By most accounts he was a “mean cuss.”
But I mostly remember his bald head,
plaid shirts, and brown cigarettes filling up the tray
while he watched Hee Haw on TV.
He’d take some creaking steps
into Grandma’s kitchen where there’d be
a row of red tomatoes on the sill
lined up like the heads of decapitated carnations—
and fix up a raw beef patty,
take out his dentures, bite into it grinning like a shark,
and grow them back (pop them back in),
just like that.
He “did not play well with others,” and he
“liked to fight in the old days,” have ended
many stories I’ve since been told, sounding like
they were from the movies.
But, in my innocence, and being the apple of his eye
until he died—I didn’t know you couldn’t play with sharks.
I also didn’t know until his funeral when I was six,
he’d fathered other children
besides my dad and his brothers,
when they stepped forward, swimming toward his casket
as if from some magic ocean closet
while a voice above named them, echoing sorrow.
I’ve since been trying to sort out what I got from him
that echoed on after that day—
brown eyes,
a little scrappiness,
the love of good cowboy (girl) boots,
a pocket watch,
Grandma’s heart.
O, Shark, you gave me some good stuff, you mean ol’ cuss.
© 2025 Jennifer Wagner
Photo above of the man himself taken by my grandmother. She won the car shown in 1958 in a raffle for $1.