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  • Of the Revolution
  • Brock Clarke (bio)

The last time i saw my father was on monument square. it was a Friday. I was thirteen years old. My school and my father’s office were within walking distance of the square, and so every Friday afternoon at four we met there in front of the monument and then walked to one of the nearby restaurants, where he had a martini and I had a soda and we talked and drank until my mother joined us there for dinner. I was a few minutes early that day, and since I was standing in front of the monument with nothing better to do, I decided to read the plaque on its base. I’d stood there next to the monument dozens of times, but had never bothered to find out who it was supposed to memorialize: it could have memorialized a guy named Monument for all I knew. But it didn’t: the plaque said it memorialized George Washington, whom the plaque called “the Father of the Revolution.”

I should mention that my father and I had been talking a lot those days about what I was going to be when I grew up. Except he’d never put it that way, exactly. Instead he’d kept saying, “I worry about what’s going to happen to you, Charlie. I worry about it so much.” He said this in the morning before we both left the house. He said it at night as I was in bed, waiting for him to say good night to me and to turn off the light. He said it at random times, on random days. He said it before he and my mother had their fights, and after them, and sometimes in the middle of them, too: I’d be upstairs in my room, trying to read or trying to sleep, and I’d hear their angry whispered back and forths from downstairs in the kitchen (they always seemed to argue in the kitchen) and in the middle of it my father would cry out, “But I worry about what’s going to happen to Charlie! I worry about him so much!” Anyway, this had gone on for months and months, and so the subject—what was going to happen to me, what I was going to be when I grew up—must have been on my mind when I was standing there, in front of the monument of the Father of the Revolution. Because when my father came up behind me and asked, “Hey, what are you thinking?” I said, “I was thinking about how I’d like to be the Father of the Revolution when I grow up.”

My father made a hissing sound between his teeth and said that probably wasn’t such a hot idea.

“Why not?” I asked, and turned to face him. It was February, and there was a good bit of snow in my father’s gray hair and on the shoulders of his black overcoat, too, even though it wasn’t snowing that hard, and besides, my father’s office was right across the square from where we were standing. It made [End Page 9] it seem like he hadn’t come straight from work, like he’d been walking around for a while. His face looked red and chapped and he smelled like wet wool and cigarettes, even though, as far as I knew, my father didn’t smoke. I expected him to whack me gently on the shoulder and say, “Hey bud,” like he always did on Fridays when we met in the Square. But he didn’t. He just stood there, a foot away from me, and looked at me gravely, as though he were seriously considering why I shouldn’t, or couldn’t, be the Father of the Revolution when I grew up.

“Because,” my father said, hooking in his thumb in the direction of the monument. “There’s already a Father of the Revolution.”

“But if there weren’t,” I said.

“But there is,” my father said. “And besides, I bet the Father of the Revolution would be a little bit paranoid, a little...

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