What do other fathers and sons talk about? I’d ask myself, shifting the worklight from one hand to the other. There was never any problem making conversation with my mother. That was effortless, the topics springing from nowhere, and we’d move from one to the next in a way that made me think of a monkey gracefully swinging through the branches of a tree. The silence my father and I inflicted on each other back then is now exacerbated by his advanced age. Every time I see him could be the last, and the pressure I feel to make our conversation meaningful paralyzes me.
