Before             for my father, on what would have           been his eighty-ninth birthday   Before then, when the bells of St. Anne’s had barely stopped ringing, before you looked at the black and white proof: wife/woman, man/ husband (I was engendered by the book, all right) . . . but before, full two years before — that night you got the call — who was it told you that your best bud’s kid sister, ignored (not quite ignored) way back before the war — the redhead — was now a nurse, was now holding vigil in a church on Telegraph Hill, still fogbound, still struck numb by the phone that rang the night before her wedding: George Somebody was dead, lost in the bay off the bachelor boat, so leaving her alone?     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont July 2009