Five Years Ago

It was Labor Day, September 2, a Monday, five years ago, and I was twenty-seven years old and about to bring my forty-four-year-old mother and my forty-four-year-old father together for the first time in my adult life. All my life I had daydreamed about this moment, wondered if it would ever happen, and now that it was about to happen, I was so emotional, I was almost out of control. The night before, my father had flown into Chicago from Boston, where he worked as a real estate broker. I drove down to his mother’s on Fifty-fifth and Indiana Avenue to pick him up. Mother Zoe—that’s what I call his mother, my grandmother—was sitting at the kitchen table with her cup of coffee when I knocked on the back door; and there was my father—whom I hadn’t seen but once before—two years earlier when he came back to Chicago, that time, I think, because a brokers’ convention was being held in Chicago. He was slender and brown and handsome and wore a beard and was smiling at me as I came in. Apparently ready to go, he was already holding a tan summer jacket across his arm. I blushed and felt something like a current of electricity shoot through my body as I simply lowered my head, hiding my joy, and walked straight over to him and slid my arms under his and around his body—which fitted mine nicely—and hugged him for all I was worth. I knew I was going to cry. Tears were already rimming my eyes. All it would take was a blink. And I wanted my face over his shoulder, so I’d be looking out the kitchen window, my back to Mother Zoe, when the tears came. But it didn’t help and finally it didn’t matter. I not only cried but, also, I sobbed, sobbed with joy and pain and love for this man I’d dreamed of and fearfully wondered about all my life. And here he was. Two years before, I had expected him to appear suddenly bigger than life, but when I came into Mother Zoe’s house that time and saw him sitting at the dining room table with his mother, with his elbows on the table, he seemed so small, so fragile, so frail, compared to the giant I’d imagined. He was just a flesh and blood human being, a man, and one not especially imposing, just an ordinary man. But this time I didn’t rush to him and hug him. I was too confused, too scared. He stood up and came to me and hugged me, put his arms around me and kissed my forehead. And, yes, this time, too, I cried. I cried but I pulled ...