin in front of me at the exact moment the nurse pushed a needle into my arm.

I had been a trooper until then, channeling my father's best social self for long hours in public. Helping my mother with decisions I knew my dad would want.

But then my mother, standing dry-eyed by his freshly dug grave, put down a small flower arrangement and said softly, "Well, I brought you home." And she quickly walked away.

My heart cracked open.

I sat in the car and cried in silence for several minutes. We did not speak, the three of us, the new widow, her older sister and I. Then I started the car and drove through silent headstones and tombs, back to my aunt's house and then to Alabama. I continued to hear my father, although his voice was fading with each day.

I stayed in my hometown for two more days. My mother flies into high gear to cope. I need down time. Not sleeping, hours of driving, going on my mother's manic missions. These included returning flimsy pie pans meant to be thrown out, to the surprise of people who brought food in them specifically so we did not have to take them back. I was worn out.

My siblings live in the same town with my mother, so she had company and help. She wasn't bereft. She was energized, hyper, keeping herself busy. We were starting to grate on each other. So I left. At the airport when I got back, J. met me, folded me into his long arms and brought me home. I really slept for the first time in nearly a week.

I talked to my friend L. I told her I thought I was losing my mind, hearing my father and his truck pulling into the driveway. She said she heard similar things after losing both her parents, a year apart.

I was relieved, to say the least.

That's because L. doesn't believe in the woo woo. She is not given to fancy, belief in the supernatural, things not scientifically nailed down and the like. Once, after she had surgery, I drove her home from the hospital, installed her on a couch, and turned on a relaxation tape of flutes and babbling brook, birds singing, etc., thinking she would find it peaceful and, well, healing.

We were quiet for a bit. Then she said:

"C.?"

"Yes?"

"You are SO weird."

But this is what she said about "hearing" our relatives after they had passed away. Or something to this effect: "It was like there was a scrim or a curtain of gauze between this world and the next. And my parents had gone just beyond that curtain. And I felt like I could reach out and almost touch them, but not quite. And that they could touch me if they wanted to. But they didn't. And wouldn't. Because I didn't want them to."

She said the feeling lasted a few weeks. Then one day she realized the curtain was gone and so was the feeling that her parents were just there, behind it. She felt their souls had moved on, to where they were supposed to go. That this process just took a while, longer than we had been taught to believe.

And it was like that for me too. In time, I didn't hear my father.

Except for one last time.

A few months after he died, I had a dream about him.

In the dream, the telephone rang. My father was calling. He was dressed in his blue and white seersucker suit, his summer dress up outfit. In his hand, he held his white hat with the tiny pearl pin in the hatband.

I told him we had been extremely worried, looking for him everywhere. He was laughing, telling me not to fret. He chatted a bit, he was on a trip. Healthy and fine. The charming, gracious father, the one with his best foot forward, bad moods nowhere in evidence.

"I am fine. Everything is good. I am doing very well."

And that was that.

So, I was not with him when he passed away like his other children and my mother, even his friends at the restaurant, the ones he shook hands with on that last day. But during my last visit, we had gone to a movie together, as reader Rebekah said, a sort of special goodbye that he had suggested and completely out of character. Then he seemed to stick around for a while, for me. And he came to tell me goodbye again, in a dream.

But I hate goodbyes. I don't say them.

I will, instead, be leaving a dime in this spot and that when I think about my father. That's my decided response to this whole thing, once and for all. Finally.

The random dimes are me saying, "Well, hey there daddy."

I won't be saying any goodbyes.

Meant To Be

I'm borrowing this story. Read on and you'll see why.

The setting was the rural deep south, a car winding along a dark road in the hollows of the Appalachian foothills. The driver was a young woman, Sarah, taking her relatives home after a trip to church. Her passengers were Eva, we'll call her, and Eva's son Charlie.

Eva was a widow. She'd been married to Irvine for 60 years when he passed quietly, the way he had lived. She was elderly, her health fading. This was cause for concern. And that concern would be Charlie.

Charlie, himself an old man then, had been born with disabilities. These were people who handled their own problems, for better or worse. Charlie had always lived at home, worked with his father on the farm. They were salt of the earth, sharecroppers. He went to school some, but mainly stayed close to home. People told Eva and Irvine to send him away. They refused. They taught him what they could, how to get by, with their help. Took him to church every time the doors opened. Still, he was dependent.

Now, with Irvine gone, and Eva fading more each day, relatives were increasingly worried. Proud people, working hard at their own jobs and raising families themselves, just getting by, they didn't know what they would do when, well, the worst happened. Charlie was an only child. Eva and Irvine had no siblings left. The family was small and resources were limited. Family members were doing all they could to help.

But Charlie had been nearly inconsolable when Irvine passed. He wouldn't make it when Eva died. It was all too much to even consider.

Sarah had taken Charlie and Eva to a church singing that evening. They were winding home along the hollows. Eva loved singings. Irvine used to take her, driving for miles in the ramshackle pickup. Sarah was happy to help, when she could. She loved the singings too.

The night was unseasonably chilly, but Sarah wasn't worried. She'd grown up in those gentle hills. Although she was not driving her usual route, still, this was her home turf. She had wanted to get them all home earlier, it's true, but her aunt had been in such a good mood, lingering to talk to some of the gospel singers, some in the audience too. People she'd not seen in a while, since Irvine's death two years before sent her into a sad slump.

Eva was happy tonight. So, because of that, Charlie was too. They left the church on a high note.

So they drove, listening to Eva hum old hymns, the car headlights fashioning a path of warm gold for them just ahead through the mists cascading heavily now over the night-blackened hills.

It happened in a blink of an eye.

Sarah didn't understand. They had been moving and now they were stone still. The rush of the wind outside the car was replaced by silence. And then a moan. Eva. She was calling Charlie's name.

Finally the horror surfaced, pulverizing the merciful numbing shock. The car was tilted, almost at a 90-degree angle. It had left the road somehow. They were alive, but hurt. At night, in the cold, in the middle of nowhere, in the days before cell phone nation.

Sarah felt hysteria rise in her throat, frantically fighting the urge scream. Was that gasoline she smelled? Could she get out of her seatbelt and get to Charlie in the back? He wasn't moving, speaking. Eva was still, too, but whimpering.

Suddenly, Charlie started to stir. Then twist and pull, trying to get out of his seatbelt. The car was pushed in and mangled, Sarah sensed any further movement could make the situation worse. She was panicking, yelling now, begging him to calm down. God help us, she cried us, over and over. God please help us.

And then it happened. Sarah heard a voice. Someone else was in the car. The soft, gentle, masculine voice of a man they all three had known and loved all their lives.

It was Irvine. He was in the car, with them.

The fear, shock and pain went away, replaced by calm and relief. The four sat throughout the long, cold night, waiting for the first rays of sun to break through the mountain tops and dense trees.

And finally another car came over the hill and around the curve where the black ice had melted. The ice that earlier had formed in silent treachery over the road surface, sending Sarah's vehicle careening off the blacktop, flipping several times before coming to rest against a tree. On the passenger side, where Eva had been sitting in the front seat. And Charlie behind her.

Rescue workers were summoned. Sarah was hospitalized briefly for observation, with minor injuries only. Eva and Charlie were gone by the time the sun came up. Their injuries were profound, doctors said a quick rescue response would not have saved them. And of course, no one else was found in the car.

At the funeral, Sarah was quiet, sad, but at peace. She had been assured there was nothing she could have done to prevent the accident and what followed. She had cared for her dearly loved aunt as best she could for years. It took several years for her to relay the story of the night in the car to the man who told it to me.

True to her character, Sarah was not effusive or emotional in her description of what followed the accident, the hours in the car.

She said she was beginning to panic and was praying out loud when she heard Irvine's voice. He actually spoke very little, which had always been his way. He talked to them quietly, about simple things, the things that mattered, the life they had spent together, their love for each other.

Irvine had come to comfort his family through the last hours of their life in a car that wrecked on a dark cold night. And then, as though it had always been meant to be, he took them home.

A man who had always claimed he was an atheist told this story to me. But with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, he admitted he believed every word of it, despite the supernatural elements. Partly because he knew the principals, good country people not prone to fibbing or hyperbole. But mainly because, in the narrative that defied scientific rationalization, he recognized the clear, high struck sound of truth.

More Than A Movie

On my last visit with my father, he wanted to see Kevin Costner's "Dances with Wolves." I was floored. My father was an action man, he considered movies a waste of time.

Plus, his eyesight was failing him. He had just turned 80, and although very strong physically, had senile macular degeneration. He could not see directly in front of him, only his peripheral vision worked. But he wanted to go to "Dances," something about the buffalo and wide open vistas of the West.

Another thing, he wanted to pick up my niece, L. What? This man who insisted that his children go to school unless we were practically in the hospital? But I complied, going to L.'s teacher and blurting out his request. I had grown up with this woman. She laughed and said "no problem." L. was thrilled. She got out of school before lunch to go to the movies!

So, my father took one arm and my 10-year-old niece the other as I made my way from the bright lobby into the dark, nearly deserted theater. I actually couldn't see, but shuffled to a row and settled them in on either side of me. One questioned me about this, the other about that, and I explained the scenes on the huge screen as best I could.

And I was mesmerized. I would never have gone to this film on my own initiative. I've never cared for Westerns. But there were many layers to this tale about inadvertent Union Army hero Lt. John Dunbar, whose assignment to a remote outpost in the wilderness of the Dakota territory changes him forever.

It was a wonderful afternoon. I had often roamed with my father as a child through woods and fields, on hunting trips, through small towns exploring. But this was the first time we had been to a movie together since I was a very small child and we saw "The Story of Moses" at the drive-in at my mother's request.

My visit home, from Washington, D.C., in May of 1991, also was noteworthy for something my father said. This man loved to talk, and would do so with or without a conscious audience. He drove me crazy asking what I thought about, say, South Africa sanctions before I'd had a chance to pour a cup of coffee in the morning. But he rarely discussed the personal. Feelings were taboo, or at least, not interesting to him.

But on that visit, out of the blue, he told me he regretted not enjoying his children more when we were growing up. That he had been too wrapped up in making a living and allowed precious moments to slip away.

Age had mellowed him a bit, but he was volatile when my siblings and I were growing up. He was raised on a farm and probably shouldn't have left that life. He wore a suit and worked behind a desk even though he craved the outdoors. He could be the happiest person in the room or the gloomiest, and we never understood what would set off his moods.

So, when he talked about regrets, again I was floored. For the second time that visit. Because this was the closest thing to an apology I'd ever heard from my father. I didn't realize at the time how significant it was, that comment, the movie, the entire visit.

Because soon my time at home was over, and I was on a plane back to my life. Quickly these things slipped from my thoughts. And then two months later, on a Saturday morning in July, 1991, I got the call from my little sister. The one that stops time. The one you never forget.

I sat with wet hair in a white terry cloth robe, on my bed, phone to my ear. I stared out over a mass of treetops, watching planes approach National Airport just over the river in Arlington, VA. Hundreds of miles to the south in my hometown, my father had been hit by a car. He had been crossing the road after his regular morning coffee session at the "liar's table" with his friends at their favorite restaurant.

It was bad. He'd been airlifted to the hospital. It didn't look good.

He died before I could get home.

There are imponderables, still, about that day. Why did my father stop in the median, appear to see the approaching car, but then run full speed into that vehicle? A friend, who shook hands with my father and watched him walk away, saw the accident. Then at his funeral, why did two people choose then to tell me they had seen him walking too close to the road several times? He was stubborn, chaining him down would have worked, maybe. But if we had known, we could have had a chance to intervene. Maybe.

And sometimes I wish I had gotten the chance to say goodbye. I was in the air when my mother, abiding by my father's wishes, made the decision to turn off the phalanx of medical equipment keeping him artificially alive. The internal injuries were massive, his brain was destroyed, there was no hope. My sister talked some about his last hours in the hospital, so maybe being spared those images was a gift. I've never talked about any of this with my mother. We don't discuss these things.

Maybe because of this, though, every year the month of April lurks in silent menace. When it arrives, I count off the days until the 20th, his birthday.

For years I had a recurring dream: I was falling from the top of a cliff, the fall seemed to go on forever, in terrifying detail. But just before I hit bottom, my father stepped out from nowhere and caught me. Safe.

I haven't had that dream in a very long time. I guess it's gone.

But on his birthday, I watch our movie. Seeing it brings back our last great adventure and gives me some idea about where my father has gone, at least in spirit. I see a strong, brave man on a horse heading off into vast unexplored territory. The vista is one of big sky, big land. He's just gone on ahead.

And then I cry myself to sleep.

Cotton Fields Back Home

I read a blog the other day by a poster who was trying to meet new friends after a move. This involved finding common interests via the internet, then getting together in person.

The entry generated some sympathetic comments. I had nothing useful to add and did not post. But the subject sent my mind, and senses, into an irresistible bout of time-shifting. It was a cold, nasty day, after all. And I needed warmth. So I found it, in my mind, in north Alabama's rich red cotton fields. Goodness, how long ago. Half a century.

It was the late 1950s and we had moved to the Tennessee River Valley. My father built a house in the middle of a cotton field. And five days a week he put on a suit and a brimmed hat and commuted into the city to work, leaving my mother with three small children and no relatives or neighbors to speak of, at that point. We were in a tiny, very insular farming community where people had known each other all their lives.

Mother took us to church every time the doors were open. But it wasn't enough. She was lonely.

So she reached out in the only way she knew. Mother was raised on a tobacco farm and had never picked cotton. But she was no stranger to hard work. With her son in school, she got a sitter for her younger daughter, sewed a little sack for me from a netted grapefruit and attached a cloth strap. And off we went.

Cotton pickers for hire. No experience. In search of friends.

In Texas I'd left behind my best and only friend. I didn't understand what was happening when this little girl held onto our car door, her face inches from mine, sobbing. My mother insisted, "We're just going on vacation, we'll be back." She knew better than to set me off, her theatrical child.

She didn't buy it. This girl, a year or so older than me, was losing her near-constant companion and absolute servant. Her family owned a general store next door. Our long days of play were halted only by the welcome interruption of lunch at her place. In the store, at a small kitchen table behind the meat counter, we wolfed down excellent sandwiches. I especially remember the bologna and cheese, thick slabs of meat and dairy slapped together with mayo. Washed down with icy Dr. Pepper straight from the cold drink box.

All too soon, those days were over. My father was taking us to Alabama where he'd gotten a better job. It was closer to home for my parents, whose Middle Tennessee families had not understood the move to Texas, which then became the place where my sister and I were born. And that was enough, it was time to go home, or close enough.

On that last day, Mrs. H. took her time in pulling her grieving daughter away. She was upset too. Maybe she wanted my parents to own the sadness they had delivered with this move. And she probably did not approve of the fib my mother told. I remember smiling intensely, as we pulled away, waving hard, trying to get my friend to buck up.

I never saw her again.

Unlike in Texas, we had no neighbors in our new home, no general store next door. In the back, we had lush woods that I would grow to love, my refuge. And more woods across the road in front. Scary woods that gave shelter to howling coyotes and wildcats that made their way down from the small mountains ringing the entire vista.

And we had cotton fields, masses of stalks rising from fields like a vast stick army. They start out green, then flower and produce bolls. As the fiber matures, the plant dries out and the cotton bursts forth in soft pods of white puff that hold seeds. By the time we arrived in Alabama, machines had started harvesting some fields. But laborers still picked smaller fields and also combed the remnants left behind by machines.

The pay was minuscule for pulling the white fluff from rows with gloved hands and sending it tumbling through the holes of the bags strapped across our chests.

The work was grinding, hot, strength-sapping. Unless you were there on a mission, like my mother, or a lark like me.

Segregation was still in full force then. But in the cotton fields, the races easily worked side by side. Talk flowed, a necessary distraction from the tedium, the sweat. Oldtimers gave tips for preserving soft hands and keeping the sacks from tangling. Jokes were told. The occasional dirt clod flew after the school bus dropped off more pickers. Cotton field flirtations swelled and fell apart.

All were equal in the cotton field. At least for those few hours.

I was young, so my exhilaration soon ebbed. My mother would be on a roll, so her solution was simple. She let me crawl into the bottom of her sack.

The voices of my mother and her cohorts in the cotton soon lulled me to sleep. A bit of song here, a scrap of scripture, the soft scrape of the bag being pulled on the soil. Laughter rising, the sweet-smelling cotton floating down on top of me, bit by bit as I rode curled into a ball inside a bag being gently pulled down one row and then another.

At the end of the day, we hauled our sacks to a big truck to be hoisted onto a hook for weighing. The farmer announced the weights and fished out pay from an old cigar box. Everyone wanted the big haul. One perpetual winner was C.S., a teenage girl who could outpick any man on the field. I loved the days she showed up to pick. Her weigh-ins launched endless rounds of taunts, shouts and laughter.

But even the littlest picker got a chance to participate in my favorite part of the cotton harvest. Something I conjure up in detail when things in this life get a bit rougher than I would like.

Back then, the big kids demonstrated our end-of-picking celebration. I watched, then came my turn.

I climbed the slats to the very top of the truck side and dropped inside a few rungs, facing out. Next I carefully climbed back up, balancing on the top rail. When I got the signal that all was clear, I took a springing jump, like a backwards swan dive, although stopping short. My body stayed perfectly straight, arms flung out wide, legs rigid, toes pointed. I kept my eyes fastened tight to Alabama's big, blue sky.

And I fell back into the big, soft, warm mass of cotton that we had all just gathered. Fell and bounced and fluttered my arms and legs to burrow in deep. And to take in that scent.

Because the smell that covered me was something no manner of alchemy can ever get close to -- deep sweet softness melded with the sun, the sky, the rain and of course that rich red earth.

I tell people sometimes that I picked cotton as a child. And usually they recoil in surprise. But we dug into our new town in a way I doubt would have been possible if my mother had not taken the land's measure and decided to go to the cotton fields. We were truly of that place -- whatever it took, whatever came our way, we belonged.

And at the end, when my life is passing before my mind's eye as they say, I'm pretty sure I can predict at least one scene: I'll be climbing the wooden slats of a big truck filled with soft white cotton, breathing the sweet smell in deep, getting ready, pushing off hard, arms spread wide...