before bethlehem

of course i have always struggled to imagine my father as something young. as every day he slips into something necessarily old. dad who drinks budweiser beer and listens to perhaps credence clearwater or the beatles or even so far as very negro jazz. but also dad who retains his long hair and blonde mustache and sense of humor beyond either the laughter in you or me. and i suspect very much that he should have been the writer, not me, in the family, if not a famous court jester that has both at once grace and a profound understanding of the simple fool in god. because dad is a laborer, an ironworker, an essence of greek nudity. and he belongs to the union blues. and has a great American honor that someone such as myself, who can only be a late expatriate, respects as so grossly superior to this little life, that i believe he would have been ver good friends with even John F. Kennedy, had he been good enough and not assassinated by the bad in all of us. this person; my father, who understands nature, and the dollar, and his neighbors' exhausting need of someone like him, to exist, to wear me on his levi knee in hot afternoons, to sing songs about America, and mothers like mine, and the seventy-six years promised to each of us, before we expire less greatly than he has alread, in a very hard a reprehensible spring.