peroxide ovenbird I thought Dad was napping in his chair, but suddenly his eyes are wide open. He looks at me and says, "do you think I was a good dad?" I get all tangled in "was" because he still IS my dad, though I suppose most of the active parenting is over. I understand that he means to ask if he was he a good dad when I was a child. It isn't hard to emphatically say yes, yes of course he was a good dad! Not without faults. No one is. But goodness prevails in the shoulder rides he gave me on my way to bed and the way he ruffled my hair when I was sad and the books he read me and the peroxide he insisted on pouring on my cuts even though I screamed every time (I can still see the bubbles it made in my tiny wounds) and the music that he always had playing in the house and the meals he cooked and the way he was always on my side, always believing I was something rare and wonderful. "You kids were my life," he says and I know what he means but I also wonder what sacrifices that entailed, what parts of him had to die so I could live. I look at my father, his vulnerable question hanging in the air between us. I'm getting disoriented by memories and can't get my words to line up. "All I remember is love," I say. There is no greater truth. 250502 what's it to you? who go blather from