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On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Bloomingdale's, our very silk stocking department store, unveiled that year's Christmas windows. Because of its contract with Walt Disney Productions, Bloomingdale's spectacle in animation excited the sizeable crowd that had gathered around those windows, especially, as P. T. Barnum would say, the “boys and girls of all ages.” Our 12-year-old son grabbed his eight-year-old brother, and the two boys rushed around the building in order to take in all the sights. They are of an age where they do that sort of thing, leaving my wife and me to look at a distance and shiver in the cold with each other. We ran into my wife's friend, Stan, and his wife, Maggie. Both are successful criminal lawyers, especially Stan, who has gained a reputation for steadfast defense of the underdog accused. Donnie, their 15-month-old son, was “up high” on Stan's shoulders, watching bug-eyed as all of the major Disney characters in the flesh, expatriates for a day from a much warmer Orlando, Florida, paraded in front of the store's main entrance. Stan is very blond and fair-skinned. His eyes were watery and red, something I attributed to his general body-based sensitivity.
The next day I learned that Stan had been crying when I saw him. As his story unfolded, Stan had been thinking about his father through those tears, a father with whom he was genuinely close, from early childhood on, a father who had taken him, as the years went on, from circuses and Christmas windows, to baseball games, to dates and to cocktail parties. There was a brief period, when Stan was a teenager, that his father had slipped from grace. But, as Mark Twain pointed out, it was only a short time before Stan appreciated how much his father had learned by the end of those adolescent years. Stan was crying because his father had not lived to see Donnie shouldered “up high” that day. His reaction is a pungent reminder that, even in these superior father–son experiences that rarely come to th