Paternal Anecdote

[The following is an excerpt from a letter.]

The swingset of my youth was not so grand. It was a children’s swing mounted on a metal A-frame. I can almost remember the day my father erected it in our backyard at the way back end of the lot. My father was an exceptional craftsman—a cabinet-maker in early adulthood—and seemed to take real pleasure in building things. But he apparently couldn’t support a family that way and eventually went into business and started wearing suits to work and never seemed quite as happy. Like two of his brothers, he smoked heavily and died young. I sometimes wonder how things would have been if he’d stayed a carpenter.