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Rodney DeCroo
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The Night of My First Breath
On the night of my first breath in a delivery room at Allegheny County General Hospital, my birth father whom I will never meet is asleep on a bus
disappearing into the mid-west. His name is Frank Houser. His jacket is crumpled between the side of his face and the window. It is the 29th
of December, but he dreams rain coming down so hard, long strands strike the glass as if to shatter it. My father's hands are twitching in his lap
and when he looks down a sparrow is nesting as if in the crook of a tree. Warmth like joy fills my father's body because
so delicate a creature has chosen him for safety. He lightly strokes with the tip of a finger the small brown head. The bird begins singing
into the darkness of the bus. Its high, sweet trilling goes out among the sleeping passengers, drawing each breath into its praise. My father Find more lyrics at ※ Mojim.com
knows he is as much this song as anything else in his life. When he looks outside the rain has subsided into a blazing mist
lit red by the furnaces of steel mills along the river. Upwards through the mist, against the darkness, black smoke over the city like the sparrow's notes,
traveling through my father's hands into the night of this place that he is leaving. When he looks down again his lap is empty. A woman nudges him awake
as the bus pulls into the Cleveland terminal. Piles of plowed snow are crusted black beneath the white lights of the empty parking lot.
He stares out the window, trying to remember what he was dreaming. He is asked if he is getting off here and he says no, he has much further to go.
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