When my father was new to America, he lived either in New Jersey or New York. I don’t know which. In any case, it was a big city, and it was no easy thing to find your way around. How could my father remember where to turn and at which corner? He could not read street signs. Especially in the newness of America, everything in his surroundings was a blur. How could he not get lost?

What my father did was take a stone he picked up somewhere and scratch a deep X on the corners of the sidewalks of the route he had to take, and so he found his way to work and his way back to where he was living without any trouble.

There was one other direction my father had to go in every day as well. For a long time, my father knew of only one public restroom, and he had to take a ferry to get there.

At some point, my father went to night school. This is where immigrants learned English. This is the sad story I have to tell you.

The first night my father went to night school, everyone who enrolled was sent to the first grade class. The first night, the first-grade teacher appraised everyone’s ability to speak English. Those who were advanced in their English-speaking skills were promoted to the second grade. It was one of my father’s proudest moments when the teacher quickly chose him for a promotion to second grade. So, the next night he was supposed to go to a different room and be in the advanced class with the few others who were advanced in English. Oh, how happy he was.

By the time the next night came, he was feeling that the nice teacher might have made a mistake, and that he wasn’t good enough for the second grade. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find the room. And if he did, the new teacher would say that the other teacher had made a mistake, and he didn’t really belong in the second grade, after all, and she was sorry, he would have to go back to the first grade. These are what I imagined my father was thinking that night. What he actually said was simply that he wasn’t sure he was good enough to be in the second grade.

So, on the second crucial night when he was to go to his second-grade class, the time came and went, and my father didn’t go back, and he never did. That was the end of his education.

What shyness was this? What lack of confidence? What sense of inferiority?

At a very young age, I understood it all perfectly. If I had been alive back then when my father was a boy new to America, I would have taken him by the hand and taken him to the second grade class. I would have sat beside him, and, if the teacher said something he didn’t understand, I would know what she meant, and I would tell him. And if the teacher asked him a question he didn’t know, I would know the answer, and I would whisper it to him. Then later he would dare to go to school by himself.

And so, even before I had entered kindergarten and my father would tell me this story, I would take his hand in mine as if to pull him back in time, and I’d say, “Daddy, I’ll go back to that school with you. I’ll take you to the second grade room. I’ll go there with you.�

My father was fifty when I was born, and so it had been thirty-two years earlier when my father had made the choice not to go back.

Even when I was very young, I knew this was not the right ending to my father’s story, and I understood deeply the theme of What Might Have Been.