My father's picture never appeared on the back cover of Life Magazine, wearing a white smock, saying how he would walk a mile for one, but he was a doctor, and he did smoke them. Camels. By the zillion. But after all, in 1939 no one had ever heard of a Surgeon General, or that cigarette smoking was hazardous to your health. I suppose it did help to relieve the stress of eighteen-hour days spent peering down throats, excising appendixes, and delivering babies. 

Like most boys, I wanted to be like my father. I remember the time my first-grade pal, Freddie, and I swiped a pack of his Camels and sneaked off under the spirea bushes out by the garage and smoked all twenty of them. Freddie said, "Look how smoke comes out of my mouth when I talk, just like grownups." I was too busy to talk, I was trying to get the smoke to come out my nose in two hissing streams just like my dad did. With a Herculean effort, I was suddenly belching smoke. My head was on fire, and Freddie swore my eyes were lit up like the Fourth of July. I bolted for the kitchen door, raced to the bathroom, threw up, and dived into bed.

By the time the theft was discovered, my mother was already putting cold towels on my forehead. My father came into the room with a look in his eye that spelled corporal punishment. Mother laid her hand gently on his and said, "Now Roger, I believe the boy is coming down with something, see if you can find something in the pharmacy." Without a word, he turned and left. 

A myriad of such boyhood scenes played out in my mind like an old home movie as I was driving south from the St. Louis airport. My name is Ronald Morgan. In the spring of 1979 Sports Illustrated offered me an assignment to do a series about the burgeoning scuba diving business that had sprung up in recent years in the abandoned shafts and tunnels of the old lead mines in southeast Missouri where I grew up. The countryside hadn't changed much in the twenty-odd years since my last visit, except for a proliferation of motels, and gasoline stations at the highway intersection near Bonne Terre, the site of the largest scuba center. I decided on an ancient motel I recognized from long ago nestled in among the cluster of franchise motels with their blazing neon lights. How the old relic of individual cabins with flaking paint had survived the onslaught of the chains was a mystery to me. But the grounds were well kept and it looked inviting. The white-haired gentleman who checked me in looked at my signature and mused aloud, "I used to know of some Morgans, over to Leadwood . . . a doctor he was, I believe." 

"Listen, I'm really beat, could you just give me the key please?" I wasn't in a mood for conversation, especially where that conversation might go. 

"Sure, young feller."

Leadwood, ten miles to the west, was another diving spot and my hometown, but I wasn't ready for that one yet. It was a town sprung up in the wilderness of the 1890s. A rather primitive mining town it was, until The St. Joseph Lead Company took over in the early 1900s. My physician father came there with his new bride, my mother, in 1929 and served the town's two thousand souls until his death thirty years later. The parson, who lived next door, Reverend Velvic, was an avuncular type with a round face and eyes that twinkled behind his rimless glasses. He liked to tell about the day he and the neighbors watched the big 1928 Hupmobile pull up in front of the newly purchased house – the old Jackson place. While watching my parents move their belongings into the house, they were particularly intrigued with a box-like thing about the size of a small dresser drawer. It had all sorts of dials and buttons, and it turned out to be the first radio many of them had seen. They spent many an evening spinning the dials hoping to pull in radio programming from stations in St. Louis, 65 miles to the north. The parson was also fond of saying that he knew I must be proud to be Doc Morgan's boy. It was an observation I would come to hate.

The room was musty and smelled of disinfectant, so I left the door ajar and opened the windows to a warm May evening. The whiskey flask was the first thing out of my bag. I poured a generous slug of Scotch into a plastic glass I found in the bathroom and sank back into a surprisingly comfortable chair. Dear old Leadwood. It seemed so long ago. A vague uneasiness had come over me the past few days as I prepared for this assignment. I began to realize that feelings I had thought long buried were not yet dead. An editor friend who knew something of my background persuaded me to go ahead with it. "It'll do you good to get out of New York for a while," he said. "Look, Ron, it's just another series, and it's the kind of thing you do best." He was right, of course, except for the fact that it was not just another job. 

He was right, of course, except for the fact that it was not just another job. I began to realize that feelings I had thought long buried were not yet dead. It's funny how a certain mentality can form deep inside without your being aware of it until one day it takes you over.

It started with me as far back as my first day at grammar school. I was the only boy in the class dressed in short pants. At recess I heard this big kid with fiery red hair and a face covered in freckles say to his friends, "Hey, look at the kid with short pants . . . hey shorty, shorty . . . "

"Melvin Hartzell, quiet, I mean right now." Old lady Warmbold, the playground warden, to the rescue. She came over and put her hand on my shoulder

"You're Ronald Morgan, Doc Morgan's boy, aren't you?"

"Yes Ma'am."

"Well, you just let me know if those boys give you any more trouble."

Even at six years of age, I knew what a tattletale was. I wished she hadn't said that in front of the other kids. One day not long after, I faked illness to stay home from school. After a short interrogation, Mother sat back and looked at me with her soft smile, and said, "Honey, I think it's getting a little cool for those short pants. Why don't you run on to school, and when you get out this afternoon we'll go over to Sherman's and look for some blue jeans." 

My mother was a pretty woman who laughed easily. Some called her a Southern Belle because she came from Kentucky. Her voice had a quality you wouldn’t call a Southern drawl, but the broad R’s and prolonged vowels gave a soothing lilt to her speech. It had the same quieting effect as the hum of an oscillating fan on a warm summer day.

The early years slipped by rather uneventfully as was common of small towns in those days – learning our ABCs and times tables, summers spent fishing and playing kick the can, getting a first bike, and the occasional traveling carnival setting up in what was called City Park. In my early teen years, I became aware that my father had become something of a dignitary around town, a prominent doctor who was a member of the town council and the school board. He had what you call presence: a rather imposing figure at six-feet-four, with dark wavy hair, a prominent nose that supported wire-rim glasses, and a deep voice that spoke with authority. I began to sense a kind of deference toward me on the part of adults and an aloofness from my peers. I wasn't sure what it was, but in a sea of self-doubt I looked for ways to better fit in. I started clowning around – wise cracks mostly, but I also had a talent for clownish faces. With money earned from sweeping floors and washing windows at The City Drug Store, I bought joke books and developed a little repertoire that did gain me some measure of popularity. Still, I couldn't escape a sort of gloomy feeling, a lack of self-confidence.

I remember being sent to the principal's office for clowning around in study hall one day. George Englewood had been the school principal forever. All the kids called him Goose. I'm not sure why, except I had heard one of the older boys say that he always walked around like he had a cob up his butt. Goose had a pear-shaped head as well as a pear-shaped torso, and with his ill-fitting suits, it all gave him a sort of billowy look. Before talking he went through a lot of harrumphing and clearing of the throat, and when he finally spoke his esses came out in a low whistle.

On this occasion, he leaned back in his swivel chair, put his finger tips together pyramid style, looked up at the ceiling, skipped the harrumphing and said, "You're Doctor Morgan's boy aren't you?" He knew damn well who I was.

"Yes sir," I said. "My name is Ronald Morgan."

"Yes, Ronald, of course." He paused and stared some more at the ceiling. "What would your father would think of your being here under the circumstances?"

I thought, what kind of a dumb question is that? But I said, "I don't know sir."

He peeled his eyes off the ceiling and looked straight at me. "You don't know?" he bellowed. "Now, Ronald, surely . . . ." He went off on a riff about how an educated man like my father would surely be disappointed to know I wasn't living up to my potential, and how an education should be the most important thing in my life, and how sorry I would be later in life if I didn't toe the line now, and on and on and on. Jesus Christ, all I did was talk in study hall. Other kids didn't get all that heat from Goose for an infraction, all they ever got was an hour detention. He ended the session by saying there would be no punishmenthe would not call my father this time, but I should have my father call him tomorrowand he was sure there would not be a next time. 

My father was a remote presence in my life. He was a driven man, working eighteen-hour days, conscientious to a fault. He almost never made it to family gatherings due to some medical emergency or other. He was not an autocratic man, but he could be demanding. And I was never sure – never thought much about it really – what his expectations might be for me until one day, when I was about sixteen, he shouted for me to come with him on an emergency at the mine. I might be of some help, he said. He had taken me along on a few calls before, but this trip to the mine was a first.

"Marvin just called," he said. Marvin Link was a neighbor and the mine superintendent. "Jim Williams fell from a scaffold – it sounds as if he has a compound fracture of the left leg. Get that black satchel from the table in the rear examining room and take it out to the car, I need to get some syringes."

He backed the car out of the garage and by the time we hit the main street he was driving that black '49 Chrysler through the small business district at near top speed, pausing only briefly at stop signs. I had never been with him on an emergency and his driving scared me to death. "Dad, slow down a little, you almost hit Clyde Eaton's car back there." He made a screeching left turn onto Highway 8 and accelerated. 

"You mean he almost hit me. I had the horn blaring a half block away." He fumbled in his coat pocket for a Camel. He handed the pack to me and said, "Light one for me."

I took the pack. I really hated it when he smoked and drove at the same time. I rummaged around in the glove compartment for a minute and finally said, " I can’t find any matches." I could see he was wound tight as a dollar watch, hunched over the wheel, lips pressed tight.

"If Williams' fractured bone ripped the femoral artery, he could bleed to death in minutes – I hope he got lucky." He slowed momentarily at the gate until he was sure the security guard saw him then sped around the guard shack onto the asphalt drive that led to the mine shaft a half mile away. Marvin was waiting. He was a hulk of a man, and his hard hat with carbide lamp and goggles gave him an alien appearance. He ushered us onto a lift and said, "Here you go Doc, Ronnie, put these hard hats on." He pulled the slatted lift gate down and punched the button that started our journey deep into the earth. 

The vibrations of the lift on its way down and the sudden drop in temperature gave me a creepy feeling, but the instant I was out the lift gate I saw a world I never knew existed. It all rushed at me like one of those movies that look three-dimensional with the plastic glasses. I saw a strange and wondrous underground world, a world of dancing shadows where the acrid smell of burning carbide mingled with the pungent odor of dung from pack mules that formed a strangely pleasant aromatic blend, a world where the cacophony of miners' picks and shovels against the cavern walls produced a percussive symphony as they peeled away the blue-gray galena ore from which rich deposits of lead would be extracted. I must have been a little dazed by it all because I heard Dad telling me to move along.

Williams was lying on his back, his injured leg twisted beneath him like a rag doll. Someone had rolled a piece of canvass for a pillow. The broken thighbone, protruding through flesh, glistened eerily against the blackness of ore dust and the redness of drying blood. I'd never seen a serious injury like this one and it unnerved me for an instant. Dad stripped off his coat and rolled his shirt sleeves to the elbow. He sat on the ground talking softly to Williams while listening to vital signs with the stethoscope and simultaneously exploring other parts of the upper body with a quick and practiced hand. He passed a vial of something under Williams' nose who gave a little start and opened his eyes.

"Jim, it's Doctor Morgan."

"Hi, Doc. Jesus Doc, I hurt like hell."

"You've got a badly broken leg Jim. We've got to straighten it out. I'll give you a shot, but it'll still hurt like the devil."

"Have at it Doc," he said. Then he fell back. It looked to me as if he had passed out again.

"Marvin, I need a stretcher, or if you don't have one get a board big enough to hold him and some muscle power to carry him out of here. Ronald, come around here and hold his shoulders and arms steady." 

"What?" I wasn't prepared for that. 

"Hurry ," he said without looking up. "This will only take a minute."

I knelt behind Williams straddling the makeshift pillow with his head in my lap.

"Now, with your elbows on his shoulders, place your hands on his forearms and lean forward with as much weight as you can."

I had never had an adrenaline rush like this oneI heard the blood pounding in my head and felt the tension in my arms as I grasped Williams' arms and leaned forward. But I must have done as he Dad wanted, because he was now engrossed in looking into the gaping wound on Williams' thigh which, even from my position, I could see. It looked just like the muscle-and-vein charts in the science room at school except the fractured bone had frayed the muscles, and there was a lot of blood.

"Okay, Ronald, hold tight." Dad grasped Williams' left ankle and with a firm grip and a twist, pulled it straight. Williams let loose an agonizing cry as his powerful body tried to sit upright nearly toppling me over. Then, just as suddenly, he fell back, unconscious. Dad quickly splinted the leg, binding it tightly. Marvin was standing by with five other men and an oak plank six feet long. They rolled Williams onto the impromptu stretcher and took him up the emergency lift to a waiting ambulance. The Deputy Superintendent escorted Dad and me out of the mine on the regular lift.

The events of the last hour had left me in something of a spell. When we got into the car, Dad sat behind the wheel for a minute or two without moving or talking. I don't ever recall seeing him so relaxed. The tightness had gone from his face and he had a serene look, like a man at peace with himself. 

Presently he turned and said, "That was a good job, Ronald. I'm glad you were here." He started the engine and backed away slowly. On the drive home he said, "You know, I think you might have the makings of a fine physician."

The glow of that rare praise stayed with me for years, is, in fact, with me to this day. But a shadow eclipsed the glow. It dawned on me that I might be expected to study medicine as a career. No one had actually said that up until now. It wasn't long after the mine incident that Dad asked to see me in his study one evening – something about school. He motioned me to sit in the chair across from his desk.

He closed the journal he was reading and said, "I ran into your science teacher over at the drug store this afternoon, Ronald. He tells me your work in biology and chemistry is slipping, slipping to the point of unacceptability. And that is unacceptable to me." He removed his glasses and just sat there looking at me. 

I was a little flustered by all this, but also a little ticked off. I said, "Unacceptable? The last time I looked, I had a B average overall."

"From what I gather, that's only because your grades in other subjects are somewhat better. What is it that keeps your science grades down in the mud?"

"Gee, Dad, they're not down in the mud, I'm getting C's in both of those. "

"That's down in the mud as far as I'm concerned." He sat up straight. "What do you intend to do about it?"

"Besides, don't forget, I'm getting A's in English and history." This whole thing was really getting to me. "And I'm just getting a good start in basketball, Coach Oliver thinks I have potential to play first string."

"Well you're not going to play professional basketball anyway, are you?"

"Maybe not, but I'm not going to play professional biology either."

"Don't get smart, Ronald. The point is, you will never make it into med school with those kinds of grades."

"Oh, come on, Dad, who ever said anything about med school?"

He was up now, pacing back and forth behind that big desk. "I'm saying it now. The way I see it, you have the potential for it, and I think it would be a good future for you to join me in practice. Then, in a few years, it would all be in your hands." He sat on the corner of the desk and continued. "You've heard me talk about Arnold Rosenbaum, a classmate from medical school. Well, Arnold is now director of Neurosurgery at Columbia in New York and, as it happens, sits on the admissions committee." 

I couldn't believe where this was going, but he rumbled on, "I looked him up at the AMA convention a few months ago. No need for a lot of detail, but he said if your grades were up to snuff, he would help any way he could to get you into premed."

"Just like that," I said.

"What?"

"Just like that, you go to New York and make some kind of deal with a man I never even met, about my life, about my future without saying a word about it."

"Now just a minute, Ronald . . . "

He went on and on. It was just like my session with Goose, only longer and more intense. Dad kept hammering away until I agreed to do better in science if he would take back his threat to make me quit basketball. I had no intention of going into medicine, but I wasn't about to say that to him. He was a good dad and all that, but I did not want to be a carbon copy of him. I wanted to be my own person not just the son of another person. I didn't know how I could do it, but that's what I wanted. The squabble ended in an uneasy truce. Still, there was this formless feeling, untouched by any thought or reason, that stayed with me.

It was my junior year and something was urging me into a round of frenetic activity. Coach Oliver persuaded me to spend more after-school time practicing. At six-foot-two, I was tall for my age and Oliver needed a center. Melvin Hartzell was even taller and a good athlete, but Oliver wanted backup for every position. Melvin and I had become friends over the years, and now we had a friendly rivalry. But the friendliness of that rivalry frayed badly in the early weeks of practice. Melvin set about making me look less than stellar by passing off to me just a bit too low, or being a split second late with a handoff. But I caught onto these stunts soon enough, and learned to anticipate and parry most of them.

One day in scrimmage Melvin and I were playing the two forward positions with a sub filling in at center. The play Oliver outlined called for the right guard to fake left then pass the ball to me. I would then pass to the center who would pass out to the left guard who dribbled in and handed off to Melvin on the other side. Melvin would then drive in for a lay-up while I screened the defensive forward and positioned myself for a rebound if the shot missed. Just as Melvin was driving in, I heard him say in a low voice, "Here you go Morgan, get two," and he handed the ball off to me. I dropped it, of course, and the defensive guard picked it up and went all the way down-court for a score. Melvin claimed the reason he broke the play was the defensive center could have blocked his shot. Oliver could not have seen from the bench that Melvin had a clear shot, and I got chewed out for not being 'heads up.' This was the first of many such stunts, but I learned to anticipate and parry most of them.

The day Oliver announced the lineup for our first game with Bonne Terre, I could see the air go out of Melvin when I was named as starting center. He caught up to me as we were leaving the gym.

"Hey Morgan," he said. "You got the call because your old man is a big fucking deal on the fucking school board." His face was redder than his hair, which glowed a kind of orange in the late autumn sun. "We'll see if you can keep it." And away he ran.

"Fuck off Melvin," I shouted after him.

I had earned that job and I knew it. I kept it the rest of that year and the next. In fact, after we won the regional championship in my senior year, Sports Illustrated named me to its All-American High School Team.

It was about this same time that Mildred Eaton, our English teacher, asked me to write a sports column for the school paper. I made it a point to minimize the importance of scores, won-lost records, and other statistics in favor of a more human-interest approach. I even did an article about how unfortunate it was to lose Melvin Hartzell from the basketball and baseball teams after he broke his left arm in two places from a fall off a ladder while painting the house.

By the spring of my senior year I was on a roll: team captain, senior editor of the paper, and dating the willowy, dark-haired Ladonne Englewood, the principal's daughter. It was a golden time for me. To this day I still feel the excitement of mixing it up on the court, the slap of sweaty flesh against flesh, the sharp odor of the locker room; and the smell of ink still takes me back to late afternoons cranking out the school paper on an ancient mimeograph machine. The thing with Ladonne wasn't all that serious, but at least Goose called me Ronnie now and had quit asking me if I was going to apply to med school. I was coming into my own. In my self-congratulatory rush, I imagined that I had slipped the tether anchored to my father's shadow. My grades in biology and chemistry improved somewhat, but not to Dad's satisfaction. It was a continual source of friction between us.

The flask was nearing empty and I needed to get some sleep. As I reviewed my notes, memories continued to flood through me, and I developed an itch to see the old hometown. I decided to go there first then do the larger dive site at Bonne Terre later in the week. I left a wakeup call for seven o'clock, finished the Scotch, took a hot shower and hit the sack.

Next morning, the old duffer in the motel office steered me to a diner across the road where I managed to make it through a greasy plate of bacon and eggs. I finished my third cup of black coffee and headed for Leadwood. I couldn’t get my head around the scuba diving business just yet so I decided to stop by the mine first and arrange to come back the next day for interviews. Ron Arledge, the dive master, agreed to this plan, but insisted on taking a quick trip into the old mine. Lifts and elevators were no longer in use, and as we descended the stairs and ramps my mind flashed back to the only time I was in the mine – that long-ago time with my father. I could still see Mr. Williams passed out on the floor of that tunnel and wondered how he was today. But the men and mules had been gone for years – victims of time and technology. The once-rich lead veins had been depleted, and the abandoned shafts were flooded with the cold, clear groundwater held at bay for generations by giant pumps. After a quick tour, I told Arledge I would see him at eight tomorrow morning.

I left the car in the parking lot and began to walk. I walked the streets of this once-thriving community, streets with real street signs. Signs with names that held no meaning for me: Main Street, Elm Street, and the like. I remembered streets with no signs at all; Baker Hill was Baker Hill because Bob Baker’s folks had lived there forever; and Gunnet Road was named for the family of Pauline Gunnet, my older sister’s classmate. It was on Gunnet Road, during my sophomore year at Northwestern, that my father’s life came to a shattering end. The two-ton 1958 Chrysler he was driving smashed into a giant, hundred-year-old oak tree. No one could say, or would say, just how it happened, but Bert Russell, the undertaker's son, told me later that there was a large cigarette burn through the right trouser leg of my dad’s suit. It was easy to believe that he lost control while trying to douse a hot ash fallen from one of those damn Camels. 

I felt a familiar pang of conscience as I stared at the still-visible scars on the old tree that bore witness to the violence of that tragedy. I hadn’t a good sense of myself at the time of my father’s death and so had been unable to calm the waters that roiled between us. I had wanted him to see me as I had grown, I had wanted him to be proud of me, I had wanted him to see me as successful, and I ached to know if he had died a fulfilled person. Most of all I wanted the impossible: to heal the breach that separated us those last two years. 

It was in June the summer after high school graduation that the recruiter from Northwestern showed up. I came in from a baseball game and found the three of them sitting in the living room – Mom, Dad and the recruiter, who rose immediately and introduced himself as Thomas Burke, an assistant athletic director at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He was a tall man of about fifty, dressed in khaki slacks and a blue blazer with a crest on the breast pocket I took to be a school emblem. I was as surprised as they were that he was here. Mother tried to break the ice. She was sitting at one end of the sofa and Dad was in his usual chair across the room, expressionless. Mr. Burke and I sat in chairs opposite the couch. 

"Ronnie," she said, "Mr. Burke tells us that he received quite a lengthy letter from you about a scholarship to Northwestern." She looked nervously from me to Mr. Burke, to Dad and back to me.

"Excuse me folks," Mr. Burke broke in. "I apologize for barging in unannounced like this, but I was in St. Louis yesterday and hoped I could catch Ronald on this trip. We only received his letter two weeks ago."

"Yeah, Mom, that’s right." I’ve been thinking for . . . "

"And who gave you permission to initiate such an inquiry?" Dad suddenly interjected.

I could feel my blood getting up and said, "Well, gee Dad, I didn’t think . . . "

"George Englewood and I were discussing this a month or two ago and . . . "

"Dad, I wish you wouldn’t interfere." . . . "

"Interfere? Interfere? Helping with my own son’s future – that’s interfering?" His voice rose slightly and he was on the edge of his chair.

Mr. Burke shifted in his chair, leaned forward and said, "Now, Mister Morgan . . . "

"Doctor Morgan."

"Excuse me Doctor. But from all accounts, your son is a talented athlete. Our scouts think talented enough to merit consideration for a full athletic scholarship, and . . . "

"Well that’s all well and good, but has anyone . . . "I haven't heard anything about an academic program."

"Roger, please, let’s hear this out," Mother said.

Mr. Burke looked around at the three of us and settled back in the chair. I was frantic with anxiety, biting my nails to the quick. Now that I knew a scholarship was actually within reach I was scared to death Dad was going to screw things up.

Mr. Burke said, "Not onlyI was just coming to that Doctor Morgan,," Mr. Burke said. but y"Your son shows real talent as a writer. The His English teacher, Miss Eaton, has written us a compelling letter of recommendation and sent several editions of the school paper to the dean of our journalism school."

Dad looked straight into my eyes and said, "So you’re going to be a writer is that it? You’re going to be a writer and a basketball jock." He sat back in his chair with a deflated look. 

I knew I was walking a tightrope with Dad, and I suddenly realized it was a lot farther to the ground than I thought. But I took a deep breath and said, "Yes sir. That’s what I hope to do." 

Dad rose abruptly. "Mr. Burke, you have your job to do and I have mine." He looked at Mother and said, "It’s time for my rounds at the hospital, Martha, we’ll talk about this later." And with that he turned and left.

Mr. Burke, obviously flummoxed by this performance, made several reassuring remarks about my chances, left a stack of forms, told us he would be in touch within six weeks and made his departure. Then Mother said, "Let’s go out on the patio and have some iced tea."

"You know, Ronnie, you could have let us in on what you were doing about this scholarship thing." She stirred her tea, took a sip and said, "I think I understand how you feel, but . . . "."

"No, Mom. I don’t think anyone understands how I feel. I just want to make this one decision on my own." I was up pacing back and forth.

"I can understand that," she said. "But you know how your father is about these things, and . . . "."

"That’s just it. I do know how he is about these things. That’s why I didn’t say anything." 

"Oh, sit down, Ronnie. I can’t think with you prancing around like that." She frowned and went on, "Don’t you have any consideration for his feelings? After all . . . "

"Of course I do, Mom, and it’s making me crazy. But dammit, I want to do this on my own. I’m gonna make a name for myself one of these days, and it won’t be because I’m related to the great Doctor Morgan. When my name goes into Who’s Who, it won’t mention him except in passing."

"Oh, Ronnie." It was a whisper.

I could see her tears welling, but I couldn’t help it. I just put my arm around her shoulder and said, "I’m sorry, Mom."

Dad and I had a couple of rows during the summer, but when he saw there was no changing my mind, he simply withdrew. His demeanor toward me was cool and polite. What little closeness we had was gone, at least for now. As for me, I was feeling pretty smug and defiant.

By fall, things had worked out thanks to Mom’s diplomatic intervention, and the middle of September found me in freshman orientation at Northwestern. I didn’t see much of the family during the next year and a half. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years I worked on a Mississippi River boat between Memphis and New Orleans determined not to ask my father for any further financial support.

I sat on the grass for a long time and leaned against the tree. It struck me that Dad had been solid too, like this great oak here that took his life. As I got up, I ran my hands across the deep scars in the wood. It pained me to imagine the anguish I must have caused him – the disappointment that his only son had let him down in some way. 

Even had he lived, I could not imagine any words that might have assuaged his disillusionment.

When I rounded the corner past the old Roxy Theater, the parsonage loomed into view, and my heart skipped a beat in anticipation. Then, there it was. The hard maple in front, two huge oaks reaching to the sky on the north side, a garage standing slightly out of plumb, evergreens growing where once spirea blooms presaged spring, too many fruit trees in a yard grown small, a house with aluminum siding covering the old clapboards; it was the same house all right, but somehow very different from the home in which my life began. Mother had sold the house soon after the accident and moved to live with her brother in Kentucky.

I saw the plaque that she had written me about just to the right of the front door. I felt like a trespasser, but I walked in anyway, through the gate and up to the door. It read:

I must have stood there five or ten minutes just staring. But all I could think of was: how funny that after all these years, this house was finally the Morgan house. All the years I lived there it was the old Jackson place. Maybe life is like that. Maybe we never really own something until we have let it go.

With a serenity that sadness often brings, I turned to leave. As I passed through the gate and started down the walk, I was met by an elderly woman carrying a small market basket on one arm. She stopped, looked at me for a moment, eyebrows arched, then she tentatively extended her free hand and said, "Aren’t you . . . "

I took her hand in both of mine and said, "Yes ma’am, I’m Doc Morgan’s Boy."