Closer to the end than the beginning

That's me with my father when he was about 80 and I was 56, give or take a year or two for both of us. He died at 85, not long after he told my wife the only thing he regretted was that "I spent so much time on women." But that's not what he told me when he showed me his stash of secretly penned short stories. You never knew what he really thought because he always tailored his comments to his listener. I guess my excuse for posting this is that Farewell Bend is, in part, a story about my old man during his best years, when he edited and published The Farewell Bend (read Ontario, Oregon) Argus-Observer.