In honor of the occasion, my wife-to-be tattooed a message onto her left shoulder blade: “I Do,” in curvy script, surrounded by a large red heart. I responded in kind, inscribing her name in large block letters on the back of my left hand. You know that expression, “I know it like the back of my hand?” It makes less sense now to most people, because they spend all day staring at computer screens and talking on the telephone. But for people who do manual labor for a living, that phrase still has its full meaning. Because of the kind of work I do, I had to look at it a thousand times a day: Janine. The day of our wedding, we slipped ourselves into our nicest duds and readied to receive all of our friends and family at the chapel. But when I showed up at the church parking lot, a surprise lay in store for me: amazingly, my dad had showed up at my wedding. “Come by to pay your last respects?” I asked him, in a mildly cold tone. “You invited me, didn’t you?” My dad gave me his hurt face.
