Patience   A music man, my father — always whistling, singing, mastering the flute. He did it all, loved it all, called it his ministry — a true amateur, even amidst his gleaming instruments and X-rays — dentist was just his day job.                                 Evenings were for practice — lessons, band — and Sundays meant mass, incense and bells, and God must have heard what all of us heard: he sang for his soul in a thunderous baritone.                                       Even better than the hymns and churchly rigmarole were Gilbert & Sullivan shows. He let me tag along — Mikado, Ruddigore, Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Pinafore.   His favorite? Hard to say. He cut a dapper figure as a commodore, was paired with the handsomest matrons, doffed a cap like he did it every day.                                      In the glare of the footlights he found reality in make-believe, his face behind the makeup. When they did The Mikado he’d be Pooh-Bah, Lord High Everything Else, never break character, ever so pompous, so stern, so silly. He had it all in him.                                             Pillow- bellied and berobed, he took his turn with eyes painted Japanese, high plains style. He sang while assuming a sumo stance, and brought down the house with his Pooh-Bah dance.   I saw all the Patience rehearsals, sat in the back of a drab, musty old gym while the prairie howled outside.                                                    Maybe that’s when the notion first took root, in the dim confines of adolescence, childhood’s winter, that poetry is ridiculous. Night after night I took it all in: the thin, simpering figures of poets, their tight velvet knee britches, their lavender-scented hankies, their frilly cuffs. No one laughed harder than I did — I got what it meant. But my dad was a dragoon, a man after all, and I learned that real men wear swords and and that singing is the reason for words.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont April 2016