I remember when we all assembled at Norman's apartment in Long Beach, watching my father down half a pint of vodka without flinching or slurring his words. The only way you knew he was drunk was from the glaze in his eyes and his overbearing sentimentality. Norman and his pretty new wife were sitting across from my wife and me, and he offered his Dad a hit off the bong. Frank refused, saying he had "experimented" with pot and found it wasn't "my thing."

"So you lit it off a Bunsen burner and smoked it through a test tube?" I quipped.

Everybody laughed but my father, who didn’t understand the joke, pretended not to, or just brushed it off as a snide remark from his prodigal son.

And so it was just like that. My brief acquaintance with my father ended in 1982 with his last phone call to me. It was at 2 a.m. in the morning, and he called to report that Hazel, my grandmother, was dying. I paused for a long time, but I didn't really feel anything. I barely knew the woman.

"So how do you feel about that?" he asked. I knew he was drunk.

“Dad, it’s 2 a.m. in the morning.”

“Sorry to inconvenience you,” he snapped back, and then he hung up.

Those were his last words to me.

I had intended for this narrative to be chronological, my birth through childhood, early adulthood, and so forth. To explain my father I had to skip ahead, which I find annoying. Yes, I really was "inconvenienced." I feel as if my life had lived me, and through so much of it I was barely conscious of being swept along on currents that followed their own course, before me, after me and beyond me. A better writer might have made better sense of all this, but no one will if I don't.

***