There are things that can sometimes happen that are hard to explain. Hard to talk about even, because, somewhere between the story and the audience there can be a breakdown.

And we see this mostly with stories that challenge conventional beliefs and experiences. If we’re listening and what we hear is outside the boundaries of what we think we know, then the story is lost.

And I really don’t want that to happen here. Because this a story where so much is lost already. But it’s also a story about how what is lost can sometimes find a way back to us.

My father died in December of 2017. He had been living alone in a two story condominium, though a bout with throat cancer left him sadly enfeebled and he had more and more trouble getting up and down the stairs to his bedroom. There was a another bedroom downstairs, but my father was a man of deep territorial bias and he wasn’t having it.

My father always had his own space. Growing up, he refused to share a room with my mother. He liked to be alone, to sit at his typewriter, to smoke his pipe, and to listen to his radio.

We didn’t see much of him, but every once in awhile the door of his room would be cracked and, I, perhaps feeling bold or curious, would knock and peek in. He would let me in, sometimes. But always closing the door behind me, letting me know that things in here were different than they were out there.

“Do you choose to banish thyself from society, child?”

He would make curious statements like that from where he sat at his desk, never looking at me, with curls of pipe smoke framing the back of his head. And then he would go back to his typing. The radio crackled and chattered with news and sports and razor commercials.

My dad had lots of books in his room and if I happened to pick one up, he would always see me from the corner of his eye and he would start fidgeting with the radio dial, making his way through the AM band until the static would give way to dramatic narration. Radio theater.

“I used to listen to this when I was your age.”

And it would be a replay of the Lone Ranger or The Shadow, some old-timey drama that I fell in love with and sank into as he returned to his typing. He wouldn’t talk to me. But it was like he would adjust the radio, finding just the right frequency to reach me and to share some part of himself.

He was now in his eighties. The typewriter had been replaced with a computer. Throat cancer had put an end to the pipe. But he still had his radio and, weak as he was, he wasn’t interested in moving any of those things downstairs.

Until he fell one day and shattered his hip. He wouldn’t walk again and so we put an adjustable bed in the living room where he could watch TV. And of course, we brought his little transistor radio downstairs where he kept it on his pillow.

In what turned out to be the last four months of his life, I moved in to care for him. This was less out of noble obligation and more out of my own desperate circumstances. A bitter divorce left me broke and homeless. My daughters were now being raised by another man some 3000 miles away.

I had no place to go and my father needed me, but dad was still dad. “I see that you have once again banished thyself, child.”

It was just the two of us in the condo. My father couldn’t hear very well and if the TV wasn’t on, it was the staccato of radio announcers and static that reverberated off the bare walls and tiled floors.

When he died, other family members went to work preparing his condo for sale and the place was quickly emptied. But I had no place to go and we made a deal. I could sleep in the condo at night, as long as I left every morning. This would give the real estate agents a chance to show the property to wide-eyed, prospective buyers.

And so I would come home every night to the uncomfortable resonance of an empty building. It was so quiet. No keyboard. No radio. But you could still smell the pipe smoke. That was in the walls.

I got word that my daughters could come back to California for their winter school break. But nobody wanted to sleep in my dead father’s condo. So we made arrangements to stay with my mother, some five hours north of Los Angeles in a town called Modesto.

But it was only a week, and it went by so fast. My daughters had to be back in Los Angeles for a early-morning flight, and although nobody wanted to stay at my father’s condo, I reasoned that I could time the drive in a way that would allow us to get there by nightfall. The real estate agents would be gone and we could get a few hours of rest before heading to the airport at dawn.

In my father’s condo, there are three bedrooms upstairs. The furniture was gone but we had pillows and blankets and my two youngest slept on the floor with me in the master bedroom. My oldest daughter and her sister slept on the floor in a room that shared a wall with my father’s old bedroom.

I was exhausted after the drive from Modesto, and I immediately fell asleep.

It was still dark when we got up and I helped my two youngest daughters pack before checking in on the others.

My oldest daughter did not look well at all, and she told me she hadn’t slept.

I asked her why.

“How could I sleep?” she said.

“How could anybody sleep with you up all night playing with the radio?”

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