Your father works on his car, back hunched over, eyes dropped to the ground

and he's talking about the awful things he's heard in the news,

humming to a song from the forties, because he doesn't know songs from now.

And his white T-shirt is the one he sleeps in, his stubble unshaved, his hair nearly gone.

It used to be brown, you remember, not grey.

And when he goes to work, he wears bright plaid shirts, like things from a carnival.

Except he hasn't enjoyed a carnival in years, can't walk to the Ferris wheel without an ache in

his ribs and his leg and his everything.

But now he is smiling, even as he talks about the horrible news,

even as sweat drips down his neck, and there's grease all over the shirt he'll wear to bed,

and you're standing there behind him, asking him to hurry up because it's too hot out here,

even though you're the one in shorts - he wouldn't be caught dead in them -

and you're the one with a drink - he's afraid to spill one over the car -

and you're the one with the small hands, the ones that haven't been toughened up by the world yet.

Nothing like his calloused ones, the ones that barely hold a paintbrush anymore,

because he's too tired all the time, he barely breathes when he sleeps,

so he sleeps in the day, when everything is bright and shining and not soaked up in the swollen darkness of night.

Maybe this is why he smiles now, in this heavy heat, because the car is all he has.

This car, sleek and black and going on eighty years old, and it still runs beautifully.

What a pair they make. Creaking man, creaking car.

His skin is almost as wrinkled as the leather seats.

He runs his hands over the hood like it's some holy, sacred thing.

And years later, he still can't get over how classy those whitewall tires are.

Your father washes the car, digs wrenches into the engine, does whatever he can to keep it alive.

Because this is what it's like when someone grows old:

Their heart keeps beating, but it's beating them to death.