Try This 9.6

My beat up Ford rattles as I turn down the long dirt road. “This is 98.7 Your Hometown Radio Station” crows the old radio from beneath the dashboard hula-girl. Today is Friday, so I am going to see his grave. It is nothing special, just an old headstone thrown up in haste by the U.S. Military at a time when too many were perishing to allow for any pomp and circumstance. But I will go, and I will lay flowers. It is the right thing to do after all, whether I liked the old man or not, no one deserves a flower-less grave. The radio begins to play the next rotation of classic rock and the oldies. “I got my first real six string… Summer of 69..” The winter of ’69 they sent him home in a box from Vietnam. The summer of ’69 he came home on leave for the last time. “Goddamn it, son, you look like a girl.” He was always commenting on my clothes. Sometimes he whipped me for it. “Susan, why do you let our son look like such a little girl??” He shouted at my mother regularly. Letting her know she wasn’t doing her job right while he was off “Saving our country from the communists”. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt my mother had bought me from the catalogs. It was red, white, and blue floral and she had bought it for my father’s arrival home. Well, the joke is on dad. I brought him red and white and blue flowers today. Wherever he is, I hope he remembers.