Easter Sunday with my Dad

                                                                                                                       

He in his leisure chair, the seat where he lives

We look at old photos

There’s one from Easter 1986, taken in this very room

     Hey, that’s exactly 30 years ago

My hair was dark and different, and I’m wearing funny clothes

      Dad was wearing jeans, a workshirt,

     and desert-boots,

able-bodied

 then

We are watching King of Kings, about the life of Jesus, from 1961,

    the year I was born

The blue-eyed actor playing Jesus looks like such a goy

We watch him carrying his own cross, bleeding from his crown of thorns

  It all feels so real and

     I’m heartsick for him

Do not weep for me, Jesus says

My dad says, “He’s probably thinking, ‘I’m Jesus…I was hoping to get better treatment than this.’”

We watch as he is crucified by those mean Romans

They nail a board to the top of his cross, which says “INRI”

And I google it to finally find out what it means

I research later that this was the first motion picture to show Jesus’ face

and the actor who played him had to shave his chest and armpits because test audiences

 didn’t like to see a hairy Jesus

And also, Orson Wells is the uncredited narrator, whose voice my dad and I recognize

We watch the scene in which Jesus is resurrected, the holiday we are celebrating today

Jesus is all cleaned up and looks great

     and the movie ends shortly after that

My sister and I spent all our Easter Sundays with our dad because divorced dads

 saw their kids on Sundays.

He always took us to our cousins’ house where they prepared a fabulous egg hunt

 in the nooks and crannies of their big home

Those small silvery-colored milk chocolate eggs

    green, pink, blue

The visit with my dad is over,

kisses and hugs and vows of love for each other,

 and he calls me his first born, which I am

My daddy and I still together

           You could take a photo of us right now

My grandma is in the old photos, standing right over there,

but she isn’t here, physically, anymore

        She’s surely in the same Heaven that Jesus went to

Dad says for me to drive carefully, as he always does

We don’t live under the same roof

and haven’t for years

See you soon, I say

I will see him two weeks from today

     because that’s the best I can do

I’m a working mom

I love him but that really is

 the best I can do