While talking to my father on the phone last Sunday, I lied.

He lives in Spain and we talk four times a year: Christmas, his birthday, and after the Real Madrid-Barcelona soccer matches – the “Classicos” – which are played twice a year.

Alfredo Sr. is getting older and has heart problems.  I love his voice, his thick Spanish accent and story teller’s cadence.  I have a message he left on our answering machine several months ago and I still haven’t erased it.

After we talked about the Classico (Barcelona beat Real Madrid 3-1, by the way), he asked me if I remember the time when I was about ten or eleven, when he tied a rope to the bumper of his 1971 Dodge Dart and towed me up a winding road in Griffith Park toward the Hollywood sign.

I told him I did.

He and my mom were unmarried and living in Madrid when my mom became pregnant, and for my father, a conservative man living in a conservative country, this was shameful.   He didn’t tell his sisters he had a son until I was nine months old, when we were about to leave for the states.

It would be another twenty years before he would return home.

He remembered dropping me off at the top of the hill, then driving back down the road to wait for me. “You were very brave, Chato – you didn’t know how fast the skateboard would go.”

How could I tell him I didn’t remember the incident at all?

“Do you remember, Chato, when I went to the bottom of the hill to wait for you, and you came down, and you were going fast – very, very fast – and I could you see were going to lose control.  You had a look on your face, and I got in front of you and grabbed you off the skateboard?”

I told him that, yes, I was completely panicked, and that he saved me from a bad crash.

“Thank God you were there to grab me.”

I wish I could remember the skateboard incident.  I have since conjured up an image of me on my orange plastic skateboard being towed up the hill, but I know it’s a fabrication.

My parents divorced when I was six, and after that, I saw my father every other weekend.  Thankfully we both still remember our long walks to Hollywood Boulevard from the small studio apartment he lived in on Fountain Avenue.  We made a game of counting the blocks.

“Remember, dad, 68 was our record, all the way to the Chinese Theater and back.  Remember?”

He didn’t remember the record of 68, but he recalled our walks and going to the movies.  We went to the movies a lot.  I liked it, and it gave a man in his mid-forties who never expected a child something to do to pass the time with his son.

I asked if he remembered when we would walk to nursery school, and I would insist on going down one particular block to look at a garden gnome in the front yard.

He didn’t, but he remembered us singing  the “ABC Song” as we walked.

So did I.

Even if they were different facets of the same experience, we had some shared memories, and I could see they brought him great comfort now.  The decades-long depression he must’ve experienced as a displaced man who never found his footing in a foreign country had faded, and, in its merciful wisdom, the mind and heart chose only to remember the good things.

I made a point of savoring his voice as we talked about walking to nursery school, because one day, probably sooner than later, all I will have is that message on my answering machine.

We ended the conversation the way we always do.  He said “A big kiss for everybody,” and I said “You, too, love you, dad,” as I put the phone back onto its cradle.