After Sunday school, I was dispatched
to the Rexall Drugstore to pick up our
Milwaukee Sentinel, of which,
for me, only a single section
existed, the comics. On the masthead
Puck heralded wonders: The Phantom,
Prince Valiant, Mandrake the Magician, and
most especially, Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordon.
From a carefully laid row, a grey-haired
woman removed the paper with my
father’s name written in grease pencil.

At noon she hung the Closed sign on the door,
thus decreeing, but for the taverns,
a commercial silence over our little
town’s main drag, a way lost to us
after mid-century. Over the streets
a delicious lassitude lay — home
from church, time for a leisurely dinner,
season and weather permitting, a picnic
at the park, a long nap or, in my
case, a good sprawl on the living room
carpet with the funnies.  It could be

heavenly if my father had someone to
relief him at the bowling alley,
and if my parents weren’t fighting about
money or other matters beyond my
understanding, simple peace of rest
from workaday efforts, of which I as yet
had no inkling, though I whole-heartedly
participated in that Sabbath
I knew was in some way hallowed if only
by the blossoming into color of what
had stayed, all week, resolutely black and white.