In Sunday’s newspaper there was a test or a quiz. It asked as if it were a bad thing) if you had become your father or someone else. There were several answers to choose from, but I do not remember what they were.

Never became my father, just look like him.
What I became was my uncles. All of them.
My mothers fire and drive, her odd sense of justice.
Her moral code that I live through the shuffled incarnations of
my five uncles. Dead now, everyone one.
The larger than life wildcard, stories full of adventure, who vanished to the west.
The smart and quiet, the resentful one. Self exiled, distant in his anger.
The world traveler! A most accomplished man, who brought home nothing.
Stories he would spin with an elegant ease. So alone in his life.
The youngest one, the damaged fold. Handsome he died so young.
The self proclaimed hero. A bullshitter, so full of himself. People included or
excluded from his ever evolving myth of self at whim.
I stumble through these five daily, like punch-cards shuffled machine quick.
Each with my mothers stubborn optimism, seen through my father’s gentle eyes.

Doug Mathewson