Personal Essay
"Four times a year, I peek into my father's past....as time passes, my memories of him invariably fade a bit. Like a slowly deteriorating photograph, some of them grow cloudy, the edges blurred. For example, there's the day he gave me that wonderful split-fingered baseball mitt, so creased and worn and oiled that it literally glistened in the sunlight. I was 6. Or was I even younger? I'm sure he had told me it was the same mitt he'd used when he was pitching at Notre Dame in the late 1920s. At least, I think that's what he told me. Even though I tell myself that this fuzziness is inevitable, part of me wants to fight it. I guess I fear that if these memories do disappear, I'm in danger of losing my father for the second time..."
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"Four times a year, I peek into my father's past....as time passes, my memories of him invariably fade a bit. Like a slowly deteriorating photograph, some of them grow cloudy, the edges blurred. For example, there's the day he gave me that wonderful split-fingered baseball mitt, so creased and worn and oiled that it literally glistened in the sunlight. I was 6. Or was I even younger? I'm sure he had told me it was the same mitt he'd used when he was pitching at Notre Dame in the late 1920s. At least, I think that's what he told me. Even though I tell myself that this fuzziness is inevitable, part of me wants to fight it. I guess I fear that if these memories do disappear, I'm in danger of losing my father for the second time..."