My Father's Footprints Read Online Free PDF

and chatter.
     He is rolling in the sleep of near-death.
    “You were a great dad. I was always proud to be your son.” Can I really be saying these things for the first time? “You taught
     me so much, about how to be kind and funny and how to write. I love you. You’re a great dad.”
    He rolls and turns. I think he’s hearing. Oh, God, let him be hearing.
    My mom comes back in. I sing a few songs, just to have my voice in his ears. We tell him that rest and peace are coming. I
     tell him he can let go. And when it comes, it comes as a mere slowing down into nothing. No rattle. No spirit flying out.
    If he were here, he would know what to say. He would say something funny.
    “Death is overrated.” Maybe that.
    We walk outside. It’s night, and the sky is full of stars and a slivered moon. Is this where I’m supposed to look for him
     now?
    The Silver Whistle
is about a con man who restores youth to people in a nursing home.
    “When you were a child you responded to the wind. To the flight of a scarlet bird at sundown. To the first rays of light across
     a sea at dawn,” the con man tells a woman. “Look up at the stars. Look up at the night. Let the feel of the earth go through
     you.”
    At night, I suddenly want somebody in the God business to come to my house and say something wise to me. I almost don’t care
     what. But no one does. If you don’t go to the practices, you can’t suit up for the games, apparently.
    Alone in my car, I sing the Johnny Mercer song I wanted to sing to him as he died. But I couldn’t. My voice would never have
     held, just as it doesn’t hold now. It’s the one about the two drifters, off to see the world. Suddenly I’m a little kid in
     the car with my dad, two drifters, off to the zoo or the railroad tracks to watch trains, or to find out what’s waiting ’round
     the bend. Suddenly I’m a middle-aged man crying very hard in a ’95 Honda, stopped at a red light on a Friday night in the
     winter.

    He starts to talk to me.
    So much is unsaid. So many questions linger. I dig throughhis old scripts, as if they were instruction manuals for a suddenly comatose machine.
    WILLIE BURKE
    [
Smiling as he pours beer
]
    It was a grand funeral.
    SNOWBIRD TOOMEY
    It had dignity, and that’s what a funeral needs more than anything else.
    WILLIE
    I thought the casket would be heavier.
    SNOWBIRD
    We were on the end that was up when we carried it down the church stairs. Then there was the grade down to the grave. We were
     on the up end there too. One of the secrets of living an easy life is to always be on the up end.
    I see that, like any good Irishman, Dad had been preparing the world for his death for about fifty-three years. He was the
     funniest person I ever knew. I miss him, shopping for his casket. He would have been hilarious. The guy at Taylor & Modeen
     is incredibly nice, never pressures us, leaves us alone in the showroom so I can help my mom spend the right amount. Tight
     with a dollar when it comes to the comforts of life, she displays an unexpected high-roller streak when it comes to the casket.
     I’m trying to picture my father in this discussion of wood vs. metal and of various “interiors.” There’s nobody home in a
     dead body, and you might as well be piling books and bingo games and bicycle pumps on those expensive satin sheets in there.
     But casket-shopping touches our inner Egyptian.
    When my time comes, burn me up and scatter me in the woods. I’ve always known that. But I get a little sucked into thecomfort angle. We find a box that, even I admit, looks pretty cozy. Something about the sky blue interior is deeply inviting
     and beckons to me, just a little.
    “Now, you had brought a dark suit for him to wear, right?” the guy asks.
    “Yup.”
    “See, that’s all going to pull together once he’s in there.”
    Oh, Dad. We should have gone casket-shopping ages ago. You would have been a riot.
    Burial will be private, but my mother wants to see him