But as I was about to stand up to walk to my office, I felt something almost like pain in my chest. I liked the pain. And once again I wished my father were alive. He’s the one person who’d understand the inflections of what I felt, the sting and the salve braided together like twin serpents going at each other. This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.
