A Dream Deferred

Mel Livatino

. . . and so was decided the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his destiny till the end of his
days. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, it was fated that he should stand upon a certain
square foot of floor from seven in the morning until noon, and again from half-past twelve till half-past
five, making never a motion and thinking never a thought, save for the setting of lard cans.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, last page of chapter 6

Photo by Alex Powell

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

My life did not really begin until I summoned the power to forgive my father
for making my childhood a long march of terror.
Tom Wingo in Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”

One

          In 1958, when I graduated high school, I was a kid with a foggy mind and a vague, unfocused life. My only passions were the horses my hormones rode through me, spurs furious, all day and night; my only interests those the culture spread before me in popular magazines and on billboards and TV like a banquet before the unhungry but craving. Nothing was truly mine. I was blank and without direction.
          But I did have one dream — to go to college. I was as vague about what college was as I was about who I was. But one thing wasn’t vague — the dream of going. I was desperate to go. I may not have grasped what college was, but I was convinced it would make me glitter in other people’s eyes the way nothing else could. I longed to be a “college man,” as a phrase of the time had it, perhaps even a “fraternity man,” so that I might glow in the dark.
          How all this would happen I had no idea, but I was willing to take the pledge on promise, for such a promise was implicit in all that was said and written about college in those days. I can show you a fraternity yearbook from 1963 in which every member of every fraternity seems anointed with happiness and radiates a smile so large it would automatically pull into his orbit a beautiful spouse, a handsome family, success in business, and adulation by all. Glory! Halleluiah! Hosanna in the highest!
          That is how the 17-year-old boy I then was felt inside as he stood under the ceiling light of our tiny kitchen on a spring afternoon trying to tell his dream to his father. I can still see that boy — 6’3″, thin, gangling, crew-cut, cheeks full of acne, unsure of himself, the world, or anything at all except his rage to go to college.
          His father did not share his son’s dream. He was a no-nonsense man of half-Sicilian parentage who saw the world in sharply defined terms and wholly logical ways. If large questions about life existed, he either didn’t know them or left them to others and did not worry how they would solve them. For him, problems came one at a time and they were small and you fixed them one at a time and you made money and you were happy.
          He had only one question for me that spring day: Why did I want to go to college? He asked the question bluntly, expecting — or perhaps, knowing the vagueness of his son, not at all expecting — a sharply defined answer, like, “I want to be a mechanical engineer and work for GM.” Or “I want to be a lawyer,” or “I want to be a CPA.” Of course I had no such answers. I had in fact never stepped foot on a single college campus in my life. Our family did not go on exploration trips to half a dozen campuses spread out over the
U. S. to see which one was precisely right for the anointed son’s ordination into a happy, successful life. We didn’t even walk the six blocks over to the local community college.
          I did have another dream, but it was hidden from my view when I was 17. I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. Meaningful was not a word I would have used then, nor would anyone in my family, because a meaningful life didn’t exist inside the parameters of our working-class family’s values. Money and success existed there — and success was mostly about money. Degrees and titles and accomplishments were admired — but only from afar — as if they were possible only for people in newspapers and magazines but not for us in the working class. We never imagined we could achieve things. Achievements were only for people with white collars, positions, and titles. Our lives were steeped in only one reality, and it had nothing to do with achievements or dreams. We were to get a job that paid well and had security. After that, there was family and pleasure; that was all there was to life. So on that spring morning in 1958 my wispy, unspoken dreams never showed up. Nor would they be spoken for five years.
          That spring day I was tissue paper and my father a pair of scissors.
          Instead of going to the University of Illinois to become a glittering success that fall, a few months after my kitchen meeting with my father I went to work in the printing plant where my father was one of the plant’s ace pressmen, a man universally admired for his skill. On a Friday in early June I was a student sheltered by a school; on Monday I began living a nightmare of mechanical reproduction without any personal purpose but the Friday paycheck, which I knew from the beginning could only buy things, not dreams. Or so it seemed to me on every one of those thousand and more days sitting beside my father on a hard plastic-covered car seat, our odor-ridden newspaper-wrapped lunches of baloney sandwiches sitting between us, inching through bumper-to-bumper Kennedy Expressway traffic, then picking our way past the homeless alcoholics splayed on the sidewalk or crumpled in doorways sleeping off nights of drinking, before finally climbing the twenty-some groove-worn cement steps and entering the ink-saturated air of my prison pressroom.
          Every day from that first Monday on, my dream was dead. Every day was merely a drive through a dark tunnel beneath an unending mountain range that was only weight and darkness to me — no light in front and only the light of childhood growing ever dimmer in the rear-view mirror. The hardest part of those years wasn’t the crushing, killing boredom or the long hours of physical labor; it was that I had no hope my life would ever be otherwise. The heart of the nightmare was that there would be nothing but tunnel for the rest of my life.

Two

          I had been a dreamy kid in school — bright enough, but only dimly conscious and socially retarded. I did not learn how babies were made until I was twelve or thirteen and didn’t really believe the lubricious story a friend poured into my ear beside a swimming pool one bright afternoon. Except for the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I never had a date and never went to a prom. As I was with girls, so I was with everything: dreaming my way through a foggy world.
          A printing plant was no place for dreaming. Dreaming while an enormous printing press is rolling huge steel cylinders together at four thousand revolutions per hour could in an instant cost you a finger, a hand, an arm, even your life.
          My father’s arrangement with me was that I would turn in three-quarters of my pay to him in return for room and board at home. At the outset, as a paper-handler, I earned $1.50 per hour, $60 per week without overtime. My net pay after taxes was $48.60, from which my father let me keep $12 a week to pay for my car (a very uncool ’52 4-door Chevy with gray paint worn to the primer from polishing), insurance, gas, clothes, dates (which finally began that summer), and whatever else the leftover nickels and dimes could buy. On such a salary I learned not to want much — indeed, to want almost nothing, or rather not to let the wanting take possession of me — a trait that has served me both well and ill the rest of my life.
          The superintendent of the plant was a large white-haired man who lumbered through the plant with a rolling gait, seemed perpetually unhappy, and barked at everyone. But he had one great quality that still shines in my mind nearly sixty years later: enormous authority. No man in the plant ever dared question it. At ten each morning he would amble up to me in brown wing tips, drop some dimes in my hand, and tell me to get him a Boston coffee and an egg sandwich from the greasy spoon across the street.
          American Offset was located at 1239 W. Madison, at that time the heart of Chicago’s skid row. Beside the bums and winos shuffling along or sleeping in doorways, eyes bleary, faces unshaven, hair greasy and wild, features swollen and lumpy, the neighborhood was inhabited by young black men. In the summer months, working the night shift, I would watch them from the second-floor window at the front of the plant as they gathered each night in a circle on the corner. Tall and thin in their blazingly white shirts, dark suits, and highly shined shoes, their teeth and eyes shone from their dark skins, and the circle constantly moved with hand gestures, bobbing and weaving. They drank openly from a bottle they passed around, laughing, pointing, and yelling at each other – a small human merry-go-round in front of the greasy spoon.
          A stocky man named Charlie owned the spoon. His hairy arms were perpetually bare and he always wore a white paper wedge cap smudged with grease that pressed down on angry eyebrows and a rock-like face. The place smelled of coffee, grease, and eggs, and I always felt nervous inside those hard white walls and plate-glass windows.
          At the beginning, my job as a paper handler — besides being a gofer for the super –was to “air” piles of paper so the sheets would glide easily from the feeder into the press. Two paper handlers faced each other across the pile, grasped a lift of paper, fanned air into the sheets, then threw the lift onto a new pile, over and over, the entire shift.
          We were the plant flunkies on whom tricks were played. A pressman would order a new paper handler to go up to the plate room and get a set of register marks. Register marks are burnt into the plate; they can’t be gotten. But a rookie did not yet know that, so he went to the plate room with the request. The plate makers would send him down to the bindery. The bindery would send him back to the pressroom, where everyone would be laughing at the pinball who had just made the machine’s lights go on.
          The goal of every paper handler was to get onto a press, first as a helper, then feeder, apprentice pressman, and finally journeyman. The process could take a dozen years because offset lithography was a very complicated, difficult trade. Moving up that chain was the goal of everyone in the pressroom. Except me. From the day I walked into the plant, all I wanted was to get the hell out — and I lived every day with the terror that it would never happen.
          Twelve dollars a week was not enough to live on, so I got a part-time job — from which my father allowed me to keep all my earnings — as a telephone solicitor for a company that sold storm windows, garages, roofs, siding, and awnings. I left the printing plant at 4 p.m. and drove forty minutes to Cicero and 22^nd. On that corner I stood at a counter and ate two hot dogs with fries and a coke five nights a week, then went a block south to the “boiler room” — two large rooms with scores of cubicles no wider than a man’s shoulders lining the walls and two banks of cubicles cutting through the centers of these rooms. Shoulder-to-shoulder, our heads inserted into tiny cork-lined cubes, we dialed our phones twenty-five times an hour giving the same pitch in the same voice over and over. A hundred times a night. Five nights a week. The tedium was stupefying.
          When the work ended at nine each night, I drove home, went to bed, got up the next morning, drove to the printing plant, put in my eight hours, then drove to the hot dog joint and the boiler room again. This went on for four and a half months, from June through the middle of October. Once or twice I actually got a look at the “plant manager” going out to sell the leads we had gotten: two well-tanned guys in slick suits with open-necked shirts and gold jewelry sitting in a convertible.
          On a “sit” the two took turns making their pitch. At the close, an hour later, they put a contract and pen in front of the couple. If the couple resisted, they repeated any part of the pitch necessary to counter the objection. If the couple still resisted, they used guilt: “You mean you had us come all the way out from the plant for nothing? You don’t really want storm windows? Why did you have us come out?” Their final move was to sit in complete silence and stare at the couple. That lasted until the couple signed just to end the silence – or asked the men to leave, and then asked a second time because they never left the first time.
          After a few months on the job, I took to going into the washroom half way through my shift and lying down on the floor for ten minutes. I was not only tired; I was bored to death. All I wanted was to close my eyes, look at the backs of my eyelids, and imagine anything far away from there. Occasionally I fell asleep.
          By the end of the summer, boredom sometimes drove me to making up stories instead of delivering my pitch. Once I told a woman in Chicago that I was calling from the phone company. We were doing a line cleaning, I said, and it could get messy. Could she move her phone into the bathroom and put the listening end over the bathtub drain so that the dirt we blew out would go down the drain and not dirty her house? I told her I’d call back to see how it went. I did. She was happy her phone line was now clean. I made up dozens of stories. Anything to break the tedium of the night.
          The tedium was finally broken permanently one night in mid-October. On my first call of the night, I dialed the phone, a man answered, and before I said a single word he said, “We don’t want any!” and hung up. Huh? How did he know I was a telephone solicitor? Caller ID was decades in the future. I called him back intending to ask. Without a word from me, he repeated himself, “We don’t want any!” and hung up again. Now I was not only puzzled but infuriated. So I called back again. He simply raised the phone from its cradle and hung it up. I called again. He did the same thing. I called twenty-five times. He lifted and hung up without saying a word twenty-five times.
          The next night when I showed up for work, my shift boss, a perpetually tired-looking man of about fifty who always wore the same dingy blue shirt, called me into his office and asked if I had called a certain number twenty-five times the previous night. He pushed a slip of paper with the number written in pencil across his desk at me. Yes, I said, I had called the number twenty-five times. Why? he asked, and I told him the story. Without a hint of anger – as though such crackups were to be expected – he said with an understanding smile, “I’ll have to let you go.”
          Five minutes later I stepped into an absolutely gorgeous dusk. The sky was the color of a bruised peach. I threw my face and arms to that sky and roared, “Yeeeeessssssss!!!”
          Now I spent my nights hanging out at a Belmont Avenue pizza parlor called Frank’s, a charmless joint with three booths, dead empty space in the center, and a counter at the rear. I went because the only guy I knew in my neighborhood brought me, and because I had no place better to go. The place amounted to nothing more than some guys sitting in a booth wearing leather jackets pretending to be tough Italians. They talked without saying anything, then got in cars and drove from one drive-in to another pretending to flirt with girls by insulting them. Mostly I just observed. This went on until we turned twenty-one and moved to a bar called Tammy’s further east on Belmont, where we continued our empty existences over beers now instead of cokes. Marty without the glamour.
          Most of these guys were in dead-end jobs heading toward dead-end lives. But they didn’t seem to notice. No one complained about the tedium of work. They only wished for more money, and for girls.

Three

          After a few months of such evenings, I decided to take a class at the local community college. Introduction to Philosophy met for three hours every Friday night. At the end of each session the instructor, an extraordinarily gifted teacher named Bill Stevens, who later became a vice chancellor of that community college system, led us to a neighborhood restaurant/bar to continue our talks, sometimes till one in the morning. Our conversations, both in and out of class, were my first experience of what college might really be for: not a place to become a glittering somebody but a place to make a mind and discover a soul. It was a thread into a dream I was only beginning to discover. After that, I took one, two, sometimes three courses each semester. If the printing plant in the daytime was a hopeless dark tunnel, my classes at night began to glimmer light at the end of the tunnel.

Four

          After nine months on the floor handling paper, the superintendent told me to report to one of the two-color presses at the beginning of the next week. So I began learning how to mix ink and dampener solutions, fill ink and dampener fountains, tend the delivery pile, load paper into the feeder, gum plates during down time and change them at the end of a run, wash blankets and back cylinders, chase hickeys, oil the press, clean grain rollers, wash up the press, and scores of other tasks.
          It wasn’t especially hard work, but it held no interest for me. So my mind did what uninterested minds usually do. It wandered. And ink and dampener fountains ran dry and jam-ups occurred in the delivery – things that could have gotten me fired, but didn’t, perhaps because my father was well regarded in the plant. At the time I thought these things happened because I was stupid. Only decades later did I realize they happened because I was quite literally bored out of my mind. Maybe I was even trying to get fired.
          And with good reason besides boredom: printing plants in those days were downright unpleasant and unhealthy places.
          The most notable thing was that they roared all day and night with a noise so loud that all of us who worked in them suffered significant hearing loss later in life. A four-color press is much larger than an elephant, and when its fifteen steel cylinders and hundred or so ink and dampener rollers whirled against each other at four thousand revolutions an hour, it made a mighty roar. Multiply that by the number of presses and the entire plant became one deafening roar.
          All day long we also breathed in a cornstarch-like powder sprayed onto each sheet as it entered the delivery pile. The powder was to prevent wet ink on sheets in the delivery pile from offsetting onto the backs of the sheets above. The powder didn’t merely go on the sheets; it filled every square inch of air in the plant so that two hours into a shift every man looked like the abominable snowman, a fine white powder covering his hair, eyebrows, face, and clothes.
          And in the summer, when outdoor temps were in the nineties, the friction of the presses raised the heat to over a hundred degrees. Without air-conditioning, our only relief was to cool ourselves by dousing our heads under a cold-water hose and then soaking rags in cold water and wearing them around our necks.
          All day long we also breathed in the heavy smell of printer’s ink, a smell so pervasive that, even with the plant’s doors and windows closed, the odor lay upon the entire neighborhood for blocks around, and it was far more intense inside the plant. And then there were the frequent doses of benzene, kerosene, and typewash, the latter of which could knock a man unconscious with just a single deep breath.
          Lastly, printing plants were dangerous places where cylinders and rollers threatened to mash fingers and hands into popsicle sticks and pancakes. On two occasions I nearly lost a hand between rollers. On another occasion a delivery pile gripper bar jammed my hand against a spike and gashed the flesh to the bone. The scar is still on the back of my right hand.

Five

          During all these years, because I had to turn in three-quarters of my pay to my father, I never had a nickel of spare change. After I paid the expenses of a car, clothes, and dates, there wasn’t a cent left over, but I never once incurred debt, not even for a car. I did it by never buying anything I didn’t absolutely need. So I never bought work clothes. While most of the men wore uniform-like grays or matching jean pants and shirts, I wore hole-ridden tissue-thin tee-shirts and fatigue pants patched over and over by my mother and sprinkled with countless yellow, red, blue, and black ink stains. I am ashamed to remember what I looked like then.
          The lack of money even came to affect my relationships. My favorite press crew — the only guys I ever enjoyed working with; they were actually fun to be with — had a practice of buying four rounds of coffee each day. Each of the other three men on the crew gave me four dimes to get coffee. To save money I did not buy coffee for myself. Instead, I kept one dime on each trip to the coffee machine and used those dimes to buy my round, a practice that eventually brought humiliation. Worse than the humiliation is a sadness I still feel because I genuinely liked and admired these men. But forty cents a day was two dollars a week: half a week’s gas in my car.

Six

          The first and most unbending rule of a printing plant was this: Every problem must be solved and every job finished. This rule was never spoken, but it allowed absolutely no exceptions. Because hundreds of things were always waiting to go wrong, the rule generated a second unspoken rule: Don’t fuck up! But because I was bored out of my mind, I did fuck up, sometimes in a huge way. More times than I ‘d care to remember I let a dampener trough go dry, causing sheets to come out thickened in one color. Twice I let an ink fountain go completely empty, leaving the sheets without one of the colors — perhaps the most egregious error one could make, equivalent to running the base paths the wrong way. Once I dumped a load of several thousand freshly printed sheets on the floor. And so I learned the third silent rule of a printing plant: Shame!
          It wasn’t called that, of course. A pressman simply exploded in white-hot rage. No niceties, no closed doors, no concern for feelings – just a white-hot streak of epithets roared into my face from a foot away on the open floor where everyone could hear and see.
          The effects were powerful. The first was humiliation. The second was learning to pay attention and do my job with discipline. Those lessons have lived inside me the rest of my life.

Seven

          Though I was learning valuable life lessons, working in a printing plant was not what I wanted to do with my life. I knew that from the first day. What I did want to do with my life was beginning to come into focus during my nighttime college classes at Wright Junior College six blocks from my house. My mind was fired up by every course I took in the humanities and social sciences. More than half a century later, I still remember with gratitude reading Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Aristotle’s Poetics, and some of Plato’s essays. But it was literature that took my heart. Shaw’s Pygmalion and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in particular, touched who I was in those early years. My dream, so vague at the start and so long deferred, was finally beginning to take shape: I wanted to become an English teacher. It had taken five years of shuffling lifelessly through the dark tunnel of the printing plant to find this dream, but it would not be born until I had undergone one more trauma.

Eight

          One day in the spring of 1963 I took a day-long battery of tests at the University of Illinois’s two-year campus on Chicago’s Navy Pier. At the end of the day a counselor told me I was best suited to be a lawyer. Most people would consider this good news, but it came as an enormous blow to me. It meant three more years of full-time undergraduate work and three years of full-time law school before I could face the world as a free agent, marry, buy a house, and have children. Six more years before I could have a real life. By then I would be nearly thirty. I left the building feeling so hollow and numb I didn’t even know where I was walking. Behind the wheel of my car in the parking lot my whole body suddenly welled up with sobbing from a place so deep in me I didn’t even know it existed. For half an hour I couldn’t stop. By then it was dark and the high overhead lights of the parking lot were shimmering through my tears.
          Limp, almost catatonic, I began driving home. It happened we lived only one block from the Illinois State Mental Hospital, popularly known as Dunning – an enormous facility with dozens of red-brick buildings on a mile-long by half-mile wide plot of land surrounded by a high black iron fence with spikes. It was a place I had always dreaded. But that night, driving home drained and limp, I decided I must be insane and the best thing I could do was turn myself in. Maybe they could fix me.
          I drove through the huge open gates and mindlessly followed the windshield of my car not knowing where to go. All the buildings looked the same. So I picked one and went inside. I sat down on a bench facing a wooden counter and waited for someone to come. I was prepared to pour out my whole tale. After ten minutes, I noticed a large white-faced clock on the wall behind the counter. I decided to wait another ten minutes. If no one came it would be a sign I was not insane and should get the hell out of this crazy house. No one came.
          A few days later I stood under the ceiling light of our kitchen and calmly told my father that I would not continue working in the printing plant. I would be going to college full-time to become an English teacher. Everything depended on one thing – that he let me live at home without paying room and board while I went to school. He calmly agreed. Five years of shuffling without voice or dream through a tunnel of darkness had come to an end. In a life of seventy-eight years it was the single biggest and single best decision I ever made.

Nine

          And so I became a full-time college student. When summer came I returned to work in a printing plant, but not the one where my father worked. Over the next three years I worked summers at four different plants. Once the summer stretched into autumn and winter because I needed the money. By then I had become a competent craftsman, and no one ever again screamed in my face that I was a fuck-up. I had learned discipline and I had learned to pay attention. Most of all, I had learned to speak up for the tender soul that had been without voice or dream all those years.
          In 1966, three years after that day in the kitchen with my father, I received my B. A. and went on to graduate school in English. Two years later, in 1968, I began teaching in the same local community college where I had tentatively taken my first night course nine years earlier. I remained in that system for the next thirty-six years. I had found my calling. It turned out I was a natural teacher, gifted with grace, insight, and love for what I was doing. In part, my gift was the result of those years working in printing plants. I knew in a deep way what the community college students in my care were going through, and I knew how clear my teaching had to be. I vowed never to allow myself to be vague and dreamy and foggy with them, and I seldom was.

Ten

          In the decades after I left my father’s house to marry and raise a family of my own, I often thought back on my years in that first printing plant and wondered what had driven my father to be so severe and selfish. Why did he need to close off college to me? Why did he need three-quarters of my salary? Why had he forced me into such terrible penny-pinching? The answer at first was not a kind one: he wanted to be paid back for the cost of raising me.
          Only decades later did I come to understand that other forces were also at work. As the son of an immigrant, my father had himself been raised in a similar way. He quit high school in the middle of his junior year, went to work, lived at home, and turned in his salary till the week before he was married. Only in that last week was he allowed to keep his full pay. Keeping his full pay for one week was his only wedding present from parents who had lived in rent all their lives and had no savings. It was the way of the Old Country, and it had lived on in my father one generation too long.
          But the answer is more complicated. My father often referred to a distant cousin who had been allowed by his parents to keep taking courses and degrees without actually earning a living. Observing this, my father developed a profound distrust of what seemed to him the idle airiness of a college education. He feared that if I went to college I might become what he imagined this cousin to be, a perpetual lay-about.
          He also spoke daily about “the value of a dollar.” The Great Depression had etched this value into his heart and mind and every behavior. To save money he never hired anyone to fix our car or house. He overhauled the car’s engine, built a new porch, tore down an old garage and put up a new one, installed new gutters and took care of all plumbing and electrical work. No tradesman ever crossed our threshold. And he saved every salvageable item that passed through his hands: nails, screws, two-by-fours, odd pieces of plywood, screens, glass: any item that might prove useful some future day. We ate every scrap of food in the house, palatable or not. If we didn’t like it on Wednesday, we ate it on Thursday. We bought only the clothes we needed and wore them till they were threadbare or outgrown. We scoured newspapers for sales, buying virtually nothing at full price. The Great Depression had drilled this way of life into him, forcing him to scrape by on pennies. And every week my father told me of his sacrifices and ingenuity during those hard years. In our house we had no children’s stories, only the stories my father told of youthful deprivations and ingenuities. Those stories still live in me sixty years later. In these stories and in his frugal practices, my father was passing on to his son lessons that had saved his life and that he thought would save mine. To such a man, college must have seemed a place made of tissue paper and air.
          Perhaps my father also saw that I was a dreamy kid living in a fog and thought the printing plant would blow away the fog as well as providing me an actual means of earning a living. Eventually the plant did blow away the fog and instill hard lessons: that the world is a difficult place with intractable laws that we fail to observe only at great cost to ourselves; that real consequences flow from every action, no matter how small the action; that work, discipline, sacrifice, and paying attention are absolutely necessary to success. In a printing plant one cannot slide by with a C and slip away to the next course; in a printing plant every problem must be solved and every job finished successfully. Daily I was soaked in these lessons.
          I realize I am erecting a defense for my father. It is a defense that has taken me years since his death to discover. But I believe it is a defense he deserves. During the decades after I left printing for good, a fierce but mostly silent anger seethed in my heart for what he had done to me and for the years I had lost. Several times during those years when he said or did something to provoke that anger, I raged at him, holding nothing back, raking him with my furious words like terrible claws until he cried.
          I weep now to think that I had to scald him with such rage. But, as I eventually came to see — but sadly, only after his death — something else was also necessary: my heartfelt expression of love for him. He died alone in a Florida hospital in 1993 without ever hearing I loved him in the full-throated way I would tell him now.
          I was reminded of my unspoken words one morning several years ago. I got out of bed, looked out the window at a leaden sky and the bare black branches of the trees outside my window, and went down to the kitchen. I flipped the light on and made coffee. Then because the light outside was so grim, I noticed how bright and happy the fluorescent light made the kitchen. In that moment I remembered the spring morning in 1987 when my father helped me install that light, or rather, truth be told, he installed it and I helped him. That memory brought in its train other times he had helped me, times that had slipped away because I had focused so narrowly on those years in the dark tunnel.
          Suddenly, standing under that light that morning, I was sobbing hot tears of regret that he was no longer here for me to tell him I love him, tears of shame that I hadn’t told him when I could have, tears of gratitude for all he had ever been to me, everything, including what I had once thought were years lost in a dark tunnel but which turned out to be my own hard way to the light. My only wish that morning was that I could have sobbed those tears into his living, heaving shoulder.