You never played football or caught a baseball with me

We gathered walnuts together, made Christmas bells from tin-can lids and bolt washers, and concocted homemade candles from Gulf paraffin mixed with colored crayons. You taught me how to overhaul engines, work with wood, wire houses, and sweat copper plumbing.

And then later, you played checkers backwards but that's what strokes do -- which also made your paintings like this.



Today would have been your 95th birthday, and it doesn't seem so long ago.


* * *

THERE was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part
of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

~ From: "There was a child went forth", Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1881