Henry had been working in the information booth of the Grand Central Terminal for 10 years. He’d taken the job in 1920, after he’d lost his job at a factory, intending on staying at the booth for only a few months to save up some money for his wife’s medications that never seemed to do much good. Instead, the cancer had killed her before he knew it, and he’d stayed on at the Grand Central. It seemed to him that working long hours here was a hell of a lot better than sitting at home, missing his dead wife.

Each working day he stood in the booth, watching people. Some hurried past, while others stood around in groups and chatted. There were always couples parting; women and men, who couldn’t stand being apart but for whatever reason, had to say goodbye. Smartly dressed children traveled with their parents and Grand Central employees scurried back and forth. Many travelers remembered him and stopped to say hello. Eventually someone would ask about the history of the place and Henry never tired of reciting the script. In October of 1871 the Grand Central, then called the Grand Central Depot, had opened. It had cost the enormous sum of 6.4 million dollars to build and was designed by architect John B. Snook. By the time Henry started to describe the 1902 train collision that had killed 17 people and injured 38 more, his audience was usually leaning in closely; Henry was a very engaging speaker.

His days off were also spent at the Grand Central, doing very much what he did while he was at work. Henry stuck close to the information booth, in case the young woman who worked for him on his free days could not answer questions that the patrons had. He swept when the floor became dirty and picked up discarded tickets and cigarette butts.

Henry’s son, a grown man living six blocks from Henry’s apartment, would often ask him why he didn’t just stop working at the Grand Central and enjoy the rest of his years at home. He surely didn’t need the money. His son was, like many young men, preoccupied with leisure. He spent very few hours at work but was somehow still wealthy. Henry didn’t bother to explain to his son what the Grand meant to him since his son did not understand that you could love something so much that it seemed to capture and hold you to it. Still, everyday his son would come and bring Henry a sandwich in a brown paper sack. When Henry became ill, his son complained to him that the long hours at Grand Central, inhaling all of those fumes and smoke, was to blame.

Henry worked at Grand Central Terminal until his death because, as he’d always said, when the sunlight streamed through the Grand’s windows, it was like coming home.

 The boy believed his father was a sort of demigod. The boy’s father was a war hero, the perfect soldier, and an asset to the army. His father had fought in World War 2, met his mother in Berlin, started a family, and was eventually shipped back to America. Women and men alike fawned over his war hero father; men slapped him on the back and shook his hand and women likened him to Audie Murphy, the soldier turned actor. The boy followed his hero father’s every move, dreaming of the day he would be a soldier, too. If his father drank too much, the boy never saw it. If he glimpsed his mother’s tearful face in the bathroom mirror, just before she closed the door, he never let himself understand what those tears meant. If his father hit him with his riding crop, it was because he was a disobedient child and not because his father wished him harm. When his father left his mother and his four brothers and sisters, it was because his mother was a wretch to live with. The boy understood. When his father did not write to him, even though the boy checked the mailbox daily, it was because his mother hid the letters, or because he was on a top-secret mission for the Army; of course he would write if he could.

  Later, when the boy-soldier was stationed in Vietnam, he looked up with eyes blurry from too much alcohol, and saw his demigod father at the end of the bar, flirting with a Vietnamese waitress. And when the soldier-boy, who hadn’t spoken to his father since he’d left his mother all those years ago, eagerly approached his father, and his father frowned at him, it was in surprise, not disapproval. And even though his father told the boy to pretend to everyone else that their last names were the same because the boy was his brother’s son, and not his own, it was not because his father was ashamed.

  When the soldier-boy returned home, a soldier-man now, he waited for his back to be slapped in congratulations and his name to be whispered on women’s lips. He waited for his father to write to him and tell him how proud he was of his soldier-man. The soldier-man waited, but none of these things happened. His war was just not the same war that had produced such wonderful heroes and, to everyone’s surprise, America was not the omnipotent power that they had believed it to be.

  The soldier-man went to see his mother for the first time since his return from that foreign land. His mother insisted that he allow her to cook for him, slowly making her way around the sparse kitchen. He saw clearly the lines on her once beautiful face, saw the blue eyes reflecting a sadness that made his insides seize. The tears came before he could stop them, pouring down his face and racking his body with sobs. It was only then that the soldier-boy was able to understood what his father really was.

Father's Day is rubbish. I'm having a hard time speaking to a jar. 

Bruno the Athlete and the rare Schnauzer Shrub.