LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      It was never my intention to write such a personal book, certainly not at the age of thirty-two. After all, my story was not wildly different than most of the kids I grew up with in my middle-class neighborhood outside of Boston. Sure, I carried my fair share of psychological and emotional baggage, but the traumas of my life weren’t all that traumatic. Raised by loving parents who supported my dreams, I never wanted for much of anything. Beyond the normal run-of-the-mill growing pains associated with love, loss, and identity, there was no real struggle in my upbringing.

      Yet when my father and I embarked on a cycling trip through Italy in search of our family’s roots, I began pulling on the thread of my life and found something surprising at the other end. A pervasive silence hung over my family history. Although I was raised by storytellers, so much of my story was hiding from me in plain sight. From generation to generation, details had been lost amid the onslaught of everyday life, leaving me with only a cursory understanding of where I came from.

      This silence weighed especially heavy over my relationship with my father. Our bond was stronger than most, forged by a shared love of adventure sports that we spent countless hours doing together. Whether bicycling through the city, skiing icy slopes, or climbing rock walls, we developed a unique partnership that required us to depend on one another. We pushed each other faster, harder, and higher in those endeavors. We communicated without speaking—pointing out debris in the road, anticipating the next turn down the mountain, and instinctively readying the rope to catch the other person when he was about to fall.

      Perhaps because of this almost telepathic communication, we didn’t see the need to delve deeper into our personal lives. My father was without question the most eccentric person I knew. Nothing about him was conventional. Not his appearance, his profession, his passions, or even his diet. His mode of thinking was entirely his own—for better and for worse. Throughout my life I’d never taken the time to truly understand what motivated who he was and how he thought. Instead, I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Oh yeah, they definitely broke the mold after they made my old man.”

      When my father and I set off on a two-week cycling tour through Italy, we were both at inflection points in our lives. My father was downshifting, easing into a pseudo retirement and pondering how to spend the rest of his days with my mother. Meanwhile, I had the throttle pegged, accelerating from one objective to the next, gearing up to launch into married life with my longtime girlfriend. The dynamics of our father-son relationship were about to change dramatically, and this bike ride symbolized the last hurrah as the team we’d been for most of my life.

      Before the trip, I believed my father and I had plenty of time to understand one another. The many questions I had for him would eventually be answered, and the secret parts of myself would gradually be revealed. However, the folly of my shortsightedness came into harsh focus when my grandfather—my father’s father—fell ill. His life was drawing to an abrupt close, and in the chaos of trying to thwart the sickness that consumed him, there was little time to resolve everything left undone. I didn’t get the chance to glean the ultimate wisdom I hoped to inherit from my grandfather. Watching him rapidly wither away, I could easily imagine the same outcome with my father. I pictured myself at his bedside, hastily trying to learn what I could within the little time we had left together.

      Although we never discussed it, the bike ride became my opportunity to get at the core of who my father was. As I meditated on our relationship over hundreds of miles pedaling through Italian countryside, I realized there was so much more I needed to learn from him. The older I got, the more of him I saw in myself, but I hadn’t figured out how to manage the impulses we shared. My father had the owner’s manual, and this bike ride gave me the chance to tear out some key pages and throw them in my back pocket.

      The truths of our relationship and family history transcended the two of us, stretching back generations of fathers and sons. When Dad and I reached the tiny village where our family name first took root, the dramatic history we discovered brought a fuller appreciation of our past and provided new tools for navigating our future.

      Somewhere during the writing process, many authors ask themselves: Is this even worth reading? Why would someone care about my story? For me, that question echoed most loudly during early morning writing sessions when I’d dredge up my most intimate reflections and dare to bare them on the page. What’s the point of all this? I thought. Why am I throwing my dirty laundry out there for people to pick apart? Sometimes these questions of doubt blared so loudly in my mind that I stopped writing entirely for weeks on end.

      What brought me back time and time again was the belief that everyone can relate to the journey that unfolds in this book. In one way or another, we’re all on a quest to better understand ourselves and the people closest to us. So little time is spent unpacking the twists and turns that delivered us to our present. That’s especially the case with our most immediate relationships.

      Some of the most mysterious relationships in our lives are the ones directly in front of us. Time has a way of layering on memories that leave the deepest truths of those we love most hidden from sight. Too often, we don’t take the time to discover the essence of family and friends before it’s too late.

      This book is intended to sound the alarm for readers: make haste and begin that journey as soon as possible. When you strip away all the layers, you discover the foundation upon which your own life is built.

      CHAPTER 1

      Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

      —Attributed to Mark Twain

      I could practically smell the coffee on his breath through the phone. Just past eight in the morning, my father was already heavily caffeinated. As with every day for the past twenty-seven years, he had risen at 3:30 in the morning, downed a pot of cheap coffee, thrown a handful of punches at the heavy bag hanging in the basement, brewed another pot of coffee for my mother, climbed onto his bicycle, pedaled thirty miles in the frigid cold for fun (and another five miles to work), showered, grabbed another coffee at the convenience store, and then dialed me up as he waited for his first client to arrive at his hair salon. Dad didn’t wait

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