“Fate, if it exists at all,” he said, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out. My father, your father, the piano, always the piano, and then you, like my son, but not like my son, and this Jewish thread running through both our lives, all of it reminds me that our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper that we thought. Or maybe it’s nothing, just nothing.
