Happy Father's Day and then Juneteenth. On choosing to be a Dad.

Some men collapse into fatherhood at the maddening behest of biological necessity, an impetus towards destruction, to quiet his own moods, to lay spent, exhausted next to a woman, and for him to fall asleep as she is talking to no end about her dreams.

Other men make a choice, where someone stole the milk from Bessie already, and he is just there to bring her fodder to eat, like a good animal husbandman, and the old Bessie's always say he needs a hundred thousand and the prim of his shoulder at her eyeline.  It never all quite shakes-out the way the want it, either of them.

They are stuck, as it were, like old Dilbert tilling the soil of the lease holder, watching the sleepy back end of a mule undulate as it saunters along.  Dilbert had shot a man some years ago, and for his trouble, got not a Thank You card from the county, but instead pulled long years at Parchman Penitentiary.

It humbled him but did not make him forget, and that was God's own irony of the thing; he would set after Flem Snopes with nothing so more than the old form of Saturday Night Special, which was a chunk of brick, maybe or not with mortar glazed on it.

He was like them, a father of an adopted one, and the convict, at least in the sense that he never got the wild out of him completely, and like the rednecks cooking wildgame, some put vinegar in it to cut the wild flavor--the residue of endless forages through the brush, eating weeds, wild berries, sundry tree leaves and such.

William D. Goddens.  As this one thought, it wasn't William Dilbert Goddens, but instead William Damn Goddens, the man that quietly worked the earth, himself like poured out water, and his recompense the oily residue that gleamed on top of the water, the finest, thinnest little garnish.

Or should we say, not the they fall into fatherhood, but that fatherhood falls all them, and few, beyond that biological necessity, are privileged to actually go to fatherhood by choice.

Little Brian needs a dad, maybe, and Little Brian himself too innocent and naive for meteors of evil and stupidity to cause any real alter to his path of orbit around his mother's sundress-covered thighs.

The could meet together and stand there, each somewhat befuddled by the other, and Dilbert would take Brian's hand, and what Dilbert learned of killing his cousins and other stuff of lie, he could share with Little Brian; talk about feeding the meat to alligators just simply to get rid of that awful stink of putrefication, and not at all aimed at hiding the evidence, particularly.