The video­tape begins with a high-angle cam­era shot of a beefy mid­dle-aged man secur­ing a bike to the roof of a blue hatch­back parked on the curb of a sub­ur­ban street. He fin­ish­es up and walks around to the rear of the car. A teenage girl car­ry­ing a laun­dry bas­ket stuffed with clothes and a ten­nis rack­et meets him there, slides the bas­ket into the car, and clos­es its back door.

The cam­era shifts to eye-lev­el as they face each other.

“Wow. Col­lege already,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. They look at each oth­er uncom­fort­ably. “We got­ta go,” she says.

She gets in the car. It pulls away, then stops abrupt­ly. She jumps out, runs back to him, and hugs him. While they hold each oth­er close, Celine Dion sings, “For all those times you stood by me/And all the truths you made me see.”

Because You Loved Me plays on as they sep­a­rate, and the girl walks slow­ly back to the car.

He calls out anx­ious­ly, “And remember—”

She turns, grin­ning and count­ing to three on her fin­gers, “Seat belt, dri­ve safe, call when I get there.”

They smile at each oth­er, both fight­ing back tears.

“Well, bye,” he chokes out. “I love you.”

She walks back to him, and they embrace again. “I love you too, dad­dy,” she says softly.

They step back and look at each oth­er for a long moment. She walks back to the car, hes­i­tates, then faces him. “And thanks for … every­thing.” She climbs in the car. As it pulls away, she waves to him from the window.

Wip­ing tears away, he waves back.

I’ve seen that tape fifty times. I cry every time.

I relate to the beefy guy.

My son’s last night at home, we sat up watch­ing tele­vi­sion for an hour after Cindy and the girls went to bed. We didn’t say any­thing. We didn’t need words. We knew the next day he would take a big step through the por­tal pass­ing from child to man. I want­ed it for him, but I mourned the loss of my lit­tle boy.

I kept him up as late as I could with­out spoil­ing his next day, then took a deep breath, and stood. “Good night, Josh.”

“Love you, dad.”

“Love you, too, Josh,”

I lay awake half the night, remem­ber­ing the good times.

The next morn­ing, we drove him to Pep­per­dine. The cam­pus sits on a moun­tain­side above Mal­ibu. His dor­mi­to­ry over­looked the base­ball sta­di­um, where he would play left field, and beyond that, the Pacif­ic Ocean, glis­ten­ing sil­ver in the morn­ing sun­light. We moved all his stuff into his room, stalled as long as we could, then hugged him, and left him sit­ting at his desk. When we walked across the court­yard, he called out from the win­dow, “Bye, dad.”

My heart broke.

It mend­ed, of course, as I watched him con­front chal­lenges, over­come set­backs, make life-long friends, and meet his future wife.

When the time came for our old­er daugh­ter to leave the nest, I thought I’d get through it eas­i­er. It was my sec­ond rodeo, after all.

I was wrong.

When Devon was a lit­tle girl, we had friends over for din­ner. We were talk­ing in the liv­ing room when she climbed up in my lap. Cindy had dolled her up in a frilly dress and put lit­tle red bows in her silky blonde hair. I was primp­ing her, mes­mer­ized by her, as always, when our friend smiled and said, “Looks like some­one has dad­dy wrapped around her lit­tle finger.”

And that was true.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at San­ta Cruz was tai­lor-made for Devon and she loved it when she toured the cam­pus, but when her last day at home final­ly arrived, she didn’t want to leave us. As we drove north toward the school, she cried.

I wracked my brain for some way to ease her pain about the sep­a­ra­tion. When we got there, she and I shared a qui­et moment alone. I told her there was an invis­i­ble string that ran from my heart to hers, like an elas­tic spi­der web that would stretch across any dis­tance. “It nev­er breaks. It lasts for­ev­er, and our feel­ings for each oth­er will always pulse through it.” I told her she had the same mag­i­cal con­nec­tion with Cindy, Chelsea, and Josh, and she would always be with us.

She said it was a beau­ti­ful thought, and it seemed to help her.

But when we left her there, my beau­ti­ful thought didn’t work as well for me as it did for her. I broke down in the UCSC park­ing lot and choked back tears all the way home.

That wound healed, too. UCSC was a car­ing, nur­tur­ing envi­ron­ment. Devon found her pas­sion for art there and start­ed down a path to a hap­py suc­cess­ful life.

I retired before the baby of the fam­i­ly grad­u­at­ed from high school. Spend­ing more time at home, I watched all Chelsea’s swim meets and water polo match­es. We worked out togeth­er. She couldn’t stop laugh­ing when I col­lid­ed with a stop sign on one of our long runs, and my excru­ci­at­ing­ly painful, ill-con­ceived attempt to leap-frog a tall cement trash can pro­voked anoth­er hys­ter­i­cal fit.

When the time came to take her to col­lege, I thought I was ready because I was a hard­ened vet­er­an of two bruis­ing treks down that rough road.

But I wasn’t ready.

Cindy and I kept our com­po­sure when we moved her into the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, hugged her, and said good­bye, but lat­er in the car, we cried.

To avoid the lone­li­ness of our emp­ty nest, we start­ed trav­el­ing. Cindy and I had just checked into the Boar’s Head Inn in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, when the phone rang in our room. “Dad, this is Chelsea. The police are here. They read us our rights. They want our com­put­ers, but I won’t give them up. What do I do next?”

After Cindy picked me up off the floor, Chelsea filled me in on the details and I asked to speak to the offi­cer in charge. “I don’t even know why I’m talk­ing to you,” he said in an exas­per­at­ed, some­what intim­i­dat­ed voice. “Your daugh­ter has noth­ing to do with this.”

The police thought Chelsea’s room­mate was involved in a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy, but Chelsea didn’t believe it. She knew her roommate’s rights, and she was hold­ing the police at bay. In the end, it turned out Chelsea was right. The police had made a trag­ic mis­take, and her room­mate was innocent.

From there on, I knew I didn’t have to wor­ry about her. I was the proud father of a warrior-woman.

And the pain of my third and last heart-wound eased off.

Foun­da­tion for a Bet­ter Life, a non-prof­it for the pro­mo­tion of good val­ues, pro­duced the tape about the beefy guy and his teenage daugh­ter. At the end of it, after the girl thanks her dad, the narrator’s voice-over deliv­ers the tape’s mes­sage, “Grat­i­tude. Pass it on.”

I appre­ci­ate the mes­sage, but I’d revise the script slight­ly to show that grat­i­tude runs from the beefy guy to his lit­tle girl, too. I’d add these lines for him: “Thanks for all the good times, for your love, and for grow­ing up to become some­one I admire and respect. Thanks for … everything.”

Post Script: The lyrics of Because You Loved Me run both ways, too:

For all those times you stood by me
And all the truths you made me see
For all the joy you brought to my life
For every dream you made come true
For all the love I found in you
You’re the one who saw me through it all.

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I could­n’t speak
Because you loved me.

Cindy stood beside me clutch­ing my arm as I flipped the dead­bolt, opened the door, and point­ed my shot­gun at the chest of a black, angel-winged Led Zep­pelin tee shirt worn by a stranger. In his mid-twen­ties, tall, and thin with shoul­der-length blond hair and a hooked nose, he froze in the act of bring­ing a cig­a­rette to his mouth and stared at the busi­ness end of my twelve gauge as though he couldn’t quite fig­ure out what it was.

His look of bewil­der­ment slow­ly mor­phed into a scowl. He dropped the cig­a­rette and moved his hand toward his pants pocket.

“Don’t,” I said, lift­ing the shot­gun to aim it at his face.

He froze again and glared at me.

My fin­ger tensed on the trigger.

Nei­ther of us moved. Five sec­onds passed. Ten.

This stand­off occurred in 1976 in the mid­dle of the night at the back door of our apart­ment in Los Ange­les. When I signed on as an attor­ney with Lath­am and Watkins the pre­vi­ous sum­mer, we moved into a small apart­ment in San­ta Mon­i­ca. Six months lat­er, Cindy was preg­nant with our first child and we were search­ing for a big­ger place when a Lath­am lawyer offered us the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take over her lease on the down­stairs unit of a duplex in Han­cock Park.

Estab­lished in the 1920’s, Han­cock Park is a spec­tac­u­lar­ly attrac­tive neigh­bor­hood near down­town LA.  Howard Hugh­es, Nat King Cole, and Mae West built pala­tial estates in the heart of the com­mu­ni­ty in the 30’s and 40’s, and Muham­mad Ali, Anto­nio Ban­deras, and Melanie Grif­fith lived there in the 70’s and 80’s. Cov­er­ing a 1.56 square mile area, the neighborhood’s typ­i­cal home is a large Tudor or Ital­ian Renais­sance-style house set back from a qui­et tree-lined street.

Upscale duplex­es sit on its west­ern bor­der. The Lath­am lawyer’s two-bed­room unit had a big liv­ing room, din­ing room, and kitchen, and nice­ly land­scaped lit­tle front and back yards. It was locat­ed on South Orange Dri­ve, a half block from the Third Street bus line, which I could take to Latham’s offices on Flower Street, free­ing up our car for Cindy when I was at work. Best of all, the rent was low and locked-in for two years.

We moved in that win­ter; our son was born in Jan­u­ary; and we came to love the place in all respects. Except one. An island of afflu­ence sur­round­ed by eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­tressed neigh­bor­hoods in LA’s urban cen­ter, Han­cock Park expe­ri­enced a high rate of break-ins and bur­glar­ies on a per capi­ta basis, and once in a great while we’d hear about a rob­bery that turned violent.

I didn’t wor­ry about this much at the time because the odds were still heav­i­ly against some­one break­ing into our apart­ment. Han­cock Park’s ten thou­sand res­i­dents stood only a one in six hun­dred chance of being bur­glar­ized. I men­tion it here because the neighborhood’s rep­u­ta­tion for break-ins crouched in the back of my mind like an ugly lit­tle gar­goyle the night the stranger appeared at our back door, and it was part of the rea­son I con­front­ed him with a shotgun.

My back­ground played a sig­nif­i­cant role, too. I grew up in rur­al Vir­ginia. Most every­one in Sug­ar Hol­low and Brown’s Cove owned guns for hunt­ing wild game. They kept them close and knew how to use them. Bur­glar­ies on a per capi­ta basis in those neigh­bor­hoods were zero. If you were stu­pid enough to break into a house there, you’d be lucky to get out alive.

At two a.m. the night the intrud­er approached our apart­ment, Cindy had just fed our baby and put him in his crib. It was a hot night, and we had the win­dows open. Our bed­room was at the rear of the duplex next to our dri­ve­way.  As we lay awake try­ing to go back to sleep, I heard foot­steps tread­ing soft­ly on con­crete and saw the shad­ow of a tall man pass by our window.

“Who’s that?” Cindy whis­pered, alarmed.

The dri­ve­way was a nar­row lane between our duplex and the one next door. It led to our garage and a small back­yard that was walled in and com­plete­ly closed off from the lots around us. There was no rea­son any­one would walk down our dri­ve­way except to gain access to the back of the house.

I got out of bed and looked out the back win­dow. It was a moon­less night. I could bare­ly see the dark form of a man dressed in black stand­ing at our garage. He seemed to be try­ing to open its locked door.

“What’s he doing?” Cindy said.

“Break­ing into the garage.”

I pulled on a pair of jeans. The sin­gle-shot twelve gauge I used for hunt­ing in Vir­ginia was propped in the cor­ner of our bed­room clos­et. I grabbed it, retrieved a shell from our dress­er draw­er, and slipped it into the chamber.

Bare­foot­ed and shirt­less, I head­ed into the kitchen where the back door was locat­ed. Through the door’s win­dow I saw the man stand­ing on our stoop. Cindy came up beside me and wrapped her trem­bling hands around my arm.

The door­knob turned, but the dead­bolt held in place. The man twist­ed the knob again and pushed against the door.

React­ing with­out think­ing, I flipped the bolt and opened the door. The shell in my shot­gun was a num­ber five shot, designed for small game. It would inflict seri­ous dam­age to a man only at close range, so I thrust the muz­zle with­in inch­es of his chest. When he moved his hand toward his pock­et, I gave him a warn­ing and shoved the gun in his face.

It seemed like we stared at each oth­er for an eter­ni­ty. Then he raised his hands slow­ly. “I must be at the wrong place,” he said.

He gave me a long hard look, stepped off the stoop, and walked away.

I kept the shot­gun trained on him until he round­ed the cor­ner of the house. Cindy and I rushed out to the liv­ing room. From the front win­dows, we watched him walk out to the street, turn right at the side­walk, pass under a street­lamp, and dis­ap­pear into the night.

I let out a long breath.

We con­sid­ered call­ing the police, but we didn’t have much to report. The man tres­passed but he didn’t break in, and I wasn’t sure how the police would react to my shot­gun. So, we put the ugli­ness of that night behind us and went on with our lives.

About a month lat­er, the LAPD bust­ed a drug deal­er oper­at­ing out of a down­stairs apart­ment at the end of our street. The duplex­es on South Orange Dri­ve are sim­i­lar in archi­tec­ture. Floor plans repeat about every ten struc­tures. The dealer’s duplex resem­bled ours. My guess is our intrud­er was a user who came to “the wrong place,” as he said.

The reac­tion of my acquain­tances to my behav­ior that night is mixed. My gun con­trol friends point out that the man prob­a­bly didn’t plan to harm us and bran­dish­ing a shot­gun could have pro­voked him to react vio­lent­ly. I could have shot him, inten­tion­al­ly in self-defense or acci­den­tal­ly because I was scared. Either way, he would have died by my hand and my life would have been changed for the worse forever.

My gun rights friends say it was rea­son­able to con­clude the man intend­ed to break in and do us harm, and the police couldn’t have respond­ed to a call in time to pro­tect us. They main­tain I had the right to defend my fam­i­ly with lethal force.

Both view­points make sense to me.

Frankly, I don’t know if I did the right thing that night. I didn’t have time to think about my actions back then but reflect­ing on that con­fronta­tion now as I write this post, I’d prob­a­bly do the same thing again under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. Right or wrong, with the safe­ty of Cindy and our baby on the line, I’d put my shot­gun on that guy’s chest and hope and pray it would be enough to make him walk away.

Post Script: Sev­er­al recent fol­low-home rob­beries that made nation­al news occurred in Han­cock Park. A home secu­ri­ty cam­era taped the most brazen inci­dent where two men fol­lowed a mom push­ing a baby stroller into her dri­ve­way and robbed her at gunpoint.

I army-crawled under the house and point­ed my flash­light at the far cor­ner. Through the haze of gold­en dust motes and sil­ver spi­der web­bing, I saw the alu­minum duct lying on the ground. My goal was to reat­tach it to the bed­room floor-vent above it.

In my sum­mer job as a plumber’s helper, I’d crawled under hous­es before. Musty, filthy, insect-infest­ed, dark­er than a moon­less night, it was nev­er a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence, but the under­side of this ante­bel­lum manse was the worst so far. Since its con­struc­tion, the ground had shift­ed and the ancient floor joists had warped. In some places the clear­ance was less than six inches.

Slith­er­ing along on my bel­ly, I came to a joist that blocked my path. I scooped out a trough in the dirt, rolled over on my back, and scuffed for­ward. I pushed my head through, but my chest wouldn’t clear. Squirm­ing around, I got stuck so tight­ly I couldn’t move. Pinned like an insect on a poster board, I was fight­ing off claus­tro­pho­bic pan­ic when I heard a dry rustling sound to my left.

Alarmed, I cast my light in that direc­tion. A black snake lay coiled an arm’s length away, star­ing at me, its eyes glow­ing like lit­tle dia­monds, its tongue flick­ing in and out.

Mer­ri­am-Web­ster defines ophid­io­pho­bia as the “abnor­mal fear of snakes.” The genius who put the word “abnor­mal” in there obvi­ous­ly nev­er squared off against a snake under a house.

I tore all the flesh off my chest lurch­ing out from under that joist, set a land-speed record for a man crab-scut­tling on his back, and flopped through the crawl­space open­ing into the twi­light. After check­ing to make sure the black rac­er hadn’t fol­lowed me, I col­lapsed on the grass, my heart pound­ing as loud and fast as the ket­tle­drums in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

This all went down at the tail end of a long hard day. Weeks ear­li­er, the plumber, my boss, had land­ed a sub­con­tract installing air con­di­tion­ing sys­tems in a hous­ing devel­op­ment in Char­lottesville. He trained me to run the duct­work and rough-in the vents, then hired Gilly Fra­zier and told me to teach him to do what I did.

Among the hun­dreds of peo­ple I’ve worked with over my long life, Gilly ranked at the bot­tom in intel­li­gence. Six­teen years old, five-five and 120 pounds with flam­ing red hair and a freck­led face, he sport­ed a cast on his fore­arm his first day on the job. When I asked about it, he said his dad­dy took him and his broth­er, Floyd, to a wrestling match in Char­lottesville where some char­ac­ter named Mad Dog jumped off the ring’s turn­buck­le onto an oppo­nent lying flat

on the mat. Floyd came up with the bright idea of reen­act­ing the match in their back­yard, where­upon he jumped off a fence post onto Gilly’s fore­arm, snap­ping it like a brit­tle stick. “Floyd’s a dum­b­ass,” Gilly said, dou­bling over in a fit of gig­gling, bliss­ful­ly unaware that the big­ger dum­b­ass might be the broth­er who lay still while Floyd’s size twelves came crash­ing down on his arm.

Gilly said he dropped out of school because it was a “waste a time. Don’t larn noth­in’. Cain’t fig­ger what they’s talkin’ ‘bout.” He couldn’t fig­ure what I was talk­ing about either. He for­got every­thing I told him before I could fin­ish telling him. With Gilly in tow, I had to work twice as hard to keep up with our pro­duc­tion schedule.

Despite Gilly’s help, I’d fin­ished installing an AC sys­tem by quit­ting time that day when the plumber got an emer­gency call to repair the AC in an invalid’s bed­room in the old manse, drove us there, diag­nosed the prob­lem, and sent me under the house while he and Gilly wait­ed in the bed­room at the AC vent.

I was still stretched out on the grass try­ing to recu­per­ate from acute ophid­io­pho­bia when the plumber and Gilly walked up on me. In his late for­ties, short and paunchy, the plumber was a good guy, but he oper­at­ed on a tight bud­get and slow-downs on the job lit his short fuse. When he found me lying flat on my back in a cata­ton­ic stu­por on his nick­el, he exploded.

“What the hell are you doing?” he boomed.

I strug­gled to my feet. “I ran into a snake under there,” I said defensively.

“What hap­pened to your chest?” he said.

I looked down to see crim­son blood­stains on my t‑shirt and felt the sting of abra­sions for the first time. I told him what hap­pened. “There’s not enough clear­ance,” I said. “I couldn’t have made it to the duct even if the snake hadn’t showed up.”

The plumber’s tem­per usu­al­ly cooled as quick­ly as it flared. This blast fol­lowed the pat­tern. “Sor­ry I yelled at you. We’ll put dis­in­fec­tant on those cuts when we get home, but first we’ve got to find a way to fix the AC. Old man Wood­son can’t breathe in this heat.”

The plumber knelt and flashed his light in the crawl­space. “The snake’s gone, but you’re right about the clear­ance. You can’t make it back to the cor­ner.” He peered into the space for a while, then stood, and turned to Gilly. “It’s a tight fit, but you’re skin­ny enough to slip through.”

Gilly’s eyes widened. “It’s too dark,” he said.

“Take my light.”

Gilly swal­lowed hard. “I cain’t do it.”

“Don’t wor­ry about the snake. He’s long gone. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”

“I ain’t scared a snakes.”

“Good. Then crawl under there and fix the duct so we can go home.”

His face twitch­ing, Gilly backed away. “I don’t want to!”

The plumber’s tight-bud­get vol­cano erupt­ed. “The hell with what you want! I pay you to do what I want! Get under there! Now!”

It was obvi­ous where this was head­ed. In the month we’d worked togeth­er Gilly told me things he was ashamed to admit to most peo­ple. I knew why he couldn’t crawl under the house. I could tell the plumber and save Gilly’s job, but I’d car­ried him on my back like a dead body all day every day since he’d been hired. Stay out of it, I told myself.

I don’t think it was the tears slid­ing down Gilly’s freck­led cheeks that got to me. More like­ly, it was the cumu­la­tive effect of a string of tell-tale signs: a pur­plish healed-over scar above his eye I’d noticed his first day of work, a dis­col­ored knot on his fore­head that came and went a week lat­er, red marks that encir­cled his throat short­ly after that, and my grow­ing doubts about his plas­ter-cast story.

“He’s afraid of the dark,” I said to the plumber.

“Who asked you to butt in?” the plumber shout­ed, turn­ing on me.

“Gilly’s afraid of dark enclosed spaces,” I said even­ly. “He has vivid night­mares about being locked in a clos­et all night long.”

A look of con­cern came across the plumber’s tense face.

“He dreams about that dark clos­et every night,” I said, giv­ing the plumber a long, know­ing look, hop­ing he’d pick up on my sus­pi­cion that Gilly’s night­mare wasn’t just a dream.

We both looked at Gilly. He kept his head down and said noth­ing. The plumber stared at him for a long time, then knelt down, and flashed his light under the house.

“The duct’s on the ground right below the vent,” he said. “The line’s joints held togeth­er.” He looked up at me. “You think we can recon­nect it from the bedroom?”

I thought about it. “We should be able to reach it from above. If I can lift the line and nail the duct to the joists with­out the joints pulling apart, it’ll work.”

“Give it a try.”

It worked.

The next day, the plumber assigned Gilly to the senior man on the AC sub­con­tract. A few days lat­er, he told the plumber Gilly was untrainable.

I thought the plumber would fire him then, but instead he put him on a job run­ning water lines and lay­ing sew­er pipe. Tra­di­tion­al plumb­ing is more straight­for­ward than heat­ing and air. Most of what you need to know springs off the trade’s three pri­ma­ry rules: “Hot on the left; cold on the right; and s*** don’t run uphill.” I hoped Gilly could catch on to it. When I left to return to UVA, he was hang­ing on to the job by his fingernails.

Three years lat­er, I ran into him at Wyant’s Store in White Hall. He still worked for the plumber and was liv­ing on his own in Brown’s Cove. I didn’t see any fresh tell-tale signs.

As I watched Gilly’s beat-up pick­up rat­tle off down the road to Crozet, I thought about the plumber pay­ing him good mon­ey he couldn’t spare week after week, refus­ing to give up on him, stub­born­ly deter­mined to unearth what­ev­er tal­ent lay buried deep down inside that sad kid.

It made no sense from a busi­ness stand­point, but like I said, the plumber was a good guy. Real­ly good.

Post Script: The fear of snakes is among the most com­mon of the 120 rec­og­nized pho­bias, afflict­ing 56 per­cent of adults, while Gilly’s fear of the dark, Nyc­to­pho­bia, and its first cousin, Claus­tro­pho­bia, each plague about 12 per­cent. Some extreme­ly rare pho­bias must be dif­fi­cult to cope with, like Bara­pho­bia, the fear of grav­i­ty; Omphalo­pho­bia, bel­ly but­tons; Opto­pho­bia, open­ing your eyes; and my per­son­al favorite, Hip­popo­tomon­strose­quipedalio­pho­bia, the fear of long words.