I was sitting at a red light a few days ago, contemplating a tree standing kitty-corner across the intersection. It was a fine tree, tall and flush, with a long and graceful arch to its trunk.

Then something popped into my head, the way things sometimes do.

It was an image of another fine tree, a towering oak in my backyard. And suddenly I was recalling a photograph of my father and father-in-law sitting on lawn chairs under the magnificent canopy of that tree, eating from paper plates and basking in the shade. It was a birthday party on one of those picture-perfect days in late summer, and they were content.

The memory was at once comforting and sobering. Comforting because of the role those two dads played in my life. Sobering because both of them are gone now, along with the tree that sheltered them that day.

My father-in-law died in 2009. The tree was felled by a nor’easter in........

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