Father's Day always falls on a Sunday, which means I could recycle an old column and take the day off. Change a date, smooth out a paragraph, fix an awkward sentence I couldn't crack back in the Clinton administration and call it done.

In a way, that's what memory does. Every few years I recycle my father.

Not intentionally. I return to the same stories, the same objects, the same scraps of conversation. The blue haze of Pall Mall smoke. The stories remain the same. The man remembering them keeps changing.

The older I become, the less confidence I have in the stories I tell about my life.

Until recently I had a perfectly satisfactory explanation for why I never finished law school. I had grown tired of classrooms, I would say. I was burned out. A sports editor's job came along, I took it expecting to stay for a year, and that gap year turned into more than four decades of steady work. I had made a decision and then made a life.

Only recently did I come to understand that I left school because I was terrified. Because my father was dying.

He had lymphoma, perhaps connected to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, first diagnosed when I was a senior in high school in 1976, when chemotherapy seemed less a treatment than a siege. It tore him apart and then, for a while, gave him back. He had once been a professional baseball player and a Golden Gloves boxer, a compact man who could make a baseball seem alive with nothing more than a snap of his wrist. Cancer reduced him to nausea, exhaustion, and hospital rooms.

I remember wet dogs and wool, frozen grass beneath my shoes, the nap of flannel shirts, rough hands, and the scratch of afternoon whiskers. I remember a 1963 Thunderbird and a 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, waiting........

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