He was, indeed, a man who appeared as though he had come down off a mountain and yet seemed weaker, somehow less a man among other men as a result of it. And I wanted to grab those people and cuff them for their ignorance, hold them by the neck and make them kneel before my father, but when I turned to him, looking for and expecting to see in him—for my sake—something of the man I knew, who had shaped me, he seemed, year after year, to shrink before us all, as though somehow the streets and houses and villagers we walked among now reminded him of not just a humility but a weakness waiting to
...more
