I saw my father through sunlight through the window through the fog of experience. He was at the bottom of the garden, bent over the gooseberries, touching the green globes with the tenderness of a beast. Such power channelled to such humble servants. He seemed to give permission to each berry to let go of the bush before catching it in his hand. If he had ever raged, all memory of pain was now forgotten* as he tended, half-hidden, to the plants behind the parted hedgerows until he became a moving sphere of peace among the vibrating green. Is there a word* for love given in secret from a safe distance?

forgotten: temporarily illuminated, thus providing radiation for currently-forming memories

word: mechanism that gives the illusion of contacting while providing further, possibly needed, distance

He had empathy with some machines. He was no engineer, but the internal-combustion engine seemed to him to have become so nearly human that he could understand it.
 
All being acceptable with bones and muscles, and all being well in the benign control of a driver, what more did one need than a system of getting to where one wanted to be. To be where one wanted to be is human; so he said. And he wanted to be at work.
 
When he was at work, he was happy. He was in balance, or near the possibility of balance. And out of that balance rose, like a charmed snake or the head of a sun flower, that which God loved as its own kind. A man with work would love others of his type, and that which had made him and that which he had loved into existence.
 
He discharged all such duties with vigour and he was happy. The mystery of his family informed the mystery of facilitating effect out of cause.
 
A dirty engine was made clean. A wet engine was made dry even to the point of measuring the coal into the kitchen stove to maintain the necessary low warmth.
 
That the house became dirty and wet as a result was not good, he admitted; but engines powered all that made the house possible. He lived in little history. As it is now, so too in the past and in the future. He laboured to ensure that all engines ran to his ideal.
 
When a sickening mechanism was brought to him, he listened to it attentively. If necessary, he disassembled it to make internal examination; but he rarely pried into private space. When invasive response was necessary, he did it efficiently, even forcefully, but with respect.