Well, here's a story I never told before, but it's been haunting me, so I think I have to tell it, because I'm pretty sure no one else will, and if a story doesn't get told, isn't that a door that never gets a chance to open, and isn't that a shame and a sin?
So then.
I was in college. This was in the middle of America 30 years ago. It was the last night I was ever in college. The next afternoon we graduated. But the night before we graduated there was a huge roaring tumultuous party in our hall. It was a very old hall with ironwork everywhere and vaulted ceilings and all the students who were not graduating were gone so the hall echoed with music and shouting and laughter and rueful chaos and merriment.
Of course almost every graduating student had family in for the weekend, so a few brothers and sisters and even a dad or two joined the party, the graduating students trying to ooze up the new girls, and then graduates from other halls who heard the roar from our hall wandered over, and soon it was midnight and the party was throbbing and even the shyest graduating students were dancing and giggling and shouting. It was a really great party.
At about one in the morning I noticed that the dad of a friend of mine was in the corner drinking hard and telling funny stories. He got drunker and drunker until at about three in the morning he started shouting and cursing and some glass smashed and finally he fell down.
Seeing a dad huddled in a moist heap on our linoleum floor was a great shock. I had never seen a drunken dad before. My dad liked to tell of the three times he had been drunk in his whole life: one time in the war, one time with the neighbors and one time in the city, but my brothers and I thought he was probably exaggerating a little to prove that he was like other dads, which he wasn't.
At the party that night my friend picked up his dad and held him in his arms like a fireman holding a child and then he slid along the wall to the door and popped the door open with his foot and carried his dad outside into the sea of the grass. I watched him