Conversations with Dad, Again

“Do you remember,” he asks me, “how I’d cry every time I talked about my mother?”

I remember.

“Even years after her death? Decades?”

Yes.

“You thought that was weird.”

A little.

“You get it now.”

Yeah.

He has a beard today, but no mustache. He did that for a while when I was a kid, and I suppose it was an odd look, but he was my dad and that was what he looked like. The only constant over the years was his glasses, although the frames changed now and then. At one point, m...