When I first saw that my father had been sentence to a place called Annandale, I thought of the Steely Dan song "My Old School":

California

  tumbles into the sea

that'll be the day I go

back to Annandale.

But Donald Fagen was writing about Annondale-on-Hudson, New York, where he attended Bard College, not Annandale Reformatory for Boys in Sussex (Hunterdon County), New Jersey. Founded in 1928, the facility is now called The Mountainview Youth Correctional Facility. It looks quite swanky from the picture I found on the New Jersey Department of Corrections website. 

I like how they promote the "747 acres of rolling hills" as if the place is a college campus. They probably didn't encourage strolling around back in my father's day. I picture degeneracy and violence side-by-side, the kind of place where a guard might show up for work and wonder what kind of trouble would happen that day. 

One day, some unlucky S.O.B. of a guard went to work wondering just that, only to get tied up and chucked in a boiler room while my dad and three other inmates escaped.

I wish I knew what day it happened. Wish I could call up my dad and say "Hey, I'm working on this book about you. When did you break out of Annandale?" 

"Mm-mmm of Mmmm-m," he'd say. Even if I could get him on the line, I wouldn't be able to understand him. Too much chatter on the wires that lead us back to our dead.