Lately I have been missing my stepfather, Andy White, who keeps excusing himself while he steps out of the room to get something from his study or heads out the back kitchen door, on his way to the barn again.
I can hear the sound of that gray door—the steps there lead down into the fragrant connecting woodshed—as the lift-latch clicks shut.
I see his plaid button-down shirt and tweed jacket, and his good evening moccasins. It must be about dinnertime. What were we talking about, just now?
Here we are, instead, on a frigid December day in , walking up a steep stretch of Pinckney Street, on Beacon Hill, in Boston. Christmas is two or three days away, and on a clear and cold afternoon he and I head down to Charles Street and then over to the frozen lake in the Public Garden. We find a park bench instead. Andy hides our shoes under a bush and we step down an embankment and sail away. There are wintry trees and park lampposts with a different shape than the ones in Central Park, and though the sense of Boston is close at hand, we could almost be in the country.
Wind has cleared patches and paths through snow for us to skate on. The ice is rough, with frozen ripples here and there to trip you up, but Andy and I are good skaters, and we laugh when we come to a curved bridge and, bending low, shoot under and out the other side. Andy was shy and self-conscious—he was a slight man, never one to bluster his way through things—and I could see him turn his head away in embarrassment as people coming toward us down Beacon Street began to smile when they saw him tiptoeing along on his hockey skates.
