Father's Day

Beautiful, Joe.
Like snapshots from another, simpler time.

My dear Mr. Nation,

I read it twice then read it thrice and cried a good long tear
You brought to me past memories that I too, hold so dear....

Thank you so very much for sharing that piece of love with us.

Thanks for sharing your stuff Joe - I always enjoy reading it.

Hey, thanks.

Now I want to see some stuff about your fathers.

Joe(Yes. Now>)Nation

Joe,
that was beautiful. You have a way with words that I envy.
I was transported back to my youth, running along side my dad with pride at the stripers he used to catch out of the surf on Cape Cod.

Thank you.

<read that as strippers for a minute...>

Now?

I'll think on it.

Fantastic, Joe!

Soz, he had settled down by then. I am the youngest of eight kids, So it was all about the bass by the time I came around. :wink:

My Father


Happy Father's Day Dad!

Beautiful man, aidan, with a wonderful daughter.

Thanks Joe - and thanks for the inspiration. And, if it applies, Happy Father's Day to you as well.

I was trying to remember when I first knew I had a father. I had a mother, that I was sure of from even dimmer times, but I think I was sure I had a father at about age two years and eleven months and twenty six days. My mother and I were counting the days until my third birthday and I was sitting in my father's chair to wait through the moments. It went like this: Sit in daddy's chair. Big chair, leather cool and reddish dark, hold breath, wait, .... stop waiting, go ask mom "How old am I now?" "Five minutes older, you're still two, you won't be three till Friday."
Nod head. Head back to daddy's chair. Note salty mosslike smell in the air.
Wait.

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My father came through the back door of our little house, only guests came through the front door. Every Friday night, he brought flowers for my mother and every Friday she seemed so surprised and happy the moment was as new as the first time he appeared at the doorway of her nursing school dorm with his shy smile and a bouquet of tiny roses.


Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lighting they
Do not go gently into that good night.

We went duckpin bowling on Wednesday nights with a bunch of guys he worked with at the shop. They were loud, profane, proud of who they were and not very good bowlers. Al, Sid, Cementhead, Louie, Pop and me rolled three games against teams named The Royal Flushs, the Fairlanes and Vic's Pizzeria All-Stars. We won about half the time.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

At the Manchester Coon and Fox Club, Pop was president for a couple of years. I got to go to the annual meeting which was a feast of venison steaks and rainbow trout and gallon bottles of Four Roses being passed down the tables. There was a raffle one year. I was picked to pick the ticket. I picked Pop's ticket. There was an uproar. He said "Hell, I donate the prize to the club." So I had to pick again. This time I picked my ticket.
I said "Hell, I donate the prize back to the club." Everybody yelled. I picked again....


Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

I was gone a long time during the war. When I got back to the East Coast, I always seemed to have a new wife or something else that stopped me from sitting down with Pop to see how he was. One time, for a July cookout family get-together, my brother Mike and I bought thirty pounds of of lobster and Pop had the best time cooking those giants and breaking them open. I heard him singing to himself in the kitchen, it was "the Blue-tailed Fly".

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My father's folks were poor as dirt. Every child over five was expected to bring something home to the family. When Pop was about ten, he convinced the farmer two farms over to let him plant corn next to his barn on a little patch of unused ground near the road. About two weeks after the corn had sprouted there came a 100 year flood and water roared through that farmer's barn and over the newly sprouted corn. It was sure to be a total loss. The water stayed on Pop's little field for about three days before drying away. The corn sprouts lay on their sides like so many dead soldiers in the sun.
Then something remarkable happened. The sprouts turned themselves into stalks and stood straight up and then started to grow at a frightening pace. In the space of two weeks they were almost six feet tall and by the Fourth of July they were so tall that Pop had to borrow a ladder to harvest the topmost ears. And ears, there were so many ears of corn that Pop paid back the farmer his two bushels of rent in the first ten minutes of picking and then had hundreds more to sell at the nearby roadside.
Which just shows, sometimes a flood, especially one that rinses out a couple of hundred pounds of old horse manure onto your field, can be a good thing.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.


Pop fell off a garden bench at age 82 while picking weeds from around his struggling Irises. Somehow he got himself up,... and up the steps... and up the stairs to the second floor with his leg and hip broken. Tough son ofva. He said it hurt more when they took him down the stairs on the stretcher and could I get him some Aqua Velva or something so he wouldn't smell like an old goat.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

1952

This poem was written during the final illness of Thomas' father, D. J. Thomas,
who had been a teacher at the Swansen Grammar School


I miss my father on Opening Day. Baseball Opening Day and Trout Season Opening Day, the best years are when both days are the same day. I miss him when I see something I know he would love, the third place person lurchs to victory on Jeopardy, the Red Sox beat the Yankees, a pear tree, once near barren, loaded down with heavy fruit.

Sometimes when I am irrationally happy I find myself singing "the Blue Tailed Fly."

Joe(and the winner is... oh, no)Nation

My father was unknown to me, except by anecdotes. He was a vain, self centered alcoholic and petty criminal. When I was three we left him in Texas (My Mom and two brothers). Several years ago, when I bought my first computer, I learned on Ancestry.com that he died five years later at the age of thirty-three, but could not find if he died of illness or bullets.

That's a tough break, Edgar, and yet look how well you've turned out.

Joe(who needs an old man beating on you anyway)Nation

I hope I didn't seem to whine. I have a great life that I wouldn't change (except as noted on the nipple thread).

No, Edgar, life is what it is. Some of us are lucky enough to pick parents who love us, stay by us, stand by us, and turn out at the end of it all not to be the idiots we thought they were at 16. I've known too many people who had bad fathers and worse mothers, who's only memory of either parent is some horror not fit to be spoken of.

That is a bad break for them. And gives us lucky ones, and it is so so much a matter of luck, the chance to be the heros of the human race. Maybe only for one family, maybe for a thousand. In your case, and I don't mean to make this too personal, the pain and distance from love you experienced as a child has turned to near nuclear energy for your writing and poetry.

Imagine for a moment, you being dull.


Joe(still, it hurts, yeah, yeah, I know that too)Nation

I am a proud father of four. Each is grown up and self sufficient. I feel that they and their children have advanced far beyond what I knew. Hopefully, the line will prosper in the decades to come.

Thank You Dad
Thank You Dad


Happy Fathers Day to All the Fathers of the World!

Perfect, AE, Perfect.