Dear Son,
I’m watching a baseball game. The Dodgers are leading the Brewers, 5-2.
It’s the seventh inning.
When you were little, you didn’t like watching baseball games. You said baseball was boring. Endless. Every time a game was on, you said it’s never going to be the seventh inning.
When I was little, I liked the song The Twelfth of Never. The Johnny Mathis and Donny Osmond versions. How never meant always.
I’ve been feeling little since you’ve been gone. Feeling like never and always are the same.
I don’t know how to snuggle within this moment. Or how to wriggle out of it.
It’s always okay, I guess, to not snuggle, to not wriggle.
To not know how, not as in now, not as in never.
Just as it’s always okay to watch the innings peel away like Polaroids until they reach that never of a seventh one, when I’m little and small, and my tiny moon of a heart melts like April snow, as Messrs. Mathis and Osmond sing their hearts always will.
Yours until the Seventh and the Twelfth,
Dad
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Pat Foran is a writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Trampset, X-R-A-Y and elsewhere. Find him at http://neutralspaces.co/your_patforan/ and on Twitter at @pdforan.
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image: Alan Tenhoeve
Rejection Letters 