"Every Father's Life" and Poems

Every Father's Life

To Floyd "Westy" Westfelt
1935--1996

Every father's life leaves at least one indelible picture in our memories, and as I skim through my imaginary photo album, I see that my father's life looked pretty conventional.

Floyd Westfelt, Jr. was born in heartland USA, son of a trolley driver and a homemaker, graduated high school, married at twenty, spent four years in the Coast Guards, had four kids, and found a proud career with the City of Cincinnati Firefighters where he worked until he retired.

I flip another imaginary page . . . and it is when I dust off those memories of my father standing alone--apart from his role of father, husband, son, and fireman--that he begins to appear less conventional.

Well, lookie here . . . Dad was an adult convert to the Catholic Faith, that is, before he left the Church and became an adult convert to the Lutheran Faith. Dad was an alcoholic, then a recovering alcoholic and never drank another drop of liquor in his life. And Dad was a music lover, especially of the Blues, and taught himself how to play the guitar. He cooked a mean pot of chili. He played softball. He loved cats. For a brief moment, Dad donned a motorcycle helmet and drove a Harley. His favorite color was turquoise. In his later years he developed a passion for photography and was never seen without a camera. Most of all, Dad loved his bizarre garden; his banana trees and exotic plants. . .

As I close my imaginary album, it suddenly occurs to me that even if Dad had never married and had children, even if he were not his mother's son, these were the passions that made him as unique as a snowflake. These were the passions that made him unconventional and a wholly marvelous being. Dad's life was not just a picture of a man in a family portrait. Dad's life, like every father's life, was a collage.

Some of us have in our fathers a whole gallery of memories. Some of us have only a snapshot in time. Some of wish we could borrow more time. A thousand years, for some of us, still wouldn't be long enough.

Gee, Westy . . . we hardly knew ya.


         Published in local community press, Father's Day 1999

---

Death in June

It was a hot, green day in June
When I heard the rattle in her chest,
The day the kitten died.

Sweat mingled with huge tears
As I processed solemnly through the backyard
With shovel in hand, and the shoebox
Containing the syringe
That was her milk bottle,
The doll's bib that mopped her chin,
And the dead kitten herself,
Fetal coiled, chilled but still soft
In her yellow-striped suit.

And I cried not only because
We had previously made eye contact;
Two souls, nurse and nursling,
Connected forever in one pitiful moment. . .
I cried because it felt cold
To encounter death in June,
And because her tiny spirit
Had struggled so hard to live,
Her struggle ending in a casket
Designed for pink sneakers.

But as I leveled the last clump
Of dirt with the shovel,
And wiped the last tear
From my cheek,
My heart gave gave her
A lion-sized eulogy.
I envisioned her ascended
To some feline equivalent of heaven,
A palace in ancient Egypt
Where her ancestors were worshiped
As deities,
And she was groomed and bejeweled,
Fat from feasting on ritual foods,
Curled in a ball and
Purring contentedly in the lap
Of Pharaoh's daughter.

---

Mandolin Wind

All week long an old Rod Stewart song
has been playing continuously in my mind,
a phonograph record embedded in my forehead,

and just when I think it is fading,
my memory picks up the dusty needle
and reapplies it to the grooves in my brain.
My brain--a turntable whose only purpose
for existence now is to replay this one old song.

I hear it when I take a shower,
and again when I am doing the laundry.
I heard it the other day when I was shopping
at the corner market.
It followed me down the produce aisle,
disturbing the fruits and vegetables,
and even the squeaky cart wheels
and the whining children of fellow shoppers
could not drown it out.

Yesterday I heard it when I was cleaning
the fish tank, and I heard it play again this morning
at the breakfast table while I picked through
my bacon and cheese omelet. . .

And the whole reason this is happening,
the reason I am being tortured in this manner,
is because last week while I was at a
Bluegrass Festival in Kentucky
I saw a little girl with light brown freckles
sprinkled across a beautiful alabaster face,
translucent thin,

whose cornsilk hair was the same color
as her yellow dress,
both hair and dress frayed at the ends,

and she was carrying a pear-shaped guitar,
some malformed banjo or fiddle
with a delicately hand-carved spruce top
and maple sides and back,
to be sure a lovely alien of an instrument,

and when I asked her what IT was,
she looked up at me with eyes
as clear and blue as the summer wind,
and said in her thick, backwoods drawl. . .

"This here's a mandolin."

---

Goodbye, Joe

(dedicated to my brother)

He was just a baby then,
in that summer of my forgotten youth,
just another piece of baggage
I was leaving behind,
another "damn good riddance."
And I didn't even say goodbye.

He had the face of an angel
and the voice of a choir,
He even taught himself how to play
the guitar.
I didn't appreciate him enough, I guess.
And I didn't even say goodbye.

But there was something within him,
something that haunted.
He seemed lost sometimes
and brokenhearted.
He could have been my brother,
he could have been yours.
And I didn't even say goodbye.

Mississippi, where the river is slow
flowed the summer of my forgotten youth.
The South was new, and, somehow, mine,
but all I could think of night after night

was how he ran through that house
like a hurricane,
charged up because it was his birthday.
He didn't understand I was going away,
and when I walked out the door that day
I didn't look back, I don't know why.
And I didn't even say goodbye.

---

Connie

This is how I shall always see
Connie,
Little sister in dishwater braids,
A kid with skinned knees
And her dresses too large
Tumbling down over thin
Shoulder blades.

This is how I shall always see
Connie,
Though it's been forty years
since then,
And while everyone sees
What they choose to see,
I just smile and see
Connie again.