For three weeks, each time I’ve called my father, no one has answered. I’ve allowed the phone to ring twenty times. I’ve counted because I want to be certain I can tell him how far I’ve gone to account for his near-deafness, his arthritis. How long I’ve waited in case he was outside trying to fumble his house key into the lock, nervous because the floodlight that illuminates the front porch and the driveway hasn’t been replaced after months of being burnt out.

Altogether, I’ve called seven times, once each on every night of the week, staggering the attempts over the days from Thanksgiving to the middle of December. I can explain my system to him as well, that I haven’t just dialed his number on three Monday evenings when he was playing dart ball in his church league. Or three Wednesday nights when he was watching television at my sister’s house until the local newscast began. But with each succeeding call, I’ve understood I was counting the rings the way a boxer, standing in a neutral corner, might be singing along with the referee, impatient for ten.

I blame the joy of twenty on my father. For the first forty-two years of my life, either in person or on the phone, I talked with my mother. And when she died, there we were, my father and I having to feel our way into dialogue.

My mother had managed all of the financial records, so I spent the first day I returned helping him work through the books while my father vacuumed carpets and dusted furniture. Three hours after we started, my father stopped in the spare room and asked me if I wanted lunch. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you have.” He returned with an American Cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee, put them on the table, and left.

In the middle of the afternoon, he stopped by again and picked up the dishes. “Well,” he said, “we’re getting along here, aren’t we?”

My mother had died on New Year’s Day, and I saw how Christmas had stalled at gifts opened but unpacked, how her medicine was arranged by frequency: Crystodigin, Diaranese, Almodet (once daily), Cytomel (three times per day).

They had duties that supported her weak heart. I lifted the vial of Percoset (as needed, for severe pain, no refills), and I wondered at the gaps between the demands screamed by my mother’s heart. Beside it was Nitrostat (as needed, for chest pain), those pills that the foolish in movies always grope toward as they tumble one room away from their carelessly placed relief. The urgency of labels leveled to a kind of democracy, a haze of help from which nothing can emerge.

By then I’d learned my own medicine from the tablets I took, twice daily; the capsules I swallowed, as needed; and the vapor I breathed in the lapsed-lung darkness, lying back like Proust, whose life I’d learned for my job, whose asthma bedded him for years. He didn’t take Theolair, Optimine, Ventolin. He insisted, finally, a huge black woman was chasing him.

So she caught him. So now my father strained to speak, trying, “Well, did you sleep good?” to unmuzzle the following morning, and I answered him, “Good enough,” as if truth might trigger prescriptions, as if accidentally we might talk, as needed, swallowing to save our faulty selves, carefully speaking from the confluence of our altered blood.

My father had allowed my mother to die an old-fashioned, stay-at-home, natural death. No machinery. No hospital. No exotic drugs beyond the maintenance ones she’d taken for years. Most likely she could have lived another year; probably another two; maybe another three. All of those thousand days as an invalid he would have cared for her if either one of them could have put up with even one day of her not being able to stand up or walk.

She’d managed, on the day she died, to finish the crossword puzzle in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. All the way to having the patience to look up “orison,” a six-letter word for “prayer,” and “alim,” which turned out to be “a Turkish standard.” Or maybe she simply knew that stumper from having worked ten thousand crosswords. No matter, I’d thought, when I found the folded Post-Gazette beside the couch on the day before the funeral. It was the kind of definition a lousy puzzle maker would resort to when he’d worked his way out of English words. What remained was the evidence that she’d solved it, that there was no chance she’d filled in the toughest six spaces by checking the solution in the next morning’s paper.

On the last afternoon of her life, my mother wrote and mailed her weekly news to me. After the funeral, after traveling home, I received her note from the neighbor who’d held our mail. That letter kept me in a chair for half an hour before I opened it. Her handwriting was as perfect as always. There was a return address affixed in the envelope’s top left corner as it’s supposed to be, insurance against loss.

Every December, as the year runs down, I play my Phil Spector Christmas Album and reread the January issues of Life that I’ve collected. The year-in-review specials mix well with The Crystals singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” The fads and the recent dead sparkle when Darlene Love is belting out “Winter Wonderland.”

This year I start with the January 1984, issue, the one I purchased on Christmas Eve in Hollywood, Florida. I was wearing shorts and loading up on expensive delicatessen food to take back to the condominium my family was living in for the holidays. The Hitler Diaries. Wacky Wallwalkers. Boy George posing with his mother. I end up reading a page of quotations, stopping at one attributed to William Fears, telephone lineman of Mill Valley, California: “There’s nothing in space—Believe me, I’m positive of that. My father told me.”

I think about Bill Fears, whether or not he’d followed the space probe Voyager to Neptune, the trip featured in the January 1990 issue. And I remember that I’d woken up on Christmas morning, 1983, to the worst Florida cold wave in fifty years. I’d driven my family down to the Keys, thinking it would be warmer and recalling my father’s anger at our not coming to his house for Christmas. “There’s nothing in Florida,” he’d told me. “You’ll see.” My family spent the afternoon shivering in the bleak fifty degree sunlight of a Northeast March.

On my stereo, as I reminisce, Bob B. Soxx and The Blue Jeans finish “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and they’re replaced by the voice of Phil Spector himself, the Wall-of-Sound producer delivering his early 1960s, end-of-the-album soliloquy over a wash of “Silent Night.” “It is so difficult at this time to say words that would express my feelings about the album to which you’ve just listened,” Phil begins.

“Sure, Phil,” one of my sons, visiting for the holidays, says from the kitchen. I look up from the pictures of Buster Crabbe and Arthur Godfrey, two people who died in 1983.

“Of course, the biggest thanks goes to you,” Phil insists, and my son, standing in the doorway now, says “Sure it does, Phil,” as “Silent Night” swells louder. “What a cheesy record,” he adds, though, since it’s over anyway, I’m not going to argue with him. Neither of us says a word about where Phil Spector has arrived, accused of murder in California.

On the second day at my father’s, I went into the basement to see what needed to be packed and kept, packed and given away, or packed and dumped at the end of the driveway for the trash collector. “You decide,” my father said. “I won’t argue.”

I saved pictures, books, and souvenirs—anything somehow symbolic. I charity-boxed used clothes and the appliances which appeared to be most recently moved to the basement. And then, listening to my lungs for the first sign of wheezing, I hauled two dozen cartons of carpet remnants, wrapping paper scraps, ribbon pieces, and a hundred thousand labels from products that had promoted some sort of refund offer.

Maybe five hundred General Mills cereal coupons. At least as many Betty Crocker box tops and Planters Peanuts vacuum-jar seals. An old RCA color television box full of miscellaneous wrappers. A Sears washing machine box crammed with sorted, rubber-banded coupons. I didn’t check to see what my father might receive if he mailed all of them in or lugged bundles to each of the three nearest grocery stores. Whatever it was, he’d never miss it. There were expiration dates from the 1970s,thousands of “must redeem by’s ”from the 1980s. I didn’t want to tell my father to spend the rest of his life searching for “9s”among the decade digits.

“Just you wait,” my mother would say, “you never know. ”There were two broken hot water tanks and three nonfunctioning upright vacuum cleaners. She’d shelved four ancient toasters and six radios, stored three televisions tuned to clouds. For parts,  maybe. Or miracles the next time they were plugged in.

Or as if that personal landfill would follow her soul, junk as faith, gathering possessions like a Pharaoh, believing she’d sort it out, later, when she had time, when there was an eternity of leisure to order and classify what filled her cellar.

In the first year after my mother died, my father called twice. And neither time was I home. He called after twelve, and my wife answered, thinking it was the police inviting her to the morgue to identify our son who was less than a year into driving. Perhaps my father was living strange hours now. Maybe he believed the rates were lower after midnight. Each time, he simply said, “Tell him his father called.”

On the third day I stayed with my father, after breakfast, I went back to the basement, entering the root cellar where there was a tub full of potatoes that had sprouted into what looked like a mass of thick-bodied, tentacled insects. On one shelf were cans of vegetables, fruit, and potted meats, some of the cans looking so ancient with rust I imagined them being there when I was a child.

Above them were more than a hundred jars of home-canned vegetables and fruit. I wondered about how they were arranged, whether my father could tell which were recently prepared and which might be approaching some sort of unwritten expiration date, canned five years before or even ten. Something about the beets and the near-soup of tomatoes made me consider the possibility of botulism. Already my father had regressed to eating sandwiches and hot dogs as if there was nothing to meals except removing hunger. These things would be here years longer, sitting in the dark until he happened on them one day and opened one jar on a whim.

Or they might stay there forever untouched like the thirty jars of apple butter my friend Paul Kress and I had discovered one winter afternoon in a long-abandoned house we were exploring. It was as if the surviving members of that family hated their mother’s specialty, taking beans and peaches, but leaving the apple butter behind. The boy who’d driven Paul Kress and me there was six years older, strong enough to throw those jars accurately through the upstairs windows while mine and Paul’s lobbed against the side of the house ten feet below, making a satisfying splatter.

The older boy fired his next jar against the wall, shattering glass, spraying apple butter in a glorious, huge splat that began to ooze down the wooden slats. It was ten minutes work, that wreckage, followed by ten minutes of pitching hard-packed snowballs at windows until every one was broken.

And then, when we were back in the car, ready to leave, the tires spun in the softened snow, sinking. Within seconds we were halfway up the hubcaps with no chance of moving.

I was young enough to begin thinking God had seen to it that the car would get stuck, that judgment had been made and we’d been found wanting. My friend and I were nearly useless for pushing. I was ten, all skin and bone, and he was eleven, even skinnier, but at least he had some idea of how to drive a car, giving gas and letting out the clutch.

I pushed anyway. I slipped and slid beside the sixteen year-old who’d taken us there in the old rattletrap he’d bought with money saved from a summer job. I took splatters of slush because to do otherwise was to announce my worthlessness.

The broken windows leered at us. The hilarious stains of apple butter began to talk among themselves about the stupidity of vandalism. It took a set of chains dragged from the trunk and applied to the rear tires, wooden planks salvaged from the house, rocks jammed into the deep grooves in the slick, soft snow, but finally we were out before anyone stopped to help and noticed what we’d been doing.

After I left the root cellar, that scene followed me the rest of the morning. My mother had spent days canning the hundreds of jars of peaches, pears, green beans, beets, and tomatoes that remained, the kitchen fogged by steam, the counter littered with stems and peels. She’d stood, evening after evening, to slice and chop. I thought of those jars being there years from now, the house falling to ruin and entered by boys from some other neighborhood who knew nothing about the people who’d lived here. I was turning so sentimental with guilt that I wanted to find someone to whom I could apologize.

After lunch, my father said, “I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“In the garage.”

There was no point in saying “What?” again. It was maybe twenty degrees outside, maybe thirty in the garage, and I buttoned up my coat while waiting for him to choose from the floor-to-ceiling junk that surrounded us.

It had been five years, at least, since he’d squeezed a car in there. And finally, when he’d given it up, the room had narrowed rapidly to the width of a lawn mower. I felt, for a moment, like somebody whose job it was to rescue earthquake victims, reach among twisted metal and broken concrete for quivering or lifeless hands.

I was watching my breath while he moved a barrel that, for all I knew, held a million Cheese-Puff labels. “Here,” he said. “Look.”

It was a safe. For sure, I hadn’t been expecting a safe. “You need to know the combination so you can get in here some day.” He had me stumped. I didn’t know what my father could have been hoarding that needed a combination lock to protect it.

“OK,” I agreed.

“Pay this some mind now.”

“OK,” I repeated with brilliance.

“Right four times to forty; left three times to thirty; right two times to twenty; left once to ten; right to zero and bingo.”

I thought he was kidding. I thought he was making certain I wasn’t daydreaming about cutting the lawn with one of the three hand mowers jammed against the back wall under a set of bedsprings.

“You got it?”

“No problem.”

He gave the dial a spin. “Go ahead.”

I decided to play it out, call his bluff. When I got back to zero, I tugged the door like I believed in my father’s infallibility, and the thing opened. “Good,” he said. He pushed the door shut with his foot and respun the dial. “Now you know.”

Outside it was snowing so heavily I decided to stay another day. The forecaster promised the snow would end by mid-afternoon. A warm front was approaching. In January, that meant the temperature would approach forty degrees the following day. The Pennsylvania Turnpike would be cleared, and neither my father nor I would have to worry about my driving into impassable conditions.

A month later, when I returned, the snow that was falling when I arrived was nothing but an hour’s cover. When we walked across my father’s yard, the grass reappeared where our shoes pressed.

After dinner my father led me back outside. “There’s my sky,” he said, and, not knowing what he expected, I answered, standing in his driveway, “It’s turned clear, all right.”

I thought my father was planning to tell me the ancient names for the stars or the tales they inspired about people who suffered and changed and ascended while somebody left behind handed their stories down to another generation. The two dippers and Orion were all I remembered, and I waited for him to show me where he believed my mother was, how one cluster of stars had reformed, at least for him, to suggest hope in the future.

The two of us stood with the night in our lungs. We breathed a sentence of silence until he said, “Venus and Jupiter,” directed me low in the sky where there were so many lights I could nod, certain they were among them.

Phil Spector over with, I turn on the radio, an oldies station, and pick up Life, January 1989, the issue I bought one year to the day I returned home from my mother’s funeral three days after her death on New Year’s Day, 1988.

Pictures of Roy Orbison, John Houseman, Billy Carter, Louise Nevelson—they’d died, for sure, after my mother, even Roy Orbison, who, as I remember, died just in time to make this issue.

Despite his failing memory for things that have happened or been said less than an hour before, my father astounds me with remembering more than the trivia of annual deaths. For instance, he can recite the thirty-one lines of my poem about my mother’s death. The elegy is in calligraphy, framed, on his living room wall, a birthday gift from my sister, who says she’s followed along as he speaks, checking for accuracy.

“That’s not the way it happened,” my mother would say, if she read it for herself. The last time she visited, we watched the videotape I rented of Gunga Din, replaying the scene where Rudyard Kipling has a cameo part in the film based on his story. I told her that’s Kipling himself writing near the end, that here he appears again alongside the colonel, who, lost for words, borrows the poem Kipling’s character has been composing.

“They’ve changed it,” she said. “They’ve added something.” And I told her she was right, that the studio erased Kipling from the theater version, that the movie she’s watched ten times on television shows only Kipling’s ghost, the colonel oddly off center to make room for the vague emptiness beside him.

“So it’s not the real Gunga Din,” she said, and I gave it up to rewinding.

On the radio, just after a commercial, the announcer says, “Hello, Solid Gold Saturday Night—Who’s this?”

“This is Bill,” the caller answers, sounding eerily like my father.

“Where you calling from, Bill?”

“Pittsburgh,” the caller replies, and I’m sitting up, listening, because so far it’s a match of voice, name, and city.

“That’s triple-W, S, right?”

“Right,” Bill from Pittsburgh says, “WWSW.” The call letters sound like they’re being spoken by an eighty year–old man, somebody who would never call a syndicated rock-and-roll show.

“And what can we play for you, Bill?”

“`The Hippy, Hippy Shake.’”

“I can’t stand still . . .” The Swinging Bluejeans begin, and I imagine my father listening to the recording of his call, thinking somehow the odds were excellent that I was simultaneously tuned in hundreds of miles away. Wasn’t this my music? Hadn’t I been glued to the radio all of the time when I was in high school?

Though of course there are thousands of Bill’s in Pittsburgh, dozens of them who would sound like my father on the radio. And one of them loved “The Hippy, Hippy Shake.” And that particular Bill was holding a beer and dancing by himself in his living room, shouting through the house to his wife, saying, “Listen to that, would you? Isn’t it great?”

Gary Fincke is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of The Writers Institute at Susquehanna University.