Suzanne and I had put together some decorations and bought a cake to celebrate my father’s 86^th birthday. Now we–Suzanne, her two daughters, my husband and I–hastily decorated the common room at the nursing home where he had been for a couple months after a bad fall. “Perhaps this will be the way I go,” he had said during my last visit as he pointed toward his swollen ankles and calves.

As we finished, my older brother arrived with my father’s friend and companion of the many years since my mother’s death. My brother set up a video camera. Emotionally exhausted from having planned events for family celebrations for too many years, I was feeling buoyed up by everyone’s contributing to the festivities, especially since celebration was not at the top of my agenda. My children’s father had died October 28^th; now, April 10^th, we knew that my husband’s prostate cancer was aggressive and deadly.

Relief flooded me as my wheelchair-bound father arrived as his best self. Immediately he attuned to his great granddaughters just 5, and not yet 3. Recognizing the strangeness of his being in a wheelchair in a nursing home, he quickly began to draw them in so that they would become more comfortable with him. Soon they were giggling as, with his trademark twinkle in his eye, he teased out them of their shyness.

After the singing, the cake and ice cream, I had an inspiration. I asked my father to recite “Happy Horseshit.” This time instead of launching right into the poem with his usual mischievous grin, he turned to his great granddaughters and began,

You know, I was the last born in my family. Since my three brothers and sister where much older than I was, I was the one my mother called when she saw the ice wagon coming down the street. In those days, to you so long ago, we did not have refrigerators and the ice man came in a horse drawn wagon, bringing us the ice to keep our food cold!

It was my job to follow the wagon down the street after he left our house so that I could gather up the horse’s droppings—his poop! And bring it home to put it on my mother’s rose bushes she grew along the tiny strip of dirt we had in front of our row house right here in Philadelphia. And this is the poem I wrote about it. You know, I was meant to be a poet. You be sure to do what you dream of doing in your lives.

Oh, Worthy Horseshit, Soft and Sweet,

That art despised when on the street,

When in the fields as hay and straw

Thou wert admired by all who saw

That once was grass and fields of green,

Where daisies grew and violets weaned

Their tender shoots.

Change we e’en thus!

Take heart, O, Horseshit, Someone must

Be horseshit- yes!

And someone knows

He smells you

Who smells A Rose.

And, Suzanne, don’t forget the Baccalaureate poem I wrote for you. To Boom Ba from Father South:

Time That Adds To

Not Takes Away-

-And Love.

Two weeks later four hours after my younger brother’s birthday, my father died in his sleep.