Winooski is a small town just ouside of Burlington, Vermont, near lake Champlain and close enough to Canada that my father spoke fluent French all his life, albeit with a proletarian accent. It was also a mythologic place of maple syrup snowcones, woolen mills whose doors were locked right after the morning whistle, and a church steeple that he climbed toward the gilt brass sphere — reflecting in my imagination an old leather football helmet, threadbare knickers and his worried confident smile. The place became real in the winter of my 40th year when I returned to plant his ashes in the catholic cemetary where generations of Irish Americans, his school chums most likely, and much of his poor family, repeated endlessly the stories I have almost completely forgotten.