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fathers

Suffer Me to Pass

It was only a beer bottle I found in the middle of the trail, but it pinged an impulse in me to go. Get back to the car, give up our Saturday hike. I didn’t tell Cheryl, who stood by while I picked up the bottle and knocked off the dust. She’s known me for thirty years, since our kids were babies, and mostly she endures my jumpy nervousness. But a single empty beer bottle in the big, wide open of Oregon on a sunny June day—it was silly, even for me, to get worked up over such a thing.

Easter, the American Church in Paris

 Very cold, like in a forest’s clearing, shadowed by grayboulders. Very cold, and the pipe organan enormous paternal tree, bleeding sap. The eye climbs and crossesand climbs again to take it in. The stainedglass casts gems onto the stone floor [...]

Losing

After your father gets lost for the third time,
      you get angry because he won’t answer his phone.
Part of me wants him to stay lost. God, what has stolen my generosity? 

R. Wesley/Getty

Pain

My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless, that, as his life leached away, my father would only have felt increasingly weak and light-​headed. The coroner, trying to make me feel better, was lying.

Ro Cuzon

Writer Dad: Ro Cuzon

December 12, 2013

Editor’s note: Writer Dad is a series of interviews with professional writers who are also fathers, discussing how they balance the two, what the real challenges are, and how it affects both their writing and parenting. You can read more about how [...]

Twelve Views of My Father

1 Grown so young she has a name, my father's grandmother, Cleavy Rowe, settles into the portrait's ancient rocking chair, having never told a living soul about her boy who died as she, for the first time, holds him. 2 Look, seal-slick and laughi [...]