I sat across from my father in the dimly lit restaurant that felt like September. Curling up into my sweater, I wrapped the wings of my cardigan around my body, and tucked the edges up under my arms, burying my shoulders into the seat's embrace. There was a time when my father remembered that he loved this place -- an eclectic restaurant nestled on Main Street between a grocer I've never seen open and an antique shop that smells like memories hidden in a grandmother's basement. The large paned windows of the restaurant reveal the footprints of the conversation inside, the condensation lingering in the corners of the glass like a shy child. Through the window I can see the lamp lit street outside -- the rutted road shadows the contours of a river that once created this town. The very tips of autumn blown branches line this paved boundary --proud sentries guarding their own set of secrets. Behind the tree line I can see the small, artificial "logging" islands stranded in the middle of the river -- neglected gravestones honoring and echoing a way of life barley remembered.

I watch my father eat the dinner he forgot he ordered -- his British roots honored by his meticulous use of his knife and fork. He is wearing his favorite sweater, the one he has begun to hide between his mattress and box spring. As I watch him, I think about our life together. I picture the gully across from our house where he would take me to fly kites on windy Sunday afternoons. I remember our winter evenings together when I would sit on the blue-tiled kitchen counter of our drafty apartment and watch him mix bouillon with boiling water and dust pieces of beef with flour in a brown paper bag. I remember how he would brush my hair before bed with a scarred, wooden-back brush that once belonged to his mother and read to me until my eyelids became too heavy to hold open. I remember how he would greet me in the morning with a bowl of homemade oatmeal -- the sugar-dusted oats peeking out from a warm pool of milk -- and how he would hold me on his lap when I cried.



He glanced up from his meal and smiled across the table, his familiar warmth captured in the lines of his eyes. For a moment I forgot. For a moment I pretended that life can be where you left it -- in the spaces you've hidden away. Within the gaze of those same eyes I am reminded of that soulful place where true sorrow wears silence. I realized that I too have the shadows beneath my mattress -- that safe place where I stow away all that I am afraid will be stolen. The place where I keep the things I don't want to lose.

Looking into his eyes I smiled back, a single, truant tear escaped down the side of my face, hidden by the candlelit shadows that danced upon our table. They cast their shadows across the white table cloth that rested in our laps, across the curvature of my empty wine glass, and as they began their waltz across my father's face, they lingered for a poignant moment around the corners of his eyes as if honoring the wisdom and the tragedy of a mind that has begun to hide memories for its final hibernation. I suddenly recognized his vulnerability in the pronounced veins that weaved across his hands, in his desire to protect me from his forgetfulness, from his sadness -- his desire to protect me from my own sadness.

After the waitress cleared our plates, I walked my father to the bathroom and sat in the straight-back chair outside the men's room. I could hear the happy din of the restaurant -- a chorus of clinking glasses and light laughter. It seems strange that the world just goes on without us, never looking back to see if we've caught up. I wanted to feel wise in my sadness. I wanted to feel embraced by the calloused hands of a world that has never not known tragedy. But instead I sat alone and waited.

Again seated beneath the waltz of the candlelight, my father asked me about my life. I hesitated for a moment, and as I began to talk my father noticed something beyond me that captured his attention. A ballad mournfully echoed from the next room as I watched his beautiful mind leave our table. His brow furrowed with concentration as if he couldn't quite see or understand what he was looking for. I let the last word of my sentence fall off the edge of my lips. After a lifetime of moments he turned back to me, and with concern in his eyes he asked me if my father was still alive. I tried to smile as I met his eyes, hoping that the softness of my expression might return him to me. "You are my dad," I said.

"Oh right, I... I must have got you confused... with... I don't know." As his eyes looked into mine, I could see the love and the terror both fighting for recognition.

"I love you dad," I said, trying again to smile. As I reached out for him with both my hands his frightened eyes filled with tears. I put my arms around him and held on as only he had taught me.

That night as I drove home along the rutted Main Street, I looked again through the leave-strewn branches at the tiny, logging islands, stranded in the middle of the water desperately trying to withstand the current of a river that always threatens to wash them away... and finally cried.

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