In his essay “Finding the Light and Keeping It in Front of Me,” Bob Vance describes walking behind his father as a boy longing to connect but knowing intuitively that no connection was possible: “Something inhibits me from asking him for what I need. I know, if a very young boy can intuit such things, that I am left out of his world and am somehow forbidden to ask him what I can do to have him take me into his world, to hold me playfully or tenderly. The rift begins here. This is the earliest memory I have of my father.”
