He Asked If I Missed Him From Before

My son was three years and two months old, and we were stuck at a level crossing when he asked, in his small conversational way, why I looked so much younger than when we drove the green truck together.

We have never owned a truck. I laughed and asked what truck, and he sighed — an old man's sigh, patience for a slow apprentice — and said the green one, with the chain on the gate, when we took the logs down the switchback and I let him work the winch even though the boss said not to.

My grandfather hauled timber in the 1960s, four hundred kilometres from where we live. He died eleven years before my son was born. I know exactly two facts about his work life, and my son had just recited one of them: the winch story, which Grandpa told me once, when I was ten, about a young lad he'd secretly taught on the switchback runs. The lad, in Grandpa's telling, had died young — an accident on another crew — and Grandpa never forgave the industry for it.