..squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942   
                      Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

Thirteen. I discover a billfold-sized black and white of mom and dad from the 40s. Slightly yellowed, scalloped edges. I eyeballed it like a puppy digging for grubs. Lanky dad’s white T-shirt and Burt Lancaster trousers. His smoldering edge. Mom’s tight polka-dot frock and Cuban-heel stockings. Her chestnut hair bunched into a snood.  He had one bare arm around her waist, the other stretched out like heron wings in mid-flight. Jack Kerouac and Rita Hayworth new how to jive.

Sex the open
secret. Dig Gene Krupa
who thumps the snare.

We moved from small town Tennessee to the west side of Chicago. He worked on the 44th floor in the Sears & Roebuck tower as an industrial engineer. Years later, hitchhiking cross country, dropping every other semester out of college, I got hooked on Kerouac’s haiku. Truth is, the steamy rouge was a looker. Thirty years to connect that early snapshot of my Dad to my Kerouac crush.

Volkswagen van floor
senior year sex. His muscles
lit by streetlights.

In Chicago, I can’t remember when he wasn’t bent over like the hunchback of Notre Dame in a plaid business suit. He had a troublesome and haunted countenance that would sometimes dart out of his body. Random streaks of leather belt whippings. A good day when he took the commuter rail at 6 a.m.; the very best when he boarded the last train home.

Who was the tall boy-man was in the moth-eaten snapshot? Did he once love my mom? Take her into his arms with gratitude—or wonder?  I suggest to my sister they must have felt a trace of tenderness. She chuckles and says, their only bond was lust.

Youth holds the space
for the sacred and profane.
Aging, you choose the balance.