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There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.
Life is either a collision of random events, like billiard balls during a break careening off and into one another, or if you are so inclined to believe, our predetermined fate—what my mother took such great comfort in calling God’s will.
“Never be afraid to tell the truth, Sam. Not to the people who love you.”
Still, I never even contemplated my parents divorcing, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to enter our home and not have them both living there.
We’d be who we were, and we could either come to grips with this fact and like the person we’d become, or live with regret and disappointment.
Life’s a bitch, kid. And then you die.
“Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies.” I had watched Grandma O’Malley, a proud and simple woman, shrink and wrinkle and turn white over the years. But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.
My father was my hero, the strongest-willed man I had ever known.
After all, I could not recall any occasion when God had stepped in and helped me, despite smashing my prayer bank repeatedly.
And I told myself that she’d fled that night because she had felt something with me that she had never felt with any of the others, and it had scared her.
