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In sorting out an old toy box at my father's house, I found two coloring-activity books left behind from childhood. One is titled With Jesus by the Sea; the other, Captain Kangaroo Trace and Color, the 1960 "authorized edition based on the popular TV program." Jesus and "the Captain": the two kindly but otherworldly men who sustained me as a child. They were both real, just out of reach and untouchable.

The ghost of holy Jesus lived inside me. This meant he knew everything I said and did. But that was only half the story. He had also lived fleshly, long ago and far away, not in a house but by the Galilee, before he died forsaken for me. Jesus talked a lot to an invisible but always present and never sleeping God the Father, who lived in the sky but also in God's house, the church. I was supposed to love him if not like him, but actually I was afraid of his smoting and smiting. On Sundays at the stroke of noon, my pastor-father would close a church service with a biblical benediction. "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you." Knowing this was from the Old Testament, I figured this smiling face referred to God the Father, but it was hard for me to connect the dots.

The Captain lived here and now in a one-room house with dumb puppets. He welcomed visitors and read picture books from behind the TV screen, any TV in any house, but only early in the morning. I could see and hear him in his house or linoleum yard; he just couldn't see and hear me. Every few days he talked to the always present but usually sleeping Grandfather Clock. This involved calling Grandfather's name and jarring him awake, to ask him a puzzling question. "Let's ask Grandfather Clock." I liked the wise and knowing Grandfather Clock and wished for him in the corner of my house.

In the authorized Captain coloring book, Grandfather Clock is outlined repeatedly. Inside the ring of 12 traditional numbers, he has the old eyes, nose, and mouth of a friendly face, like you would see drawn on a sun or moon hanging in the heavenlies. Yes, he's usually sleeping and always smiling.

I watched Captain Kangaroo until I was past puberty. I remember my great sadness when I was forced from his little house the fall I entered junior high. We had moved to a new school district that summer; I had to make new friends. But my real-life loss was no greater than the loss of Captain and his crew. The new school schedule meant the bus would pick me up very early, before Captain came on. I knew I was too old for Captain's jingles, but I desperately wanted to hold on to the set.

So in seventh grade, I lost Captain and smiling Grandfather Clock, which left me with Jesus and God the Father, whose face I still couldn't color bright, knowing his reputation. He expected so much of his beloved. There was the Crucifixion and the descent into hell, which I knew from the Apostles' Creed I had memorized for my dad.

When I was 23, I rented my first apartment, two landlord-furnished rooms on Green Acres Drive in White Plains, New York, two hundred miles from "home." That year my father made the first piece of furniture I could call my own: a grandfather clock. I now call it a grandmother clock, since it is only five and a half feet high. But Dad always used the masculine form when referring to the clocks he fashioned from raw boards: eventually 12 clocks, one for each of his children and siblings, presented with warm wishes for a long life and an ordered home.

I valued that clock for more than its walnut wood, and proudly set it ticking in the corner of my living room-bedroom. I quickly learned to sleep through its quarter-hour chimes, even when it struck in the dead of night. Like Jesus' God the Father, it neither slept nor slumbered. Like Captain's Grandfather Clock, its golden face smiled on me, though it never spoke. I moved my clock with me to a series of apartments, soon having a living room I didn't sleep in and owning all the furnishings downstairs and upstairs too.

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June 10 2002, Vol. 46, No. 7