And beneath the date were six words I had spent my entire life wishing he had said to me. In his blocky, careful hand, on the back of a photograph of a sleeping little boy in the back seat of an old truck, my father had written: “I love you. Drive safe, son.”
The date was the day I left home for good. I was nineteen. I remember it as one of the coldest mornings of my life, and not because of the weather — because he had shaken my hand at the door, said “all right then,” and gone back inside before I had even backed out of the driveway. I drove away certain that my father did not much care whether I stayed or went.
He had taken that photograph years earlier, when I was small and used to fall asleep in the truck on the long drives home. And on the day I left, he had gone out to his workshop, dug out that picture of his sleeping boy, and written on the back the six words he could not make himself say to my face — and then he put it in a drawer, where it waited thirty years for me to find it.
All the other photographs told the same story. My first bicycle. My first day of high school. My graduation, my wedding, the birth of my daughter — every one of them kept, dated, labeled in that same hand, in a drawer I never knew existed, by a man I had spent my whole life believing did not know how to love out loud.
He knew. He just could not do it with his mouth. He did it with a camera, and a workbench, and a drawer full of moments he was too locked-up to ever show me while he was alive.
The one of me at ten, beside my first bicycle, said on the back: “He doesn’t know it yet, but this is the best day of my life.” He wrote that about a Tuesday afternoon spent teaching a kid to ride a bike. That was my father — saying the biggest thing he ever felt, to no one, on the back of a photo, where it was safe.
I have those pictures framed now, all through my house. My daughter asked me who took them, and I told her: her grandfather, who loved me more than any man ever loved a son, and never once figured out how to say it — so he wrote it down, in a drawer, and trusted that someday I would go looking.
I wish I had known while he was still here. I wish I had gone back and hugged a man who did not know how to be hugged, and told him the things he did not know how to say, so at least one of us would have said them out loud. But he found his own way to tell me, in the end. Six words, thirty years, one drawer. I love you too, Dad. I always did. I just wish one of us had said it while we could still hear it.
