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make me feel better, he told me about his own father who had been a drunk and beaten him and his mother until his unexpected and highly unusual death. When he spoke about the man, his eyes became unfocused and distant. Apparently, when Father Michaels had been a year or two older than I, his father had had a vision which reformed him on the spot. At the time he had been on a bender for nearly two weeks, during which he had not been home, much to the relief of the boy and his mother, whose eyes he had blackened before leaving and which were still greenish yellow. When he finally returned one afternoon, his wife was prepared to leap from the third-story window if necessary, but though shaky, her husband was sober and dressed, unaccountably, in a new suit. He was shaved and combed, and he announced that he had returned to them a new man. He certainly looked like one. The boy and his mother scarcely recognized him. The bag of groceries he was carrying was welcome though, as was the news that he had a job, a good one. He then kissed his wife’s yellow eyes and asked his son if he would like to go to a ball game at the Polo Grounds while his mother prepared dinner. At the ballpark they drank sodas and watched the game from high in the stands, and Father Michaels remembered it as the happiest day of his young life.
    When the game was over, the older man took his son’s hand and together they came down out of the stands. Father Michaels remembered the bright sun seemed to rest right on top of the opposite bleachers, and perhaps for that reason, his father thought they had reached the bottom when there was still one step to go. As a drunk, he had miraculously survived his share of dangerous falls. More than once he had missed the top step on the stairs outside their third-floor flat, unaware that he had done so until he discovered himself seated on the landing below. He had fallen off chairs, out of moving cars into gutters, off porches, offbicycles, off ice skates, off countless bar stools, even off women. But that afternoon, when he was sober and full of new life and aching love for his long-neglected boy, his leg stiffened when he thought he had reached the bottom of the stadium stairs, and though he had misjudged where he was by inches, his leg shattered like a dry twig, the separated bone driving up into his groin. He immediately went into shock and died before the doctors at the hospital to which he was finally taken could diagnose the problem.
    If Father Michaels had not explained the moral of the story, I would have missed it, for it seemed to me that the man’s mistake in judgment had been to sober up when his natural state was clearly an alcoholic trance. But my friend explained that God had generously given his father the opportunity to die in the state of grace, and to allow the two of them a wonderful afternoon and its memory. He went on to explain that his father’s memory probably had more to do with his becoming a priest than any other single factor. Even viewed thus providentially, God’s design, though unmistakable now that it was pointed out to me, appeared to me a trifle convoluted, though I was hardly an expert. It just seemed that if He wanted disciples, His method with Saint Paul on the Damascus road was cleaner since it involved just the man in question (unless you counted the horse), not the beating of the man’s wife or the prolonged torture of his son, or any other innocent bystander to effect the conversion. Nevertheless, Father Michaels and I were bound by mutual sympathy, and he was of the opinion that even if my own father never showed up again, he would very likely continue to shape my life. I should be thankful for him, and for the brief time I’d spent with him, even if he didn’t seem like so very much of a father.
    My new friend also encouraged me to be thankful for my mother, whom he regarded as an extraordinary woman, not just as a gunfighter, but as someone of courage and endurance, who