I remember asking him once, "Then why can't I look in it?"

"I've lost the key," was what he said, but I didn't believe it. I just figured that's where Dad kept his real treasure and he didn't want anyone to know because he was afraid they'd steal it.

Back when I was invading Dad's private space at age eight I felt guilty on two counts; I was doing what I had been told not to do and worse, I was taking unfair advantage of what seemed to be, until several decades later, my father's only weakness -- his sock moments. Whether out of my own innate sense of fairness or fear of the great man, paralyzed on the edge of the bed, I did not go directly to the trunk that loomed so large in my imagination. Instead, I contented myself with taking out the Indian artifacts. A noisy child by nature, prone to talking to myself out loud, I retold the stories he had shared with me about the Indian tribes that lorded over the state of Illinois long before he was born -- the Kaskaskia, the Cahokia, and the Peoria tribes, decimated by their brethren, the Iroquois, in the Beaver Wars. But it wasn't the same. I wanted his voice, I wanted him to come back from wherever he was in his Sock Moment, I wanted him to hear me. Anything was preferable to the loneliness I felt knowing he could be so close and yet still so far away.

Suddenly desperate to break the spell that held him, I did the worst thing I could imagine, far more forbidden and dangerous and unforgivable than opening the trunk -- I stood up on the overturned wine box, pulled out the squeaky top drawer of his head-high dresser, and took hold of the loaded .38 caliber long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver he kept on top of his clean handkerchiefs.

He was so far gone even the sound of me opening the forbidden gun drawer did not wake him. Not even the click of me closing the cylinder snapped him out of whatever held him captive. What if Dad never woke up? What if he never came back from the Sock Moment? What if he stayed petrified like that forever?

Missing him, wanting him, needing him, and mad at him, I pulled back the hammer of the big pistol. My hands shook, my finger closed on the trigger. If I fired the gun, he'd have to wake up. No matter how severely I'd be punished, at least he'd be with me. An eighth of an ounce of trigger pressure away from bringing the hammer down on the moment -- the thought occurred to me: what if I pulled the trigger and he still didn't wake up?

Then I'd know there was no hope. I lowered the hammer and placed the handgun back onto tomorrow's handkerchief and closed the squeaky drawer.

I went back out into his bedroom and got down on my knees the way you do in church. Taking the argyle sock from his hand, I gently began to pull it onto his long, narrow, white foot.

I watched as my father's eyes focused down on me. They were grey, pearly and wet, like the inside of a shell pulled up from the sea with something alive inside it.

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