I have known my father was a strong writer, an able writer, for my entire life. It is the universal opinion of everyone in his life. "Hugh Ed," they would say, "he was the sensitive one, the thinker. He could really string the words together. He could make the angels weep or St. Peter cheer." Oddly enough I have almost no direct knowledge, though, nothing to base my own opinion on. I have my own memories, of course, of the many occasions on which my father spoke. His work in the parish, his work for the City, his not-to-be-resisted predilection for parables, led him on many many occasions to demonstrate his linguistic prowess. More than a writer, even, my father was an orator; and I had many opportunities to hear him speak.

But I was a kid, never more than a teenager, and what could I know? I have the impression of a deep intellect, a gentle voice, words that seemed to speak from soul to soul. I remember rooms full of people listening in rapt attention one moment, roaring in laughter the next. But what could I know? I was young and far too inexperienced to be neutral, much less wise, and he was my father. How could I, at that time, in those places, truly judge his skill?

For no particular reason I recently decided to rifle through all the memorabilia I've carted from place to place in no fewer than five distinct moves. I haven't always had a great appreciation for what I have and I probably haven't kept the best stuff, or the most appropriate stuff, or the most meaningful stuff. But I've kept stuff, twelve years of letters and poems and postcards and pictures, harkening back to a time pregnant with possibility and ballooning with opportunity, harkening forward through all the unmet potentialities and unmatched futures. Casually thrown in a folder, carelessly packed in a box, almost unconsciously hauled from place to place, have been the flotsam and jetsam of my memories.

Perhaps unavoidably, perhaps egotistically -- probably a little of both -- much of this had been about me, my experience, my journey. I didn't keep my keepsakes until I went off to college, until I left home, until I broke with the past. A new life was beginning and I was going to chronicle it... what had come before was at best prologue. What can I say? I was eighteen years old and coming into my own. I was young, the world was young, and the past only a weight.

Somewhere along the way, however, I came into possession of some effects of my father's. As best as I can recollect, my mother was the agent of this. Upon her retirement from teaching in the City's schools, she embarked on her own well-earned new life; and that involved, in part, a move to a new state. The house where I'd spent my teen years -- it was not my homestead, which for me as for all of my family will likely ever be Green Point -- went up for sale and the accumulated weight of memories needed to be divvied up and parceled out, disbursed and distributed among me and my two sisters.

My sisters got the pictures, under the entirely reasonable argument that they would actually look at and display them. I received a somewhat more eclectic mix of documents and snapshots, report cards and draft notices. The oddments and scraps that seem, in the end, to be the legacy of any modern life. Somehow -- probably because I am not terribly careful of these things -- these bits and pieces of my father's memories got packed into the box I used for my own, a strange and almost organic intermingling of the accidental history of two lives. I didn't even notice when it happened.

But happen it did, somewhere between Palo Alto, California and Bensalem, Pennsylvania; or maybe between Bensalem and Princeton; or maybe between Green Point and adulthood. So, when I decided to sift through the box of fading memories, thinking to weed out the irrelevant and preserve the meaningful, I came across my father's things. Some of it I will treasure and some I will carry along from sheer obstinacy. Some of it, like a report card from St. Cecilia's Roman Catholic School, echoes in a dancing resonance with my things, in this case, my own report card issued thirty-four years after his. Some of it, like his Army discharge papers, speak to me of a world vastly and irreconcilably different.

Tucked among these, almost hidden away, present surely by accident, were four stapled pieces of faded block typewriting on yellowing paper. I don't know why they're there or even why they are together. I don't know for what long-forgotten occasion they were written or for how many years they sat folded in an envelope with a diploma from LaSalle High School. I do know that they are not perfected, for some of the words are hand-written and the spelling had not been checked. I don't know when he hoped to revise them, or for what purpose, or if they fit among a broader work. I do know that they are, like so much of my father's life, complete but unfinished, caught between a moment and the next, mutely striving for a perfection that cannot, now, come -- and stronger, somehow, for their imperfections, their incompleteness, their very failings: somehow a statement of hope.

It became important to me that these pages not flutter back into total obscurity. Even as I sit here transcribing them, I cannot say why it became so important. I do not know what I might accomplish or how. Armchair psychologists would likely say that I seek through these pages to recover a connection with my past, with my father, that I lost along the way. My motivation, they would say, lies somewhere between simplistic hero-worship and tortured self-reflection, between uninformed admiration and inarticulate accusation. Maybe. I acknowledge that typing these has helped me feel closer to him, has bridged a little bit of the unthinkable chasm separating us now. These are his words and this is his voice, vouchsafing me a momentary glimpse back at my life before.

Maybe I just appreciate his writing. I vaguely remember the events he narrates -- not firsthand, for I was much too young, but as part of my family's personal and specific legends, the mythos that sprang up spontaneously and reinforced itself by the retelling at every Christmas dinner, every poolside barbecue, every wedding and wake. I know not the players but I know the arena, and I see how it is framed by our personal history. And I hear the resonances in the words.

I can feel my heart rate accelerate as the Comeback Team begins to win. And I don't even like football.

I have known that my father was a strong writer, an able writer, for my entire life. I have known that he could really string the words together, to make the angels weep and St. Peter cheer. I have known it as an article of faith, unassailable and untestable. clung to more from memory and love than knowledge. At last I see why.

Faith cannot be proven and love need not be justified. But words can speak past their time, and chasms can be bridged.