They come to me whenever they want, these moments, arriving unbidden and with unexpected force. They can't be conjured intentionally. The instant I recognize them, they dissipate like the smoke that used to curl from the White Owl cigars he loved.

I can't even claim to recognize them when these moments come, at least not in the sense of actively participating in their discovery. I stumble on them, small treasures that barely give me time to savor their appearance.

Some afternoon, I'll suddenly notice the way the tip of my thumb and my index finger seem to seek each other out and form a small "o" together, as if they were closing a circuit. Or I'll be pulling on my socks in the morning and notice how the blue latticework of veins etched on my lower leg will suddenly look familiar in a new way. Other times, I'll be stopped cold by the strange familiarity of my voice saying hello on the telephone answering machine.

Others in my family see these moments more easily and more often than I do. "Oh, you look just like your father," sweet old Aunt Eleanor used to tell me every time she saw me at family visits. Later, sitting in an over-stuffed chair and staring at me from behind Coke-bottle lenses, unaware my father had been dead for years, and she'd call me "John." No one in the room ever had the heart to correct her.

I never saw the resemblance until I started tripping over those physical reminders of him, those moments when I was allowed to recognize my father living on in me.

Nervous fingers and varicose veins are hardly the sort of legacy my father would have dreamed of leaving his eldest son. He might not even recognize them himself, any more than I recognize the echoes of myself in my own son, older now than I was when my father died of cancer at the age of 47.

He died of a type of brain cancer that was only the culminating assault of a disease that took nine years to kill him. It destroyed one of his kidneys before it mutated into leukemia. He fought the cancer by working hard at what he loved to do, which was writing about and being a major player in the sports world in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y.

My father had been vice president of public relations for the Buffalo Bills for eight years when he died. There's a brass plaque dedicated to his memory in the press box at what is now Ralph Wilson Stadium. That's the sort of legacy he dreamed of leaving. Though being a sportswriter and a p.r. guy are by definition behind-the-scenes kind of jobs, he liked being noticed and acknowledged by the men in his world for being the best at what he did.

He was devoted to his job, which, in the '50s and '60s, was considered the best way a man could demonstrate devotion to his family — by making enough money to afford increasingly large, comfortable houses in the suburbs, large, comfortable houses that he did little more than sleep in before he died in a narrow hospital bed in 1973.

It's fashionable these days to look back disdainfully at the absentee father of those years, to charge men like my father with the crime of avoiding the real work of fatherhood by becoming workaholics. That was something I accused him of doing, especially after he died and he couldn't answer the charge. The condescension with which I've spoken and thought about my father's absence from my life shames me now.

When I became a father, shortly before his death, I vowed to do at least one thing: I would always be present for my children. I felt righteous making such declarations.

But my willingness to abide by that vow often masked my disinterest in working half as hard at my profession as my father worked at his, as he worked for me and the large family he faithfully provided for during his short life.

I've lived many more days than my father was granted. I haven't had to spend the last nine years of my life in and out of cancer clinics, allowing my body to be used for risky, experimental leukemia therapies. I haven't had to lie in dim hospital rooms as the ability to speak and write escaped my weakened grasp.

I miss my father. The physical echoes that visit me every now and again, though they elicit a sharp and delicious and startling response, are happy reminders of an unsuspected legacy I can't help but carry, reminders that parts of my father more substantial than a marbled limb or a word on the phone exist in me.

Aunt Eleanor's simple declaration, "Oh, you look just like your father" describes exactly the nature of my father's legacy. Before he had any thought of fame, of my birth or his death, he gave me life.

The legacy my father left me is me.