50

Later that evening I stand behind the lectern at Powell’s Books, reading to a standing-room-only crowd, but I am constantly aware of the family taking up the entire fourth row. That line of warm, encouraging people is like a distant land seen from the churning sea. I take in only flashes: white hair, a blue shirt, a tall, angular man arriving late, my half sister’s wide, generous smile. But even as I bracket the air in front of me, moving my small hands in the same gesture as the man I come from, there is another man—the one who loved me into being—who I am looking for. There has rarely been an event of importance in my life when I have not searched for my father. Rarely a time during which I have not felt both his presence and his absence. I silently call to him, a Hebrew word—hineni. Here I am. Hineni, uttered only eight times in the entire Torah, is less a statement of personal geography than an expression of presence and pure attentiveness. Abraham said it to God when he was asked to bind Isaac, and repeated it in response to his son. Jacob said it when he answered the call of an angel. Joseph said it to Jacob when he was sent to seek his brothers. Moses found his voice and said it to God at the burning bush. And I say it to my father, again and again. Hineni. I am here. All of me.