My Father Gone These Forty Years

My father gone these forty years, my mother gone twenty, I remember... the acrid smell of tobacco on my mother’s rough fingers, as she sat, silently, in a predawn Texas coastal town, my head in her lap, the short-wave radio crackling with static. She strained to hear the chatter of shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico, yelling out to each other in Cajun French, Mexican Spanish, accented English. She stroked my nine-year-old hair, her middle-aged body aching, hungry, worried, sleepless. Far from her roots -- stranded -- in this strange, dry, totally foreign place. Her imaginings of my father’s struggles with the sea and its weathers filled her mind. She knew, all the while, that even if he were safe, we would still suffer the poverty of the displaced and desperate, whose minor, occasional comforts were only, onshore, the cold beers and noisy camaraderie of the others like him, like her...like us.