My mother swears my father used to be happy. She points at the old black-and-white photo on her picture wall, as evidence. She says they shot it about a year before I was born: probably in late 1975, right after purchasing their box of an old house. She and Dad are standing in the tiny back yard, in front of a tangle of whatever bushes were surviving the drought. Mom is wearing a dark turtleneck and light pants, crease-pulled across her hips and suggesting a flare below the frame of the picture. Her face is at three-quarters profile to the camera and she’s smiling at Dad. She’s holding a roll of what are probably the house plans. He is dressed in cords and a Henley shirt, in some dark color that was probably brown. His right leg is bent a bit forward and his arms are extended out from his sides. His hands aren’t in the picture but they must have been open, palms up. He’s looking straight at the camera. It’s obvious that he’s dancing a bit. And he’s grinning with every muscle in his face.

Really. His eyes sparkle behind wire-rimmed glasses. His teeth gleam from within his beard. In fact, Dad’s eyes are weak, pale blue, sparse-lashed, and skeptical. Not his best feature. He was never one for oral hygiene, and his teeth are soft and dull. But he’s radiant in that picture.

A year before I was born.

Mom catalogues his skills as a young man, but I don’t remember most of them. She says he rode a unicycle and could pilot a small plane. He was an untrained musician who could pick out a tune on anything, and he composed ditties on his concertina, his electric piano, or the cherrywood clavichord he lovingly built from a kit. He liked to laugh, and she says it was almost annoying how willing he was to help anyone with anything, how often he wasn’t available to play, because he was assisting his parents or neighbors or even a needy stranger by the side of the road. He answered so many questions his friends called him Mr. Science. He helped so many move that they called him Mr. Fixit. And he was always tinkering, with models or verses or dot-drawings inked all night with his Rapidograph pen. He made containers out of old cigarbox wood. He performed electronic miracles with speaker wire and old amplifiers. I don’t know if my father was ingeniously creative, but it certainly sounds like he was crafty.

They used to say, Mom recalls, that when they walked into a room she immediately thought of ways to improve it, while he was busy appreciating what worked in it. Apparently she’d describe her ideas and he’d winnow out the unfeasible ones, and what remained he often tried to build. That’s how they came to have the little mini-kitchen upstairs. And how they didn’t come to have the hot tub, which design idea was never practical enough to construct, never doomed enough to discard, and a source of some chronic strife between them, as I recall.

I was almost six when they split up, so I ought to have memories of him happy when they were together, but I don’t. I suspect there were some good times – I still have the activity box he built for me, with its bells and lights and all the lovely switches – but maybe there were too many bitter arguments between my parents then, drowning out the good moments and muting all of the memories to misty scenes I can handle. My first six years observed through sheer curtains. Pale yellow, they seem to me now.

I remember Dad happiest during the four years between his marriages. History insists he was then quite depressed, prone to drinking too much Jack Daniels and a practitioner of bizarre sleep habits, but I recall nothing but good times and sweet adventures from those years in his apartment.

We did everything together. Unlike Mom, he let me stay up late on Saturday nights, sitting by him on the couch watching TV, laughing at his sardonic comments. He was always ready to help me build forts, make kites, and buy toys. He liked to eat fast food. He liked to shop. Mom didn’t.