Third day of spring...wanted to walk to the park...but it is too cold and windy...went to our garden..some Daffodils are up, their tops yellow-- they nod like sleepy children.I look to my archives for inspiration, find my four year old poem "I Love Lucy". It goes:
I imagine Lucille Ball--all mouth and eyes--eating a seven foot long strand of spaghetti when a tiger enters.
Lucy says: Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night.
The tiger says: Grrr
Lucy says (0ffering bowl) You have another red sauce that you're fond of?
My friend Ron loves this poem. I will read it for him at the soup kitchen workshop. I have never been a soup kitchen "guest." But I used to volunteer and I'm a church member. Another poem pops up from four years ago: it goes:
I love to love love
I love to love
I love
yes I love to love love
and somewhere, somehow, father,
I love you.

That poem took years to write. Spring is here and soon there will be birds and bees. It took Pop years to give that lecture and only when that square badge of masculinity a package of condoms was discovered in my car's glove compartment.
"Use your peter to piss with " he said. Stunned (I was seventeen) I had no use for condoms for several years. I would not be trapped into fatherhood like my dad. It worked out. I was too ill for marriage and family.Until now. Though fatherhood is out of the question. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside, the song goes. That was me. Perhaps it was Lucy too. We all have our tigers.