Poem for Monday and the Kingdom of Father's Day

Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming
By Thomas Lux

It must be coming, mustn't it? Churches
and saloons are filled with decent humans.
A mother wants to feed her daughter,
fathers to buy their children things that break.
People laugh, all over the world, people laugh.
We were born to laugh, and we know how to be sad;
we dislike injustice and cancer,
and are not unaware of our terrible errors.
A man wants to love his wife.
His wife wants him to carry something.
We're capable of empathy, and intense moments of joy.
Sure, some of us are venal, but not most.
There's always a punchbowl, somewhere,
in which floats a…
Life's a bullet, that fast, and the sweeter for it.
It's the same everywhere: Slovenia, India,
Pakistan, Suriname—people like to pray,
or they don't,
or they like to fill a blue plastic pool
in the back yard with a hose
and watch their children splash.
Or sit in cafes, or at table with family.
And if a long train of cattle cars passes
along West Ridge
it's only the cattle from East Ridge going to the abattoir.
The unbroken world is coming,
(it must be coming!), I heard a choir,
there were clouds, there was dust,
I heard it in the streets, I heard it
announced by loudhailers
mounted on trucks.

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After a morning of catching up on the ramifications of one little observations about Janeway/Chakotay and "State of Flux," we spent the afternoon with my parents and Paul's parents, for whom Paul made brunch before we went downtown. We'd known it was supposed to be in the 90s, so we ruled out baseball, and none of our parents nor our kids had seen the Indiana Jones exhibit at the National Geographic Museum, so we went to see that!


Family and Indiana Jones!


Getting ready to enter the exhibit.


My parents and the Holy Grail.


My in-laws and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.


Younger son declared that I was a tacky person for trying to kiss the skull.


Do we weigh as much as a monster fish?


Could we catch a monster fish?



Paul had left cassoulet cooking in the crock pot, so we all had dinner together before the grandparents left. Then, after much discussion of what constituted an appropriate Father's Day movie -- I said Field of Dreams, Daniel said National Treasure, Adam said Man of Steel -- we discovered neither of our sons had seen Edge of Tomorrow and put that on (it's probably my favorite Tom Cruise movie, tied with Minority Report)!