me & dad, way back in the Before
This is a Monday morning, with roses in it, and burning-off clouds, and a puppy who has just learned to swim. This is the day after Father’s Day. This is the cool breeze that creates a confluence of culpability.
This weekend I got the new Kent Haruf novel, Benediction, and, in starting to read, returned to the world that is the place that my father is from. He wasn’t born in the High Plains of Colorado, but in the fertile land of middle-southern Nebraska, but it’s small town midwest living just the same. Reading Haruf’s setting and characters, I meet the voice and the cadence of the people I am from, and I meet all the layers of things a generation of folks never wanted to have to talk openly about: abuse, illness, homosexuality, love.