from Stefan de la Garza, How High Deer Jump Son
This was the season my dad sat me down in a big leather chair in the office we were never supposed to go into and gave me a small glass with some whiskey at the bottom and said You're On Your Way To Being A Man It'll All Start In Just A Couple Months and then he told me about deer hunting and that he was going to take me on a trip, the same trip he took my brother on when he turned twelve and the same trip that he went on when he was twelve and so on and so on until I don't even know how many. He looked me in the eye and didn't even blink and told me to drink my whiskey because this was part of the ritual that men did and Mom didn't even know about it he said he'd never tell Mom even and that if I did I'd know what I'd be and I knew it was worse than being dead. I knew all this though because every fall my dad would take me and my brother to the shooting range once a week for three or four months until winter and tell us all about the traditions and rituals our family had and we'd shoot targets and he'd keep saying that he's getting us ready and then when I drank my whiskey I started gagging and coughing and my mom yelled up What's Going On In There....
Mr. Petsch told us all about how the heart works, that it has four chambers and pumps and pumps and pumps all the blood in your body around in a big circle, pumping from electrical signals from the brain and that the type of muscle in the heart is the only place in the body that that type of muscle is found and that if you make a fist, Hold Up Your Fist, That's How Big Your Heart Is and Can You Imagine That That Small Piece Of Muscle Does So Much and no one could imagine that and then I thought about my dad's hands hands bigger than textbooks and thought that his heart must be huge and that he'd probably just live forever it was that big.
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