Things got worse and worse. I decided it would have been better if we'd never even tried. Sam had been doing fine before we'd started looking. Now he was frustrated, mad at his dad, and mostly mad at me. He said that if I was a better person, I would not have driven his father away. I wanted to find him, for Sam, but at the same time, this was someone I hadn't seen in seven years, about whom I had, at best, mixed feelings. It was a mess. We got more frustrated, more stuck, less hopeful. But Wendell Berry said once, at a coffeehouse in Mill Valley on a rainy dark December day, "It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born." And he's not even a Christian. That line came back to me, out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue. I decided that God was not off doing the dishes while Sam sought help: God heard his prayers, and was working on it.

And within a week, the local paper carried John's father's obituary. This is God's own truth. The story said Sam's grandfather had been cared for until the end by his only son. Sam's father was in town. I felt like a cartoon character who is standing too close to a huge Buddhist gong.

"I think I know where he is," I told Sam after school. "He's at his father's home." We decided to let a little time pass, so he could heal up from the loss of his own father, and then Sam would write him a letter.

His letter began, "Hi, Dad, it's me, Sam, and I am a good little boy."

He said he wanted to know him and to be friends. He put the letter in a small red mailbox, with his favorite action figurines, and some candy, and we took it to the post office.

A week later Sam heard from his father, who couldn't wait to meet him.

This is the only part of the story I am allowed to tell, except to say that a week after their first shy meeting, a few days after their first meal together, John was standing in the doorway of Sam's second-grade classroom when school ended for the day. He was holding a soccer ball. Sam reported later that all the kids turned to look at him, having been prepared by Sam's teacher for the introduction, but one kid said anyway, "Who's that guy over there?"

And Sam said, "Oh -- that's my dad." I mean: I ask you.

It's not perfect, because it is not TV and we are real people with scarred, worried hearts. But it's amazing a lot of the time. Where there was darkness, silence and blame, there's now a family, and that means there's mess and misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and sighs. But it is a family: Sam and his father love and like each other. Sam has a new stepmother this time, and she's great. Can you imagine how impossible a dream this was for Sam? He even gets to whine about our shortcomings, like any old child: "Why doesn't this family ever bring thermoses of cocoa, like the other families?"

It's cold when we get to see his father, because we usually visit in early winter. Things go wrong every time, but more things go well. We are mostly lit by domestic fires, logs in the fireplace, candles. But one year his father took us to a frozen lake on a mountain, that you got to by gondola, where you could rent ice skates, and buy hot food. His father and I watched Sam skate. We got to be really proud at the same time. Maybe married parents do this all the time and it is not all that big a deal. But it was to us. When we got too cold, we went and warmed ourselves over trashcans at the edge of the rink, in which people had built hobo fires with paper cups and wrappers, and twigs they had found in the snow.

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