This one’s for my dad, who died twelve years ago.

There’s an expression: “You can’t paint the air.”

It means nobody can do the impossible. I think my grandfather might have made it up. I’ve never come across it anywhere else, so I’ll give him credit for it. He was a painter by trade, and was known to say this often to his son, my father. As a first generation immigrant of Irish and English heritage, shaped by the Depression, he’d trot out the line whenever he thought my dad was getting uppity ideas about life. Nope, life was hard, you worked hard, you drank hard, and then you died. At least in my grandfather’s version.

My father would prove his father wrong […]