Life is Good

On this day, this Saturday, the daddy won’t be posting about a Republican president that went all the way to Israel to criticize a Democratic presidential candidate. The daddy won’t be talking about a Republican senator who, lacking solutions to a depressed economy or a failed foreign policy, tries to run a presidential race solely by criticizing his opponent.

No, on this day, the daddy is strolling around St. Anthony Main, a small commercial enclave centered on the North side of the Mississippi river, in downtown Minneapolis.

The daddy is standing in the center of a bridge, staring at the water below. It seems to come toward the daddy in waves, somehow calming his nerves, replenishing his soul.

Standing on this bridge, the daddy, for some reason, begins to think of the great African American poet Langston Hughes, of his poem about the river, his first published poem, one of his best. The daddy, who fancies himself as a writer, a poet, stares into the mighty Mississippi and tries to remember Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers:”

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
Flow of human blood in human veins.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut in the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
Went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
Bosom turns all golden in the sunset…”

{The daddy forgets the rest of the poem. Damn! Let me see: Senator McCain is 71 years old and sometimes has senior moments. What’s the daddy’s lame excuse?}

The daddy stares into the river again, beneath the waves, shutting out the sound and slowly begins to remember the rest of the poem:

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The daddy looks up into the sky, sees sunrays streaking down into swirling waters and thinks: when the daddy speaks in third person, life is good.