Flash. Jim Miller

is. Maybe I never will. Who knows? Anyway, it was a good story. Better than what I read in class.

      Stuff like that always floored me. He was a remarkable kid, but how the hell could I respond to that? My son, musing on the meaning of suffering in his middle teens. Was I the source? I would always write back and treat him seriously, but I never knew if I was doing any good.

      Perhaps I was so unsure of myself as a father because I didn’t really have one myself. My own father died of a heroin overdose in 1975 when I was just a kid. Mom, or Sandy as I more often called her, left him, with me in tow, sometime in the early seventies. So I only remember my father vaguely in flashes of memory—running with me on the beach with his long hair and shaggy beard, playing guitar for me in the basement of a large Victorian house in San Francisco, carrying me on his bare shoulders on a hike in Topanga Canyon. I had a picture of him that I kept in the drawer next to my bed while I was growing up. It was a shot of him standing beside a big psychedelic school bus wearing a plain gray t-shirt, smiling a beatific smile. On the back, my grandmother (on my dad’s side) had written, “Your Dad.”