glen raze i shook the hand of a dead man, with my shoes sweating off what they picked up from the grass outside. i thought he'd be bedridden, but he was standing and smiling. his cough was better than it had been in thirty years. i was wishing i'd been there the day he told his daughter, the woman who carried me in her womb for nine months, to stop blaming other people for her own misery. i was wishing i'd been there on other days too. days when he was coaching little league baseball. when his ailing mother was arm wrestling in her hospital bed, winning long after her strength had gone. but i wasn't even an idea yet on any of those days, so they got given to me later as stories of the days they'd been. i used to watch him hand roll cigarettes before the cancer got in his lungs and made him mortal, packing the paper with all that beautiful golden brown dirt. it was a better commercial for smoking than anything i ever saw on television, because it was meditative and real. his second wife, the one who was right for him in all the ways the first one had been wrong, would make me peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and they tasted like everything that was good about being alive spread between two pieces of bread. she smoked when he smoked. but she didn't roll her own. 140504 ... raze all these years i've been spelling his name wrong. but maybe that's right. maybe with one letter less he would have been a valley between hills and mountains. something the world wore down into a greater thing than it was when it was made. something strong enough to hold a river in its arms. maybe he was all those things anyway and no one noticed because the steadfast ones never call attention to themselves. they never ask to be told how beautiful they are. they just are. i still dream about his house, but he isn't in it anymore. 210830 what's it to you? who go blather from