Our Father

Two things you should know about our father. He loved golf, a game played, as you must surely know, in a garden. One winter, for example, he painted some old golf balls with red shoe polish and then went out on the course to practice in the snow. Was his golf jones so bad he needed a fix in mid-winter? Or was he secretly amused at the thought of a middle-aged man trudging about in the snow hitting red balls with some very expensive sticks?

Perhaps both.

He also kept meticulous practice notes and designed and constructed his own putter.

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He had a sense of humor. We called it his “Danish sense of humor.” Whether or not it was peculiarly Danish is beside the point. His parents were from Denmark, of which he was proud. Victor Borge was Danish, played the piano well, had a sense of humor. From this it follows that Dad’s humor was Danish.

A favorite riddle: A duck family was swimming in a pond, Mother, Father, and the Baby. Perhaps there was a fourth; I forget; but it doesn’t matter. Anyhow, they swam about: circles, S-curves, spiracles, ogives, pterodactyls, parabolas, equilateral triangles, eternal ones too, helices, and hemi-demi-semiquavers, all the standard figures of Olympic pond swimming. As they were heading back to shore, feeling all flushed and satisfied, the baby duck remarked: “Aren’t we five ducks having fun?”

Why'd the baby ask that?

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From Dad

by Sally Benzon


William Benzon
(1912 – 1998)


Clinging to light
By weeping tears

Charged with this silence
Only sorrow can receive:

Whispered heights of trees
Sway the breathless memory

Out of nowhere,
From the airs of body

You walk at once alone,
And beside us: Not that we are

Asked by a flock of birds
Who insist on behalf

Of one shy authority,
“Part our days together

To a different branch. Larry, Sally,
Sing to laugh around the world

With me!” Tiding this canopy,
You are the man whose voice outlives

Agreeable disbelief
Into our inhabited green

Hundreds of leaves, golf balls, too
And leaves growing! . . .

Round of arms’ reach
The echo of echoed wings

Reveals the merry chance
Now a sunbeaming glow:

Chimes to sound
The melody of you.