For the longest time, my father was nothing but a bunch of words on old, onion-skin pages, living in a mottled gray/green cardboard box with a silver clasp on it. How long had I known about this box? When did my mother, who had been its first keeper, let me see it, and when did she let me have it? 

That information is lost to time. If I can't remember when it came into my possession, then I'm certain that she can't. I know I didn't have it with me when I first went off to college, but I remember having it when I went to grad school––at least I think I did. At a certain point it became something that I always had with me, so it's easy to insert it retroactively into any situation.

Maybe it was even in my room when I was a teenager, inspiring/haunting me. I must have had some access to it by then because the only work of my dad's that ever got published before daddylabyrinth was a short story I slipped into my high school literary magazine in 1980 or 81. Did my mom let me rummage freely through those stories to learn about things like drunkenness, prison, and sexual debauchery? Or did she filter them, allowing me access only to this one "clean" story?

Regardless of how long I knew about that black box and how long I possessed it, I have always tried to access my father through its pages. From the beginning, my search for my father has always 

begun with those words

on those pages 

in that box. 

Yet as I write this, I am near the labyrinth's completion. The only pages I haven't yet built are the ones that contain his writing. Maybe I've built everything backwards, from the edges toward the center, and this thing I've avoided is the place where I should have begun.

Am I building this labyrinth or walking through? If it already exists, prebuilt by God and fate and my father, then this challenge is mine only, and it is simple. Can I get to the center or can I not? Is his writing the center, and am I there right now?

Am I building this labyrinth at the same time as I walk it? If I knew this when I started, shouldn't I have begun at the center rather than ending there? Or was there no other way to do build than from the outside (where I don't understand my father) towards the center (where I can love him and leave him in peace)?

In any case here I am, walled in where the query and the quest began. Now that I've gotten here, how long will I be here? At least now I'm working with a minotaur made of words and letters, rather than a beast that can kill me. Something I can learn and know the way I never got to learn and know my father. Twenty-six letters in neat rows, arranged to teach me something. 

1. WHAT MADE TOMMY WRITE?
2. WHAT MADE STEVIE WRITE?