100 Words: Father’s Day

Father’s Day brunch in the backyard, an easy 5K with a friend, hot in the sun and cool in the shade—meanwhile the Arctic broils and Siberia burns. I am a creature of shreds and patches on my attention, pulled perpetually, centripetally and centrifugally, in flight from my ordinary life into the rarefied, terrifying superstructure of unordinary times. My own father gone two years this summer, leaving me in the blind spot of fathering, caring for a child I can’t possibly protect, afflicted with unforeknowing. The present tense insisted I remain with the day, breezes in leaves, the night to come.