The center of our home is anchored by a single photograph hanging directly above the living room couch. The glass is marred by a thin, spiderweb crack in the corner—the result of a stray foam soccer ball and an eight-year-old’s overenthusiastic kick. When it happened, my dad didn’t get angry. He simply stared at the frame for a long moment and whispered, “Well, I survived that day. I can survive this.” In the image, a lanky teenage boy stands on a high school football field, his graduation cap sitting crookedly atop his head. He looks utterly terrified, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and fierce determination. Clutched in his arms is a tiny bundle wrapped in a fleece blanket. That bundle was me.
For years, I teased him about his expression in that photo. I told him he looked like he was holding a live explosive, afraid that a single wrong breath might cause me to shatter. He would always give a characteristic shrug to dodge the emotional weight of the memory and reply, “I wasn’t going to drop you. I was just convinced I was going to break you. But apparently, I did okay.”
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