I’d heard the story years before, and I smiled as he began to recount it for what would surely be the final time. “Mom,” my father said, “will whip our asses if she hears we jumped off the Cannifton bridge into the river.” Who could blame her? The Moira, until the dog days of summer dried it to a trickle, moved with deceptive speed, and had claimed the lives of cattle, cats, and the occasional child who’d escaped the surveillance of its soon-to-be heartbroken parents. And “mom,” in my father’s story, wasn’t my mother, but他的母亲 - 我的父亲，在他的临床上，将我误以为他的兄弟，并回到了七十年前的夏天。在电影，文学和生活中的结局总是参考开始。我的父亲在85岁时，有一个星期的生活，已经回到了十几岁的时候。这是我们之间的一个可爱的交流，他的脸上有一个暗示他小时候一定的样子，然后他一生中的一切都迅速。
他15年前去世，我写了降低从我的旧大众巴士的后面，在离我长大不远的露营地。明天，2022年6月22日，是我父亲的生日，与我的妻子一起（从未见过我的父母），我们将庆祝他的出生一百周年。明天早上，咖啡和早餐后，我们将开车20英里到达旧的宅基地，到达别人的房子只是一个破败的垃圾场。Then we’ll head to the graveyard across a pasture from the Moira river where he’s buried next to my mother, then on down to Point Anne where he worked as a machinist at a cement plant, finishing the day with a dinner of scalloped potatoes, his favorite food.
谦虚而坚强，我的父亲爱贝多芬，无法理解爵士乐，在第二次世界大战（从17岁开始）度过了六年的时间，并感叹时间的流逝比我所知道的要少。而且，自然而然地，他是一名摩托车手。我们一起复活了一辆旧自行车的杂乱无章的船员。从印度酋长到胜利的代托纳，再到两冲程的普利司通175，再到许多其他人，我几乎不记得所有这些。
年轻人是混蛋。我当然是。但他never called me out on my know-it-all ways. Instead, he’d slyly recount goings-on in his life that contained the ghost of guidance. When I went through a maddening phase where I was dissatisfied with anything less than perfection, in a paint job or a polished primary cover, he told me the story of a friend of his, who’d obsessed over his belongings to the degree that they no longer brought him pleasure, but had become an albatross of obligation. After this friend of his had died, everything he’d coveted was neatly laid out of tables in the yard of his farmhouse, to be sold to the highest bidder at the estate auction. The point of this tale? To acknowledge that everything is temporary, and to accept that what we own will someday be owned by someone else, someone who couldn’t care less about us. Things are just things. Eventually, I began to listen.
有一次，在一个晚宴上，坐在作家，艺术家和电影制片人旁边的一个问题上，桌子上围着一个问题。一个刚出来父母的男人问我们所有人，如果我们告诉他们是同性恋，我们的父母会如何回应。正如桌子周围弹跳的问题的答案是可以预见的 - 一些人认为他们的父母会理解，有些人期望这样的公告随后被家庭驱逐出境。终于，桌子的眼睛落在了我身上。我说：“我的父亲说，如果他有一个不能适合活塞的儿子比有同性恋的儿子，他会感到震惊。”桌子上，对圆柱体安装活塞的男人和女人的灯很困惑地看着我。他们似乎在说什么与任何事情有关。我只是笑了，说修理和建造东西，例如引擎，手表和房屋，正是男人所做的，他的三个儿子做了什么。
当我拿出扭矩扳手时，他总是笑。He never used one, and when I asked him why, he said that once you were familiar with the material the thread was cut into, and whether it was a coarse or fine thread, you’d instinctively know how hard to bear down on the wrench. Still, I didn’t trust him, and once he’d gone into the house I’d whip out the torque wrench and double-check his work. It was, invariably, spot on.
He had no interest in speed. You’re a long time dead, he used to say, what’s the rush? In motorcycles, he admired first-kick starters, low idle speeds, and light, smooth gear changes. We rode a lot together in the years after his retirement, and despite the age of our equipment, we were never, not once, stranded by a mechanical problem. Even when we rode nearly 1,000 miles through the mountains to Springfield, Massachusetts, for celebrations at the old Indian motorcycle factory.
As he crept into old age, I began to worry about his riding. Once, in a gravel parking lot, he skidded a locked front wheel while feeding in more throttle. His right hand was receiving mixed messages from his brain, which was telling him to simultaneously brake and accelerate. The incident seemed to startle him, and he didn’t—with me as witness—ever do it again. Twenty years ago, tomorrow, on his 80Th生日，他最后一次骑行，在双手线上熟悉的道路上有20英里的循环。一切都结束。他比任何人都更了解这一点。
I miss the stories. Always downplayed. Never oversold. Of the intricacies of anti-aircraft guns—you had to mind your fingers, he said, because the gun would rip your fingernails off if you didn’t snatch your fingers out of the way—and of hunting for German submarines in the harbor waters of St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he spent a year before being shipped to Europe.
The Greatest Generation他们被称为我父亲年龄的男人，但他认为标题像那样令人尴尬。他认为自己很幸运。他回家了。他生活了。而且，如果您读到这么远，您也知道这一点 - 最幸运的是我。
