Our Fathers.

We are not our fathers.

But we could be.

We may grow to be.

We are the pieces that they were bred from. But we are not the whole of them.

Our fathers come from stale bread and warm milk and rusted gears. They come form places like farms and mills and workshops. Places that we do not know. Places that remind us of far off lands vast with foliage and hungry lions.

We expect them to know us when they barely know themselves. We expect them to help us grow into men when they are still only little boys themselves; lost in their mothers aprons.

They are married, or divorced, but continue to sit in worn out front porch chairs day dreaming of the siren that lured them in the days of their youth.

They think back to when, in the corner of a college bar, they saw their wives for the first time. How her hair fell on her tan shoulders and how no other girl in the room existed at that very moment.

Our fathers minds are clouded with these things and yet, we still expect and call upon them to lead and be mature and to rally us together in times of need and strife. But they are just men. They are just boys.

Boys hiding under the pale flowered patterns of their mothers aprons.