O Father Where Art Thou? (Or, The Men in My Family, Part I)
I don't have a lot of pictures of myself with my father. There's a simple reason for that: throughout my childhood, my father was the family photographer. The pictures I of him I took myself, starting with my twelfth birthday (when I got my first camera), do not, of course, include me, for the same reason. So a picture with both of us in it is a rarity. You could reach the conclusion from this dearth of father-son shots that, like many mid-century fathers, mine was absent from my childhood; and you would be partially right. Dad was 34 when I was born. He was almost a decade into his career, an American Baptist minister about to move to his third job. He was actually out of town, interviewing for that position, when my mother went into labor. I spent my first five weeks in San Jose, and then we moved up the coast to Fort Bragg. In fact, though, Dad was about as involved a parent as a man of his generation could be. From all accounts, he doted on ...