And so: David Francis Heller, August 26, 1981. Small and skinny, like his father. For more than a year I called him Moose.
        He wasn't like you.
        And yet, like you, he was a revelation. Some men, stupid men like me, cannot imagine the way the world of light can change us. No matter from what angle light happens to shine on our undiscerning faces, nor how brightly, we simply cannot imagine ourselves as different. Then one day, we are. On a small bookcase in what was once my private study sat a black and white photograph of David when he was almost two, wearing a baseball T shirt and a sweet grin, nestled in the lap of his father, the middle class dork: perfectly combed hair parted over my right ear like a volunteer 3rd base coach running for City Commissioner on a Republican ticket. Neatly trimmed mustache failing to conceal a toothless, goofy grin. A picture of happiness, of a kind I'd never wanted nor even imagined. I was living the writing life, all right, like hundreds of other dorks just like me.
        Nevertheless, I remained convinced I was different. I would have a life beyond this one, beyond the front porch swing where the picture was taken, beyond family and school and The Little Apple. Beyond the blank page itself. I would not sit at home and write about worlds only others had seen. I would go, I would see, I would do.
        May 11, 1984: Michael Stephen, the Terminator.
        June 28, 1987: Daniel Gordon, the Elf.
        Through these years the writing life occasionally took me away from The Little Apple, sometimes to distant and exotic-sounding places like Hawai`i. But mostly I remained. I sat, I thought, I wrote. In January of 1990 I walked out of Denison Hall past two students examining a booklet of spring semester course offerings. “Steve Heller,” the tall one said to the short one. “Who's that?”
        “Oh, him,” the short one replied, oblivious to my passing. “He's the English Department's Daddy of the 80s.”
        In that moment I knew exactly who I'd become: I was George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.
        Later on I'd joke about it, but the truth was the thought galled me. Like George Bailey, I appeared to be living a wonderful, an enviable life. I had a good job, a decent career, a loving wife with a successful career of her own, three healthy male sons who displayed the blessed grace of the nonviolent, all of us living together in a big old crumbling but comfortable parkside house, which we perpetually dreamed of renovating. Like George Bailey, though, I was dissatisfied, ungrateful, relentlessly opposed to the life I was living, the life I was good at.
        Unlike George, I had no angel watching over me. No Clarence to show me the roads untaken, nor the differences that lay at the end of each. No one to confirm my life except the people in it.

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