My Father, His Father and President Kennedy One of my earliest memories that doesn't have to do with my tonsillectomy or the arrival of my baby brother - and I am not equating the two - is of seeing President Kennedy ride along East 161st Street in the Bronx in the back of an open limousine, moving up the hill that begins at Yankee Stadium and ends at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, next door to which my family lived. It was 1962. I was 6 and perched on my dad's shoulders. One Sunday some 40 years later, I opened this newspaper to find confirmation of that gauzy memory: a photograph, taken from the south side of 161st Street. Kennedy is in the foreground, beyond him a crowd of spectators. There's a man wearing eyeglasses, and on his shoulders a boy. Unmistakable. I put down the newspaper and phoned my dad, and within days had ordered a print for each of us. Eight years went by, and my dad died, suddenly. In the emotional upheaval that followed, I was seized by a determination not to let him slip away. Not that there was much danger of that. I was bound to the man, who was wonderful, and also to the story of his life, which did not start off so wonderfully. His mother died when he was 2, and his loving father, widowed and desperate, installed my dad with family members in different cities while he waited on tables at the old Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street. Then there were two years on the Greek island Chios, where he was sent (at age 6, as it happened) to live with his stepmother while his father continued working in the States. She turned out to be emotionally unstable - she would walk him barefoot on pilgrimages to the island's churches - and my grandfather essentially had him kidnapped and taken home. My dad's account of his reunion with his father was a scene I could conjure even better than I could J.F.K. on 161st Street. How, malnourished and frightened, he crossed the ocean on the Vulcania and was taken to a Midtown hotel, the Rex (now gone), which catered to Greek immigrants. How, the next morning, he nervously descended the staircase to the lobby where my grandfather stood waiting. As my mother, brother and I sorted through the detritus of Dad's life, I wanted to gather it all up, everything. My mania extended to the previous generation, and when I found myself on eBay bidding on Commodore Hotel cutlery because - who knows? - my grandfather might have bussed it, I knew I had to take a deep breath. Then I came across a memoir my father had abandoned, despite periodic nudging from me. In it, he describes the reunion. He is told that his father is waiting for him downstairs. "I remember vividly," he writes, "the wide staircase leading down to the main floor, the rather large lobby, the lone figure of a man who did not seem like anyone I knew, motionless at the other end." He walks uncertainly toward him and, when his father catches him in his arms, begins to sob. That was the start of the most important relationship in my father's life - something I had not only heard about and (now) read about, but also witnessed, because I was lucky enough to know my grandfather, who lived till I was nearly out of my teens. As my dad went on to write: "My father was nothing if not the essence of human warmth, unadulterated, unequivocal, unmasked, something that I was to realize again and again in the course of my life. That was in many ways the beginning moment of life itself. Although more hardships were to follow, Dad's next 75 years were in the main supremely happy ones. And he gave as good as he got: my father was himself the essence of human warmth - unadulterated, unequivocal, unmasked. Not long ago, I found a vintage Rex Hotel postcard online. It is an artist's rendering of the lobby - wood-paneled walls, sconces, small chandelier. Stairs - those stairs - are on the left, and the entrance is upstage. Like the Kennedy photo, the postcard represents late-arriving evidence of a family scene long kept alive in the imagination. The Kennedy photo, while a treat to have, remains a curio. The Rex postcard, on the other hand, sits on my desk, where I can see it always. There's no father and son in it, there's no one at all - just an empty hotel lobby, a stage set waiting for its characters. But I know that in that modest, expectant space, someone's life is about to begin. George Kalogerakis is a deputy Op-Ed editor at The Times. He is also co-author of "Spy: The Funny Years." E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.