by Mike Lubow

Over beers one night, my dad said that on the day I was born he'd imagined a visit from a young man. This stranger handed my dad a newborn and said, "Take care of him."

This is my dad's imagining.

The stranger added the word, "dad." "Take care of him, Dad." And continued, "I'll come back when he's grown. Thanks. Thanks, Dad."

My dad felt obligated to the stranger, who was me, of course. It was his way of explaining how he felt about having a son.

Well, my dad did a good job. He talked to a pretty teenage girl in Alabama. And he let me bump his Buick into a tree. Chalk those things up as worthy.

I'm not sentimental. Yet here I am, about to do a sentimental thing. But it's a sentimental place, this cemetery, an underground city of sentiment.

My dad wasn't sentimental either. He was a grownup who smoked unfiltered cigarettes like they did in the movies of my dad's black and white life. He wore slicked hair. He wasn't vain or tentative, like me, or long-haired like me, nothing youthful.

And he had a handle on things. While I feared the sky falling, he would say, "Everything's okay."

I'm about to do this sentimental thing, as I said. It involves finding my dad's grave and putting some pebbles on it, and powdery old Dublin concrete.

I'm not the kind who visits cemeteries. But maybe this'll bring me an aftertaste of childish solace. I could use it. When my dad died, after the dealing with details, I realized it signified the end of reassurance.

No "business problem" should make a guy feel the sky's falling, but I can't help it. I'm owed big money by a bad character. The guy has told me to screw myself. A redundant act, since without his payment I'm already screwed.

My dad was born in a homely neighborhood in the cheerful city of Dublin. He described it that way, cheerful. His folks lived over a store at 38 Clanbrassil where his mother gave birth on newspapers. The newsprint was antiseptic.

I went there recently. The building, his bedroom window, the courtyard where he played, they were still there. This was lucky, since much of Dublin is being gentrified.

My work is considered "soft costs" to the bad client, and he won't pay. He erects towers in the tough town of Chicago. My small ad agency did his logo, brochure, signs and ads. I booked $110,000 in the Trib.

When I billed these costs, he said I'd have to wait. A friend in the client's office told me, off the record, that soft costs have low priority. Hard costs like cement come first. Insultingly, they were collected by men harder than I. I pressed my friend to speak for me. But the boss said, simply, "screw 'im."

By contrast, a hard-cost guy who wasn't paid, well, he had leverage. Construction would stop without cement. If not paid, a hard costs guy will collect in steel-toed boots.

Hard costs are hard to ignore. Soft costs, well, screw the soft guy and his soft life of brochures and logos. Real men don't give a crap about logos.

My dad didn't give a crap about logos. He was a working class guy who led a peddler's life, a life started by his father in Dublin with horse and wagon and continued in Chicago with a Buick.

My dad worked fast six days a week, and did accounts on the seventh. We'd take a vacation in August, driving to Florida when temperatures were high but prices low.

Once, on the ride home, we stayed in a motel in Birmingham. I was fifteen, going nuts with the monotony of the ride and itch of sex which plagued worse than acne or sunburn, two alternating problems then. Every girl I saw was naked under her clothes. That idea kept me up at night.

I thought the hard-on was a disease, too private to talk about. It was a conservative era. Wet dreams and unruly genitalia were more bits of sky falling.

There was a girl there. Another disaffected teen suffering the company of siblings and parents. She was pretty, reminding me of the movie character Tammy, a girl with a theme song.

She sat alone, enjoying the night--motel rooms had no air conditioning and families slept in one room. She was in a grassy spot near the small pool. Bugs circled lamps. Breezes moved the Alabama air and there was the sound of trucks from the highway.

She was wearing shorts, a ponytail, just sitting there, swinging her legs, looking up at the sky. Naked under her shorts, and I'm sitting nearby, mute.

Then my dad came out and started a conversation. She's laughing. My dad didn't talk to teenagers, and didn't make strangers laugh. After five minutes, he called me over and introduced us. She was so sweet I married her.

My dad explained that he'd come out for fresh air, met this fellow road-tripper, and found we had much in common. Both heading to Chicago. Both lived on the South Side. God, she was pretty!

My dad asked if I'd seen her in the neighborhood. I said no, since her school was different, but I knew kids who went there. She asked names. Conversation with a girl is an effort, but at that moment, in Birmingham humidity, truck noise and insects, the smell of lawn and asphalt, it came easily.

I credit her; she makes everything easy. After we started talking, my dad excused himself. Long drive tomorrow, getting an early start.

The girl and I spent two hours talking. We exchanged phone numbers. By the time we said goodnight I was in love. And, as I said, I married her. We saw each other during high school, went to the same college, went steady, broke up, went steady again, broke up again, then got married and she's home now while I'm about to put well-traveled rocks on a grave while the sky is about to fall.

Yeah, the sky. This time, a $110,000 chunk that could knock me into bankruptcy. It was years until I figured out that my dad had been watching two isolated teens. How he was sorry to see my shyness.

The rocks I had in my hand came from Dublin. At my dad's address, I went around back, to the courtyard where he'd played. I remembered him talking about it. There I was, in this alley on a rare sunny day in Dublin. I picked up pebbles, pried mortar out of the crumbling wall that defined my dad's courtyard.

I don't know when I got the idea of bringing them to the cemetery. But when I did get it, about a week ago, it had a familiar feel. I think it was there all along. But I don't feel comfortable with sentiment, so maybe that's why I never brought the thought forward. My dad wouldn't have been comfortable with it either. I doubt he put stones on "da's" grave.

So there I was, doing this embarrassing thing, this pointless gesture that couldn't matter to anyone, least of all the poor guy under ground, when I get into a bloody fight.

Fists, kicks, biting, scratching, gouging, a knockdown brawl--and the Irish rocks scattered. Just as I'm not sentimental, I'm also not a fighter. I don't think my dad was, either. But every man has his battle and it comes when least expected.

I'd been hanging around the grave, holding the rocks, planning to make a quick, quiet ceremony of pressing them into the grave, reuniting my dad with the earth of his youth, but the moment was disrupted.

A man and woman were bickering and when it got loud I realized I'd been hearing it for a while. He said something dismissive, turned away and came toward me.

He was wearing a double-breasted suit with big shoulders. She followed in a polka-dot dress and smacked her purse into his back. He pivoted and punched her jaw.

She went down and I could see up her skirt, garter belt, panties. But there was no fun in this. She sat up, sputtering, as the guy walked past and I tripped him.

This guy punched a woman on my dad's turf. I wanted to say, what the hell! But I couldn't say anything because of the windmill of his fists, something I hadn't seen since school days.

He was my size, not fat or thin, young or old, but fast. I instinctively reached through the punches, getting a headlock, twisting, driving us both to the ground while the woman swore.

I had a thought. Surprising for me: I can handle him. Every once in a while, in a generally insecure lifetime, I get the feeling I can handle something. I rarely express this.

When I was five, my dad took me to a deserted parking lot at Soldier Field in our Buick--not the Buick we drove to Florida when I was a teen, but a bigger one, older and fuzzier on the inside.

We'd have what he would call, importantly, "a driving lesson." My dad would put me on his lap and get us going. I'd turn left, then right. He'd tell me to park between two lines.

One day, I had thought that he was humoring me into thinking I was controlling the car and if I did anything on my own, he'd stop us.

There was a tree in a planter with bushes around it. I headed there, intending to prove my dad was toying with me. Bam. One wheel into the planter, bumper through the bush, the Buick's nose banging and shaking the poor city tree.

My dad said, "Hey, what'd you do? That's no way to drive." We backed away. I had a new appreciation of power. I could control the car, take it anywhere, avoid trees or hit them.

I could do anything in this fight, anything I wanted. The guy took a gun out. Before I could say, "oh, shit," he threw it like a baseball, high over the headstones. Then dove into my gut and we rolled, tearing shirts, slapping faces, pulling hair, pinching flesh.

We got tired and fell onto our backs, breathing, bleeding and, although we weren't laughing there was the suggestion of laughter.

"My luck, I had to pop her in front of a hardass," he said.

"I don't know why I tripped you."

"Was the right thing, that's why I didn't kill you."

"The gun."

"With my hands, man," he said.

"You threw it," I said, panting.

"Didn't want to get tempted," laughing.

And he got up.

She approached, wiping her face, looking like she wanted him to come to her. I noticed the gun in her hand. Its cylinder hung open, the barrel aiming down. She handed it the guy and he looked at the holes where bullets had been, clicked the cylinder shut and pocketed it. He gave her a hug.

"Where are the bullets?" he said, and they walked away from me. She said, "Tossed 'em." And the couple faded into the distance.

The rocks had gone the way of the bullets. I had nothing to give my dad. But they were nearby, and they'd work into the ground. My dad wouldn't know the difference. The immediate area would still receive the kindness of my gesture.

Of course there would also be bullets, but those, having been strewn in disarmament had good karma, I think. Bits of Ireland and now, ammunition. I hoped they settled deeply before some hapless gardener on a mower exploded them. Every workplace is full of dangers.

If I were the kind of guy who talked to graves, I'd have said something like, nice setup, Dad . But I don't do such things. I'm not sentimental.

I walked across the soft lawn with its unseen vaults, rubbing my knuckles, walked toward the winding road where I'd parked, and looked forward to getting behind the wheel.

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