Memories of My Father

by Mary Rohrer-Dann

I don’t care if you come home crying, my dad

tells my five-year-old self. Just make sure

the other guy is crying too. The other guy

is also five, also named Mary.

My father throws me from his shoulders

into Sunshine Lake. I plunge into tea-

colored cedar water, rise to droplets

sliding like diamonds down his arms.

Draw five lines, he tells me, any which way.

Then he takes my crayon, sketches a face.

Again! I draw lines even more haphazard.

Goofy, sly, surprised faces crowd the paper.

Someday, my sisters and brother and I

will teach this game to our kids.

He loves telling about being an Army cook,

about baking a general’s favorite cake

in the heaving hold of a troopship

during a typhoon, how he had a pet monkey

on Leyte, saw village women suckling piglets

in Papua, New Guinea. Only sometimes does

he talk about how his regiment was gearing up

to invade Tokyo.

Then, Hiroshima.

Stop yelling at Mom, I shout at him.

His fury, all volume, vanishes like steam

but leaves the rest of us shaking.

I am the only one who yells back.

Long after he quits his Pall Malls and beer,

even after retiring, his baker’s smell

of flour, sugar, and butter lingers

in the lines of his hands, the back of his neck,

his bitten-to-the-quick nails.

Eighty, my dad swings a badminton

racquet at lumbering carpenter bees

that nest in the patio roof. Every

afternoon, he and the bees perform

their inelegant pas de deux.

Near the end, long past midnight, Dad and I

watch the hospital meditation channel.

Molten colors flow and bloom, transform.

I kiss him goodnight. I love you.

            Oh, yeah?

* * * * *

“Memories of My Father" is part or the author's forthcoming book of poems, Taking the Long Way Home, to be published in December 2020 by Kelsay Books.

Mary Rohrer-Dann is a writer, painter, and educator in central PA. Her book of poems, Taking the Long Way Home, will be published by Kelsay Books in December 2020.  Recent work has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Literary Yard, Literary Heist, Flash Fiction Magazine, San Antonio Review, The Drabble, and others. Two narrative poem projects, La Scaffetta and Accidents of Being, were adapted to stage by Tempest Productions, Inc. and produced in NYC; State College, PA; and Philadelphia.