Every now and again, I think about where my dad might be, and what he might be doing at the very moment in which I think of him. “No dignity, no duty,” I remember my Grandfather saying. We, meaning my mom and I, think that his current dwelling is south, somewhere in Arizona. Maybe alone, maybe with a recent girlfriend who hasn’t realized how two-faced he is yet. It went something like this: when I was the little old age of three, he decided to leave me, my mom, and my sister. He said we were an expense not worth retaining. Having us around couldn’t pay back the debt he owed from his failing business proposition, the invention of a hybrid eating utensil that combined a fork, spoon, and knife together to increase the amount of table room at restaurants and finer consumption establishments for large parities of impatient patrons. His “would-be” investors claimed they already had the “spork” and that hybrid eating utensils were a thing of the past. He cursed the world, anointing the words “*******, I'll make it... I'll make it big somewhere else," and simply was gone ever since.

“Your father is a very bad man,” My mother explained to my watering eye. “I hereby excommunicate him from this family. We are going to love each other in this house.”

“What’s ex-chum-oon-eh-cating mean?” I asked diligently, wiping a tear.

“It’s what the Christian Church does to people who have been naughty. You’ll learn all about those religious doctrines in school, when you’re older. We’ll talk about it then little Bugaboo.”

And I was off to bed.