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Rockaway Beach, March
My father is at the center of my mother's picture—his rough collar turned up against the wind. He is looking out to sea. In the distance there is a stone breakwater. The sea is gray, as is the sky and the sand. Different grays. My father is nearly 60 (younger than I am now), his red hair is faded and cut too short; his neck and shoulders are muscular. He might be a retired stevedore, or a sailor. But the image is misleading. Still, my mother likes it, likes to think of him this way—although she knows that my father is not a man of action. Neither is he a man of thought (I mean accomplished thought), but he does seem to be thinking now. He's not so much looking at the sea as looking at something by looking at the sea. What that is she doesn't know and neither, probably, could he say. But my mother understands my father's inwardness-disguised-as-outwardness because this is the way she looks at things herself. I'm the child of dreamers.
In her fading color photograph, Hadrian's Wall is a narrowing road, an ancient footpath along the top of what's left of a rocky embankment winding across a gray-green heath and vanishing in a cloudy North of England sky. As a wall, it's keeping no one from anything—although