What does it mean to lose the familial patriarch? Our sadness steps in what remains of his big footprints, unrecoverable truths forgone on the long walks of his livelier years—but what mattered then, perhaps to us both, was play; and play was proper too, while his feet could still dance with ours atop them. Those years are busy with the doing. We missed occasions though, ignoring the inevitable, putting off what looks like a burden, gathering sweet glimmers of his perspective before death; mopping the decks for the details of life that can only be pointed out by such a captain as our patriarch; for only he knows the dingiest corners that hide the secrets of our ship, only he can recount the waves that we were. It became his ship, after all, precisely because of his own months and years of scrubbing away with sore elbows, slowly acquiring the old man's palate; for peace in the mundane task, for the love of waters rough or soft. All at once and all too late we realize what luck we'd have stricken to have been the scolded deckhand throughout this captain's voyage cross sea—even the mop itself. How keenly interested do we become in those smallest of details post mortem? Where did he buy his shoes? What did his tailor think of him; his brother; his second wife? Which gales did he face down that perhaps he shouldn't? And what's gone with him, with the meager handful woefully tossed upon his oak square —gone is that same dirt, forever, from which we sprang. So here we remember to soak him up, to play the role of the mop, the deckhand, any instrument at his disposal while he still bares his chest against rough ocean, while he yet guides our crew, reading the stars as only a deckhand-turned-first mate-turned-captain, brave in action even while fear well inside him, like any man. One day you'll own his compass –and tears, distorting the arrow's direction below its glass protectorate– you'll mourn the beat of that captain's pulse that once warmed this compass, coaxing direction from it like a small god over dark waters, demanding safe passage for his beloved, however meager and green their merit—the direction that led fate across rough sea and to our own unlikely creation. Mourn your father before his death or twice you'll lose his treasure.