Take care of each other. That was the second of three “pearls of wisdom” my father offered as my wife and I were packing up early on New Year’s morning 2012 to head back from South Jersey to Asheville.

I remember one other occasion on which he offered a father’s wisdom. Then, like now, I was about to leave him and my mother. About to leave home. (Is that the right word for the place where my parents live now—a condo they moved into twenty years ago, long after I had settled elsewhere?) In a few minutes, my friend would arrive and we’d begin the drive to Boulder, Colorado for our first semester at the University of Colorado.

A rite of passage moment: the oldest son leaving for college. A moment that creates an opportunity for the passing down of wisdom.

His wisdom that day, like now, came in a group of three points. (Is that a convention? Al Shlosha D’varim. On three things, the sages of the Talmud say, the world stands: on Torah, on service to God, one form of which is prayer, and on acts of loving kindness.) I only remember one of those three: don’t rush into anything. You’ll always have another chance. To this day, I wonder if that’s true.

I also wonder what in his life informed that particular bit of advice. He was an only child, raised mostly by his mother after her husband abandoned wife and child when my father was seven. At forty-four years old, adoptive father to a boy (me) who had himself been abandoned by his birth father (at two months), husband to a woman who had been divorced, birth father of two other young boys, traveling salesman on a late summer morning in the suburb of a nation in the throes of terrifying, awe-inspiring, and defining changes, my father must have drawn on something he had learned from personal experience.

But he didn’t tell that story. How useful is wisdom, or even mere advice, that stands apart from the conditions that shaped and informed it?

Had he rehearsed what he was going to say to me moments before I backed out of the driveway? Or did he just open his lips (Open my lips, O Lord) and the words, the right words, came (and my heart will sing Your praise).

Naturally, I didn’t consider such questions at the time. I recognized that at a moment such as this the rhetorical situation itself creates the expectation that some wisdom will be passed down from one generation to the next.

I listened to my dad, made a mental note to remember what he said and consider it at some future time, then out the door and down the road I went, opening myself to the thrill of miles that led to awesome mountains and a mantra and a mentor in conceptual art, to sitting with hundreds of other anti-war protesters in the intersection of Broadway and Pearl when who should rise from the center of the crowd but none other than Allen Ginsberg to lead us in chant, to hiking in the Rockies with a tender, anti-materialistic Jesus freak, to sipping Almaden at a hippy happy-hour hosted in his dorm room by a future nationally known restaurateur/chef, and to diving or being drawn into the girls’ beds that absorbed the first spasms of my sexual life.

The map of my life, as it was spread before me that first year of college, offered me many points toward which to orient myself. Were there certain directions toward which I should resist rushing? My dad’s advice, the map’s key, was not to be found.

Now, forty-one years later, to my surprise, I get a second chance to benefit from his “pearls of wisdom.” Take care of each other.

Knowing how their days have become increasingly full of driving and accompanying each other to appointments with this medical specialist or that; knowing, too, how important it is to both of them that their family—including all three sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren—stay connected and strong; and knowing that we have chosen for now not to speak any more, my parents and I, about the fracture I unintentionally caused between my family and one of my brothers and his family, this time I have a context that enables me to understand why, of all the possible things my father could possibly urge me to do at this moment in his life and mine, he would choose this: take care of each other.

Urgency: was that the tone? Was it a plea? A wish? Was there also gratitude mixed in, gratitude for how well my mother has been doing in taking care of him as his stride—he’s a tall, hefty man, 6’ 1”—has been reduced to a shuffle, as his waking hours of each day dwindle; gratitude, too, for still being able to take care of my mother as her own health problems arise—with her vision, with debilitating pain in one of her legs?

A plea and a wish and gratitude—this and more mixed in his voice. Certainly more than a calm distillation of a life into a few words, a legacy of values to pass down to at least the next generation.

There we stood, my father and I, the car just about loaded, the corned beef sandwiches for the road ready, and my father, still strong enough in mind and heart to meet the rhetorical demands of the situation.

Clearly he spoke, trying to invest a few words, the main resources left to him, with the power to do for us, my wife and kids and I, what he would have us do for each other. Words to extend his influence, his reach, maybe even to transcend, in whatever modest way possible (what’s the power of five words?), the limits of embodied life.