Somewhere in college, basketball sneakers with velcro snaps got hot.

I bought a pair and the first morning I was putting them on, my dad saw me in the kitchen adjusting the adhesive bands.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I wish you wouldn’t wear them.” His voice was flat, dull.

Just like, Dad, I thought. Never likes anything I do.

Then he said: “It reminds me of my Dad after his stroke. He couldn’t tie his shoes so they made him wear shoes like that.”

I glanced at him and saw a son with his face turned away. And I had a vision of him as a young man helping his father with braces and shoes at the bedside. I felt him aching with the yearning-to-be-understood-babble of the man who’d once painted and talked and charmed with the terrible beauty the Irish were known for. I felt the loss behind the curtain that this now man, my father, kept shut away from me, and maybe himself, so successfully that I did not even know it was there until those words.

It was the most personal thing he’d ever told me.

I wrapped the shoes up in tissue and put them back in the box. I returned them the next day.