That crooked, crayoned, whole-hearted BEST PILOT EVER was the physical form of my son’s capacity to love without reservation, to admire without cynicism, to hand his entire self over to another person in complete trust — the most valuable and most fragile thing a child possesses, and the thing that his father, over a loudspeaker, took a careless swing at.

In a very real sense, everything I did for the rest of that day, and the rest of the three years that followed, was in service of protecting the thing that drawing stood for.

Not the paper.

The paper was easy to protect; I folded it and kept it in a drawer.

What was hard to protect, what took years, was the capacity the paper represented — my son’s ability to keep loving that way, openly and fully, after the person he had loved that way most had shown him it could be betrayed.

A lesser wound, handled wrong, could have taught Leo never to draw a picture like that again — never to hand anyone his whole heart, because look what happens, look what they do with it.