We moved to Philadelphia when I was fourteen. After that, we visited the Midwest once or twice a year, until my grandparents died, in short succession, when I was twenty-two.

During our visits, I slept in the basement of their farm house, the house where I‘d spent the first fourteen years of my life. It was a dank, unfinished room that reminded me of a fallout bunker. A few light bulbs hung from the ceiling; the floor was cold, exposed concrete. One side of the basement was devoted to my grandmother’s canned fruits and vegetables - her strawberry, raspberry, and blackberry jams; her pickles and peppers and tomato sauce. The other side was full of relics from my father’s, and his brother’s, childhoods. There were dusty vinyl records stacked in one corner, and yellowed copies of Life magazine stacked in another.

Hanging on the wall was a map of the world from 1972. My father would have been sixteen. On it, different countries had been circled, with lines connecting them, delineating imaginary journeys. One line traced the Himalayas down into the flood plains of India. Another followed the myriad capillaries of the Amazon: a journey into the unmapped world of reclusive natives.

Another still hopped from Greek island to Greek island, puddle jumping through the Aegean, before crossing to Turkey and zigzagging between the Biblical sites there. It ended, emphatically, in Istanbul, beneath which was written, in my father’s handwriting, Constantinople. It’s handwriting I recognize from the dozens of books he’s lent me over the years, books lined and noted to the point of illegibility.

On one of our last visits, I ventured into the crawlspace. It must have been late at night, when the house creaked and moaned, the ventilations gasping, the old pipes expanded and contracting. That house, like so many Midwestern homes, breathed. It felt like a living thing. And the crawlspace was its bowel, the deepest part of the house. I’d been terrified of it ever since I was a kid: I imagined it connected directly to some nefarious netherworld full of goblins and, more pertinently, enormous centipedes or bloated vermin.

For whatever reason, on this visit, I went in there. Maybe it was because I’d already gone through every possible issue of Life magazine, perused every vinyl. Maybe, instinctively, I could tell that my grandparents didn’t have many years left. Whatever the reason, sometime after midnight, armed with a flashlight, I crawled into the long, gravel corridor. It was filled with meticulously organized boxes from every year of my father’s school career.

Two at a time, I pulled out the boxes that documented my father’s academic life. Inside were collages he’d made in elementary school, and picture books he’d drawn during Vacation Bible School. There were his algebra books from middle school (I’m not really sure why they saved these), and essays about applying Biblical theory in the Vietnam war protests from his high school newspaper.

The last two boxes contained his work from college. It became apparent, quickly, that my father, himself, had packed one of the boxes. It contained letters from ex-girlfriends and his personal notebooks.

I read the letters first. They were from women I’d never heard stories about. They were deeply passionate, playful, at times even raunchy. It was like this whole shadow life my father had lived - his life before me, or before Mom. All of our parent’s have these other selves, and it’s our own narcissism that stops us from thinking about them. There I was, suddenly confronted with my father’s. It was strange, it was glorious. These women loved him; and, it seemed, he loved them.

After that I went through Dad’s notebooks. The stories about my father wanting to be a pastor are somewhat legendary in our family; it seemed like it was his right from birth, his divine destiny. Grandma would tell Jackson and I stories about our father playing church as a boy. He would preach to his stuffed animals. I just assumed that Dad had always wanted to be a pastor, that his dreams had never extended much beyond that.

That night changed everything.

His notebooks were a wonderful mix of stories and journal keeping. It was like a document of my father’s heart in those years: his hopes and dreams, his fears. And his biggest fear, it seemed, was being stuck in the Midwest. He wrote coldly about how small life there seemed, how narrow the perspective was. He wrote devastatingly about his own father, who had also been a pastor:

Dad’s life has been all about NOT asking questions. It has been about appeasing the small dreams and expectations of the community. It has been about maintaining appearances and not rocking the boat. I think about my own life, about spending a lifetime here, and bringing my own children up in such a solipsistic community, and it makes my stomach sink. I want my kids to see that there is more than Friday fish fries and county fairs, more than Sunday pot roasts and Packers football. I want them to realize that there’s a whole world out there. And I want to see that world. I dream of that world.

My father’s aspirations to travel were new to me. He’d never talked about them or shared them. His journals were full of yearning for the road. He wanted to travel and write fiction, at least as much as he wanted to preach. His doubts about his own faith drove this wish - seeing more of the world would be an avenue to affirm or deny his faith. It was faith that had stagnated in the small towns of Northern Wisconsin where dad had spent his entire life.

The fiction he wrote was globe trotting fiction. There was a story about a dying affair set in a village in Spain. Another story was about a man on a winter train through Central Asia, the observations he made about his fellow travelers while he mourned the end of a relationship. Another one, probably the best one, followed a young woman who grew up in Iowa and left her marriage after a car crash. She fled to Istanbul, and the story followed her as she built a new life amongst the tea houses and bazaars.

Istanbul was a particular fascination of my fathers. He wrote, often, about wanting to hear the call to prayer in the morning. The city served as a lodestar in his imagination - the larger, mysterious world, the world where a small town Wisconsin boy could, all at once, open his eyes and be subsumed.

What struck me most about the fiction was how good it was. The old man could write. I always knew he was a good story teller - his sermons were always rich and moving; his sprawling, inventive stories always made our family road trips a joy. He understood structure and pace. But, more than anything, he understood his characters - the yearnings and desires that drive us. He could write as convincingly about Kazakh shepherds as he could an Iowa farm girl.

The notebooks end before Dad comes to his decision to stay at home, to be a pastor, to give up fiction. But it’s clear, from the time he devoted to the craft, and from its quality, that it wasn’t just a phase. It was something he loved.

A late entry, though, makes clear how torn he was:

How to resist these expectations? How to buck with family tradition? I don’t want to disappoint Dad. I don’t want to leave Mom. It would destroy her. But I look at Tommy, working down at the paper mill, or I meet up with JP for drinks, and I want to put a gun in my mouth. The conversation is so small. All they talk about is smallness. It’s like a noose that takes my breath away, the fear of living like them. But I feel the weight of it all. I imagine how Dad would look at me if I told him I was leaving to travel and write. He would ask: Why? He wouldn’t understand what makes me want to tell stories and to see the world. It’s not in his heart. I’m not sure if I can break away from that weight. I’m not sure if I could live with it knowing I’d let him down.

One of the notebook’s final pages there was a letter from my grandfather to my father. It was written on Dad’s 18^th birthday, typed neatly on blank piece of paper. I still remember how it ended:

It has never been very easy for me to talk with you, John. And for that I’m sorry. The responsibility lies with me. I haven’t always taken the initiative because I worried that I wouldn’t know what to say, or because I was afraid of what you might asks. But it has been easier for me to talk with you than it was for my father to talk to me. That strikes me as the right kind of progress. I hope, someday, if you have sons of your own, it will be even easier for you to speak with them.

There was only one story in the notebook after that. It was about a middle aged man, a pastor, with two sons. He lived in a nameless town in the Middle West. One day he decides he’s going to leave his life. He walks out of his house and gets in his car. On his way out, he drives through town, past all the landmarks of his life. And this act of remembering, of looking at everything as if it were past, changes something in him.

The end of the story is obvious. The father stays at home. He endures his pain silently. He quietly goes about the tedium of his life and pours his hopes into his sons.