Walking Stick

My mother had resisted telling me who my father was. When I had been younger, she had been able to ply me away from this question with a variety of delicious sops such as ice cream sundaes made to order or a toy airplane that had working propellers and people that waved from the windows.

But now I was getting older and though I never saw my mom with any member of the opposite sex and had done deep excavations around the house seeking hidden photographs of my theoretical progenitor, I was getting nowhere. My mother caught me doing this on numerous occasions and her pique grew. One day, she took me…