The Golden Boy Who Then Fell

My father didn't start as a broken man. In his twenties he was everything people admired handsome, gifted at sport, married to my beauty-queen mother, three daughters born almost back-to-back. He had the house, the car, the job, the future laid out like it was promised to him. Drinking didn't take it all at once. It shaved it away year by year. First the sharp edges of his ambition. Then the job. Then the marriage. Then the pride. By the time he died, he was living in the Salvation Army hostel with nothing but his name. All my life he told me, A drinking man never truly owns anything. Only now do I understand what he meant. And how long he must have been talking to himself. I miss you, Dad more than I ever learned how to say.