June 2019
I'm a retired English Professor spending my time writing, taking the occasional photograph, trying to follow the Dharma. For more about me and my musings: http://www.michaelminassian.com
MY FATHER’S ENCYCLOPEDIA
My father wrote his own encyclopedia
which he insisted we use for our homework
starting not with the letter A
but choosing J instead, picked
at random one morning after glancing
once at my mother reading her horoscope
in the Journal Tribune
which explains why I had so many
term papers about ju-jitsu, the Emperor Julian,
Jerusalem, and Thomas Jefferson,
filled with inaccuracies, as my teachers
pointed out, since my father preferred
to make up facts as if he
were broadcasting a radio play
to a deserted island where no one would
listen or care that his other project
was building a flying horse modeled
after Mobil’s Flying Red Horse Pegasus,
one that he expected he could breathe
life into and fly over our New Jersey
neighborhood until the garage burned down
and my mother threatened to leave him
unless he stopped picking up road kill
along the Palisades Parkway;
soon after, he abandoned the encyclopedia
as well, getting only part way into the K’s,
weeping as he typed the entries for the Kaiser,
kaleidoscope, and kamikaze and said goodbye
one night after dinner proclaiming he had built
his greatest invention, then disappeared,
forgotten by everyone except our family
and the single entry that listed his name
as K., Mark: inventor of a time machine
halfway through the last letter of his book.
--originally appeared in Stoneboat 2016.
© 2019 Michael Minassian
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