Then I picked up my father’s letter, folded it carefully along its old creases, and slipped it into the inside pocket of my coat, over my chest, where I would carry it for a long time afterward.

I have it still.

I take it out, now and then, and read it again, though I know it by heart — not for the threat in it, which has long since done its work, but for the three weeks of clarity it represents, the only three weeks in which my father seems to have seen his own life plainly.

A man spends forty years building a thing and his whole self goes into the mortar, and then at the very end, if he is lucky, he gets a few clear weeks to understand what he actually made.

My father got those weeks.