600 Hours of Edward

all right if I kissed you on the cheek?”
    I’ve never been asked this before.
    “OK,” I say.
    She puts her hands on my shoulders and tiptoes up to me, gently placing her lips against my left cheek. She smells good. I close my eyes.
    After she finishes, she releases me.
    “Thank you, Edward.”
    She opens the door, steps through, and closes it behind her.
    – • –
    Tonight, at 10:00, I settle into the couch and watch
Dragnet
. The episode, the eighth of the first season of color episodes, originally aired on March 9, 1967, and it is one of my favorites. It is called “The Candy Store Robberies.”
    In this one, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon investigate a string of armed robberies at a chain of downtown candy stores in Los Angeles. For a while, the robberies seem to follow a pattern, but then the robber or robbers—Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon aren’t sure about the number—hit a store that he or they have robbed before. Rolling stakeouts finally break open the case, and two transient men are arrested. It turns out that one of them found a gun, and they have both been using it, hitting the candy stores when they need some cash for liquor. They are actually gentle men, the gun notwithstanding (I love the word “notwithstanding”), and they have become friends because neither can read.
    Their crimes are serious, but Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon have empathy for the men just the same. I think thisepisode is just as much about friendship as it is about the unraveling of a crime.
    Friendship, I’m finding out, is a good thing.
    – • –
    The sixth green office folder holding letters of complaint to my father gathers another one.
    Dear Father,
    I was most disappointed to receive the registered letter from your attorney, Jay L. Lamb, today. It was a dark moment in what had been, for me, a day of breakthroughs and greater understanding.
    I am left to wonder if you and I will ever have a similar breakthrough. I am inclined to defer to your wisdom on so many things. I wonder if you will ever talk to me yourself or come over and have a Barq’s root beer with me, instead of having your lawyer write to me.
    But wondering is not much different from conjecture. Neither one deals in facts.
    So here is a fact: I will continue to hope that we might do better.
    As ever, I am your son,
    Edward

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29
    I awake with a start at 7:40 a.m. I’m propped up in bed, my forearms flat against the mattress, my elbows holding me up. I can remember only the faintest outline of a dream: My father, ahead of me, walking along a road I don’t recognize. He keeps the same, steady pace, occasionally looking back and waving me to come along. I walk as fast as I can and never catch up to him.
    I find the dream both comforting and threatening. I cannot reconcile these two things in my mind, and as my alertness grows, my grasp on the dream loosens.
    It’s no use.
    I record my awakening time, the thirty-first time in 303 days this year (because it’s a leap year) that I’ve been up at 7:40 a.m. My data is complete. And, as is made plain by the clock, my morning meeting will be upon me soon.
    – • –
    I shower quickly, not savoring the hot water as I generally do. It’s cold today; I could feel that when I threw off the covers and climbed out of bed. How cold, I do not know and won’t know until tomorrow. The
Billings Herald-Gleaner
awaits on the stoop.
    I step out of the shower and dry off quickly, then slip into my terry cloth robe. I’ll have to eat a quick bowl of corn flakes. I can’t say that I’m particularly hungry, as my appetite is being affected by the fact that I have to be at my father’s lawyer’s office. I also cannot imagine facing that on an empty stomach.
    At the front door, I stop and sweep the newspaper off the porch. I am in a hurry this morning, but I can complete my data. I see that the forecast calls for snow flurries today. It seems that the TV weatherman, Kent Shaw, whose smiling face is on the weather page every day, and I have a similar sense of things. The difference is that he states his forecast as if it’s fact. I know better. I shall wait for tomorrow for the facts.
    I eat spoonfuls of cereal as I thumb through the newspaper. The
Billings Herald-Gleaner
is the only newspaper I have read consistently in my life, and I like it, although there are some things that bother me about it. I don’t start at the front of the newspaper and