Friday, July 3, 2009

Roger Jones: Old Man


Dad had taken me to have my hair cut short. “He keeps trying to look like a Beatle,” he told the chuckling barber.

Afterwards, in the car, I hid my head under a baseball cap.

Backing out of the slot, Dad slammed his brakes. My cap flew off. A long-haired teenager wheeling past behind him on a bike screamed, “Watch where you’re goin’, old man!”

"Old man?" -- I'd never thought of my father as old.

Forty years ago, and Dad a decade younger than I am now.


day after day
wheeling by—
this same blue sky


by Roger Jones
New Braunfels, Texas
first pubished in
Frogpond 29:3 (Autumn 2006)

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