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K_ `ikp$E`e\P\Xijfek_\AfY For my father at his retirement dinner If you are tired, you should be—you’ve worked hard each day, the schlep into the city, the Johnson File dog-eared and heavy in your monogrammed attaché. If you are tired, but still not ready to be retired—get over it, you are. And although you are not near the fragile figure that haunts you now, that image of your own father, regretful and old at his retirement podium some three decades away forever hunched and expressing into the microphone his catarrh, you understand that gray can never be the new black, nor is sixty-five, as promised on the cover of AARP, the new forty, and if history has taught us anything Dad, it’s get out while you still can. So I say this to you in the spirit of beginnings, and in celebration of the last time you will be made to dress and answer the tasteless question: chicken or beef? Now, it’s newspapers for you in the long afternoon light of Korean restaurants, your kimchi chigae simmering in its stone bowl, and a bottle of beer so cold the silver crane, as if startled awake, lifts from its fog and rises through the cloud of frost melting down the label. ...

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