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162 GOOD NEWS FROM ThE OThER WORlD Palm Springs, CA “Dad, you’re lookin’ good,” I say, “like the fountain of youth.” His hands on my feet, grimacing, weary, mercurial, wing-footed eighty-year-old doctor. Wears a denim shirt, bola tie, turquoise and silver tip, tanned, tennis-playing, macho . . . “Making more money now, more than in Skokie. But you need arch supports,” he says, encasing my feet in plaster. Damaged feet. Feet out of alignment. Four-times married, forty-year-old feet. “Well, good news from the other world,” he says. “Really?” “The void is nothing but people’s breath.” “So something survives?” I say, “Feet survive. Feet and breath survive,” he says, “peoples’ feet and peoples’ breath.” 163 “That is good news,” I say. “Don’t mock me,” he says. “Do you know you still ‘toe in’? That your head ‘pitches forward’? You’re past the halfway mark, son. God is not altruistic, you know, He doesn’t make exceptions. Of course things are dark and light at once.” Huh? Who is he? Whoever was my father? Bloodied in some Russian pogrom. Nixon-lover on the North Side of Chicago. Blue denim, bola tie Republican. Rosicrucian cowboy in the Promised Land. ...

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