An Ode to Uncle Frank

For Uncle Frank,He liked the long roads best—those cracked, sun-baked veins of Americawhere a man could ridewith the window down and nothing but radio staticand the smell of gasoline and grassto keep him company. He wasn’t fancy about his beer.Said the imports tasted like a promise they never kept.Give him a cold American can,silver in the sun, sweating like it worked for a living.He’d crack it, take that first pull,and grin like he’d just remembered a good secret. He talked about his mother like she was gravity—something that kept him from floating offwhen the world spun a little too fast.Mom, Mommy, Mother—the way he said it changed with the weather,but it always meant love,that deep, simple kind that doesn’t ask for applause. He had a way of turning the small things holy—a drive at dusk, a six-pack,the sound of tires on wet pavement,the smell of fall when you roll your neighbor’s corpse through the leaves.You could almost believethat was all heaven ever needed to be. So here’s to Fr