Call your dad. Go see him. I wish I could.

while i was up in Gainesville trying to grow up some and make my way to UF. 

That winter and spring, i'd had what is still my favorite class ever at Santa Fe, an English Lit class taught by an amazing ex-hippie free spirit of a woman named Aurelia "Chick" Wallace. On the first day, she arranged our chairs in a circle and encouraged us to get to know each other, which we did.  I made lifelong friends in this class, and flourished personally and scholastically, acing every new challenge along the way.

Our final exam was scheduled for 8am April 25th, and was to include multiple choice questions, a writing sample, and then to finish by doing a poetry analysis on a poem we'd never seen.

But my sister called me at 3:30 in the morning to tell me that "Daddy died last night."  He wasn't exactly young and had had different serious ailments over the years, but i was just in shock, and went into a sort of functional "neutral" setting immediately....a daze.  I wasn't going to be getting back to sleep, and just didn't know what else to do but to show up for the final and to have one last triumphant gathering with my favorite instructor and class friends, so i got there early and told her what had happened and that i wanted to and felt ready to take on the final. She comforted me and reassured me that i was getting an A no matter what.

So i breezed through the questions and writing sample, with only the poetry analysis remaining. And then, when i turned the page, i discovered that the poem was by Theodore Roethke, a man whose father had died when he was fifteen.  And that the poem itself was called My Papa's Waltz, a man's reminiscence of a lingering childhood moment with his imperfect but loving father.

Sigh.  Here is that poem.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.