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As a kid I’d had the dreams of California that everybody has. I had a subscription to Photoplay. My father used to take me to movies on Saturday afternoons when it rained. He was a serious man but he liked comedies, and we saw Adam’s Rib together, and Singin’ in the Rain, and His Girl Friday, which he loved so much we saw it twice – he was a newspaperman, after all. We sometimes stopped for lunch on the way home, and we would sit at the counter with cups of coffee – mine half-filled with milk – and read books. He was capable of a pleasant and comfortable silence that I rarely encountered after he was gone. My mother’s silences were tense, and the silences of my girlfriends always made me think I had done something wrong. I suppose I was the one who lost the knack, actually, for being wi
