little more about my father, because it matters.
He worked as a mechanic at the Marshfield Municipal Airport for forty years, long enough that the county painted his name on a toolbox and nobody could remember a time before him.
Before that, he had been a young Army man, and he still wore his old veteran’s cap, black with gold letters, everywhere he went.
He drove the same 1994 Ford pickup for thirty years, and he owned exactly one good jacket, a tan canvas one with a corduroy collar.
We never took a family vacation.
Not once, not to Disney, not to the Grand Canyon, not even to the lake.
“We can’t afford it, sweetheart,” he’d say, and my mother would nod, and I learned early not to ask.
And every single Saturday morning of my childhood, Dad left the house at six o’clock with a thermos of coffee and
