My Father’s Glasses

“My Father’s Glasses,” a new essay by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12) is up at The Good Men Project:

I took my father’s glasses with me when I left the hospital that day, but five years later, I still have not put them on. Holding the glasses starts a movie in my memory, a biography of my father, but if I imagine wearing them a stranger appears on the screen.

That morning, my sister and I each boarded Los Angeles-bound flights, she from Philadelphia and I from Boston. Our plan was to meet at the airport, rent a car, and drive to the UCLA Medical Center.

We both landed ahead of schedule, as if time itself sensed an urgency we did not. Freeway traffic was light, and I could have gone faster; but having left New England’s winter gloom behind me, I enjoyed the drive under California sunshine and briefly forgot the mental chill of why we had come—my father had pneumonia again...[Keep Reading]…