The Sundowner

I found him naked on the hilltop, his hilltop, the same one as always. He stood silhouetted in the specked turbulence of a blueish-orange sunset, his clouded eyes fixed with wonder upon God’s rotating canvas. Pearly, unkempt, and uncut hair blew on the evening’s breeze like cottony threads about his clouded eyes, framing them against translucent skin road-mapped with criss-crossed veins and wrinkles. Like a scene from the “Opera Glorious” his arms raised their rippled skin to the heavens, his bony, branchlike fingers stretched wide to touch... what?

I was a young man, my values fixed, my world “real”. I believed back then that I was embarrassed for him, but I was not. He was the lucky one, he was beyond indignity. It was I who was embarrassed. Shame flushed my face. I hurried up the hill, my steps unsteady in the tall grass. I wondered as I climbed if this sunset was foreshadowing my future, if his ending was to be my lot and legacy? Were these the golden years I had to look forward to? There could only be sadness in losing a trained and exercised mind, and if one as sharp as his could falter, why not mine?

As I neared I called to him. “Dad?”

He did not answer. Instead he began to dance, his arms postured as to hold a love long lost. He raised his voice in an uncharacteristic falsetto, singing a forgotten song that tickled the deepest depths of my memory. Young I was, but not harsh. There was no one around, no one to witness his folly, so I halted my intrusion. What was the harm, to give him a moment of tranquility when so few were left to him?

He danced the early stars into a high, cobalt sky. Pink and gold clouds stretched away like a path into the darkness of the coming night. His dancing feet found those tinted clouds, and those bare feet grew emboldened in their soft downs. His movements became swifter, his eyes shone brighter, his chiselled features turned boyish. I saw something of my father then that I never had before, something that only his mother, or a youthful lover, ever could have seen. His eyes looked into mine with a wide eyed innocence from out the dawn of a new and pristine reality.

I wished then that it was me dancing in his arms, that I might feel his joy myself, but in my heart I knew who it was his arms held. In my heart I knew who it was awaiting him at the path’s end, and knowing who it was made my heart sing in that same, old fashioned falsetto that he was singing in, harmonizing to his happy memories.

My shame and my fear left me to roll away like the tears from my eyes. I no longer worried what people would think of my father’s ills. Why worry about those digging holes when you can instead raise up to the sky? Suddenly, I wished that the world would see him dancing, that it could see him dancing naked on a hilltop, on his hilltop, as I did. I wished they could see, as he was showing me, that there is such a thing for us as Peace.

Suddenly I hoped that his would be my lot, and my legacy. What more was there for me to hope, but that I might follow along in my father’s path to everlasting joy.

Shame tossed aside, I stripped free of clothes under a silvery moon and stars, and we danced to a falsetto song.