winesburg, ohio

"Those first years when you can’t blow your own nose, when your father picked you up and rocked you and watched you speechlessly as you slept, are blank. Later, as you grow up, the relationship is muddled with practicality, with the resentment and the accidents, with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behavior, tantrums and tiredness. And that’s what you know of your childhood. You remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when you slept in an ocean of love and your father never forgets and it never goes away and it will come to you."

A.A. Gill, “Fatherhood” — from Is Further Away