My Grandmother’s Only Son

Abstract

My father, in answer to a question I am often asked, is doing fine, thank you: he lives with his wife in a small pleasant town forty minutes north of Boston, in a large white house overlooking the sea. And yes, he’s still writing books, and another is coming out soon; I will tell him you said hello, even though he has no idea who ‘you’ are, or why you want to greet him. His literary career is going strong, continuing on the high trajectory that began, I must sometimes remind myself, sixty years ago, when he was a small boy in a small Pennsylvania farmhouse, surrounded by four grownups: his parents and his mother’s parents, moving around him with a deliberate, animal weight, stirring the thick, Pennsylvania air.