In the plane, on the way to my father’s deathbed, I passed time looking for shapes in the clouds from above. I found a billy goat, a hat, an old monk’s bearded face. It was easy to forget where we were headed, lost as I was in a child’s game played, gazing down, as an adult. The cloud shapes rolled and shifted, caught in the tide of a blood orange sunset. In the hospital, my family found ways to fill the breathless moments between each breath my father took. There was time enough to sway on a tightrope, perform a clumsy dance among the tubes and bottles, notice how all of our faces had changed — time enough for thirty things before my father inhaled again. On my return home, the cab from the airport snaked through a neighborhood I’d never seen. A light fog licked headlights and machine shops like the one where my father spent most of his life. I remembered him twelve years ago, at the age of seventy-seven, hiking on Mount Hood. He balanced on a rock in the middle of a stream, sore leg and all, pushed with his walking stick and launched, flying and grinning, to the other side. For a moment that memory made all other motion seem petty. When a stoplight turned red, the cabbie sighed impatiently. The street was still, my hands were still and folded on my lap. I said, “Go slow. No need to hurry. We’re almost there.”