Returning from a walk across the Dug Road bridge and into the Ludlowville
woods, Joe carried some violets we had picked. An old man with a handsome
Labrador going in the opposite direction asked, “Are they for Easter?” “No,” Joe said.
“For Passover.” Joe was nearly four, I nearly thirty-nine.
In May of that year, 1987, Joe and I approached the Dug Road bridge, and there
was no one in our path. Joe whispered: “Go quietly over the bridge, so you don’t wake
up the geese.” The next day I repeated his words to him when we came to the place.
He immediately started singing. “Why?” “Because the geese are awake,” he said.
The day we went to the bird sanctuary at Sapsucker Woods, Joe made up a song,
“Fish Birds on the Sea,” to the tune of the verse introducing “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing
through the snow.” That night I asked him to tell me a story. “Okay,” he said. “Once
upon a time, there was a little boy named Daddy.
Then, out of the blue, “‘God made me,” he said.