Years after that, my father wrote a story about his fear called “The Angel of the Bridge.” “I felt that my terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed horror of what is becoming of the world,” he wrote in the story. He was troubled by the unhappiness of his friends, appalled at the rows of new houses going up where meadows and trees had been, disgusted by the substitution of freeways for country roads and fast-food burgers for home cooking.
