The death of a president ...

The death of Gerald Ford takes me back, back to the early 1970s and my own nascent awareness. I was 11 years old.

I remember the day Nixon resigned. I remember standing in the breezeway of our house; my mother coming outside urging myself and my friends like Bob Hezlep to come in and watch T.V.; that Nixon was resigning. I and my friends could care less.

I remember perhaps a year earlier, I had taken a vacation to Washington D.C. with my mom and dad and older sister Jill. We were visiting the House of Representatives and my mother pointed to Gerald Ford in the chamber saying that man would be the next Vice President as Spiro Agnew had just resigned.

I remember being at the beach for our summer vacation and seeing a headline of a magazine inside a store on Balboa Island. The headline read: Impeach Ford? It�ll be a cold day in hell. This must have been before he had actually pardoned Nixon.

I remember the campaign posters from 1976 and thinking that with Ford/Dole you had the opportunity to vote for a car and a pineapple.

Sun bursts upon A Blue Breaking Sky

Blue breaks spreads out
Amazing morning sky, tawny
Robust with promise
Glorious with sun curling orange & red
Screaming into a new day
Rages this first day of December
Into the moment forever
Now

All the TV dads are dying

All the TV dads are dying
Morty Seinfield & this Christian monk

Are now to be remembered
Doting fatherly upon this sitcom season's fall from Grace.

These words a prelude in
a requiem for Tommy

Sweet Tommy quiet Tommy
In the field where he lies
All of us would drive by
Wondering where he was
He was there all the time.

Waiting for angels from up high in the sky
He would lie there for days
Having simply laid down to die

No one really knew him still all knew something was awry
When he failed to call us as to a reason why.

And now everyday on my way to and from work I do drive
Past the fields where Tommy sweet Tommy died.

And I pray to the heavens & think these simple rhymes;
All fate is entwined by these fields of Time.