Honesty is a word. It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.

The assertion is straightforward, but the implications are not. Honesty is the ghost of King Hamlet shuffling between a world of pretense and a world of suicide. Swear if you would on my sword to tell the truth; if you would bow nobly to swear on it, then you would be noble, and this again is the difference between being and doing, character and action, living rationally and living honestly: Swear on my sword if you would tell the truth, and then you can die nobly.

This is your father in the old house that he built, your father of the square and compass. Eighty years ago means Old World: old beliefs, old values, old money. There is the woman sitting in the garden, a white arch and white columns. I have never met her and she will never meet me. These are possibilities, each branch of man-made flora weaving its way through the cracks in the earth.  Sometimes I imagine my own wrists inside those crisp, cufflinked sleeves, his shadow at the morning striding behind him; my shadow at evening rising to meet him. The smell of shoe polish on fine leather like the smell of gasoline. Then we all tip our hats, pay our respects, go our separate ways. Tombs for the living and tombs for the dead.

San Juan. Bisabuelo. These too are just words.