My dear Michael,

You never met your grandfather. He passed well before I came to the U.S. and met your mother. There was a time that I would have said you were the better for it. But time has a way of refining things. What we think of the people in our lives can change. It really isn't unlike wine. You bottle away a vintage, stow it in a cellar, and forget about it. And it isn't until you come across the thing, perhaps unintentionally, many years later that you wipe the dust from its label, recall the harvest that produced the vintage, and let memories come back to you.

Perhaps you'd kept those memories at bay, actively repressing and keen to avoid entire topics of thought. Perhaps you'd simply forgotten them. I imagine you would do the latter.

What you might not know when you discover that bottle is that time itself has transformed what was once a barely passable Sangiovese into something potentially extraordinary. All the elements for greatness were always there: the earth, the rain, the ash, the process. But you could always produce nothing better than a mediocrity.

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The missing element, then, was only time. Time, that insatiable construct. That thresher of what was. That furnace for what is to come. Time is what transforms every low thing into a higher form. The irony, I find, is that in order to know the effects of time, you have to ruin its work. You have to open the bottle.

I've opened the bottle when it comes to my father. And I want you to do the same with me. I used to think my father an exceptionally cruel man. And while time has softened some of my recollections, it is inarguable that he had a coldness about him in countenance and deed.

I want you to understand him as I do now. I want you to consider such things as cruelty as matters of perception. Don't mistake me: I am not asking for absolution for the things I've done or failed to do. By now, you and the civilized world know who I am and some of what I've done. You also know some of what I have not done; namely, be a father to you in the traditional sense.

Please take this letter as an effort to begin building, despite all the destruction I've caused. I'd have you and your own son open a finer vintage than the one I hid away even before you were born.

Yours