I was watching two little girls run around in the subway station one night. They would run back and forth across the waiting area, where their father sat and waited. It started me thinking about my dad, which is something I don’t do.
I didn’t speak to my father for the last five years of his life. When I received the call that he was dead, I didn’t believe it. My dad couldn’t die, he was too important. I realized that it was no joke, he had died, and my mind swarmed with images from my childhood.
He used to sit with me and draw pictures. He was a fantastic artist, and taught me so many things. There weren’t a lot of good things that happened in my childhood, but sitting with my father was one of them. He gave me my love of literature, my appreciation for art and my interest in sharks. He would pull out the worst records he could find and play them for me, calling it music appreciation. When the record was over, I would say to him how much I appreciated silence!
When I went to his house, the house I grew up in, after his death I went expecting to deal with lawyers and credit card companies and such. Instead, I found myself rummaging through his jewelry box where he kept his most prized possessions. I found the wedding band my mother gave him, the gold chain that had passed to him when his father died. Various papers, medals from his time in the service. But then I found something else, something that made the tears well up in my eyes and spill down my cheeks. I had spent the remaining years of my father’s life in exile, shunned by him. I thought that he hated me, and that he was glad to get rid of a daughter who wasn’t all sweetness and light. I was wrong.
At the back of the box I found a curious bottle, sealed with a tiny pink ribbon. I shook it and small white things rattled in the bottom. I held it up, and caught my breath. I was so stunned I had to sit down on the edge of the bed. I looked again, and began crying because now I knew how much he had loved me. How he had always loved me.
He had saved all my baby teeth.

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