Little Telemachus, reverent in your role: not yet old enough to hold the cross, you process behind the rest with a candle— eye-level and tempting to a boy, you hold it steady in seriousness, and file in line to the aisle’s end. Taught well, you pause, bow, and take your seat beyond the altar.
But sitting at the back you are a boy again: you fidget, squirm, and bob your head when Psalms are sung: you yawn and stretch and puzzle over the rounded, gilded base of a flower vase; you sit on your hands and bounce; you belt out Alleluias at the Gospel proclamation—in short,
you are exactly as you should be, so my wife and I have quite the time chuckling together over watching your boyish devotion, distracted and sincere. She tells me you’re a dead ringer for me at that age: ink-black hair buzzed and cow-licked; long, curly eyelashes
my mother said would make girls jealous; pale-faced and freckled against a shock of black—I served and was young, uncomfortable in cassock and alb, scratchy and ill-fitting; I was maybe as innocent, or looked the part, though likely less so, knowing that your father
unlike mine, has kept you safe in ways that I was not allowed to be; has given you permission to be both wild and good; has loved you as he should. You stand among a forest of green vestments, and smile at the lilies bunched above, their heads bent down gently, opening to you.