To Dad in the hope that he stays with us

I saw a photo yesterday of you riding an ATV. This was before ATVs were the devil, before anyone but Rachel Carson cared about the environment, when it was okay to drink and drive, smoke indoors, and not use sunscreen. My parents and their friends, young, bandanaed, thin and tan, in perilously high-waisted jeans, would go racing over the dunes with a bottle of beer in one hand and a precarious grip on the wheel.

I saw a picture of you riding an ATV, wearing the white shirt, white shorts, and deck shoes that have been your summer costume forever, and I thought to myself, I have your legs. I had thought, or rather hoped, that I had my mother's legs, but this profile doesn't lie. Looking at this stack of photos, it makes me long for the time before digital photos, when it was a surprise to find out what was on the roll, when there were more duds, but things were less posed somehow, and there was no option to delete.

I've spent a long time missing your counterpart, but I've often thought about how I'd miss you when you went. These pictures tell us stories you never did. Oh, we've all heard about the turkey you shot on Cumberland Island with a rifle at point blank range, but what about the small struggles that make the man? We were so busy holding on to the memory of her that we forgot to make enough of you to hold on to, to store up those memories on lined shelves and guard them for the future.

Am I too wrapped up in nostalgia? Your doctor took us down the hall to a consultation room in the hospital yesterday. He was wearing a yellow button down and a pink spotted bow tie, and had the look of an old country doctor sprucing it up for the small town-big city. He propped his arms behind his head like he was about to dive into an old yarn, and told us how you showed up to appointments a couple drinks in. He was trying to pass on parameters for how not to be an alcoholic. As if a lifetime of you isn't inoculation enough.

My brother mentioned later that night that at a job interview in Cincinnati, he found himself suddenly swept away in a sea of bow ties, a disconcerting notion that resonated and sent him running. The heartland, symbols of a simpler time and all that. There's something off-putting about the mass putting on of nostalgia. But how to avoid the riptide tenacity of the past when every time we try to shake free, we are pulled back into remembering? I want to move forward, but I don't want to lose her, or you.