Night Ride Home

The night of the day my father died, I was driving my mother home along a serpentine road through a long stretch of northern Alabama woods, grim and unfamiliar. We were strangers here, a long way from the Catskill Mountains, where I imagined (and still do) we should have been. The only light was that of the car’s headlights, and a dim blue under-glow from the dashboard. I wasn’t even sure that this was the right road, but it was the one we were on.

Out of nowhere then, a prodigious Barn Owl. It swooped over the car hood, right to left, vanishing as abruptly as it had appeared, startling both of us, but not enough to break the cradling silence of our mournful journey. We continued down that lightless road, who knows how far. At last, my mother, in a down-to-earth tone, said: “That was your father.”

©John P. O’Grady