On family hunting trips, I could never raise my gun, so now I hunt 
mushrooms.  Pop and Uncle Jack and them would be up in their stands, half-
threatening to shoot me because I'd get so excited over an old-man-of-the-
woods.  I started just roaming around the cabin, searching, while they went 
off, and sometimes I'd help the women prepare for dinner.  Pop had some 
issues with this.

     "A real man can kill," was a favorite line of his.

     Sometimes I would pick some sinister-looking mushrooms and fantasize 
about killing him horribly, cramps, chills, his liver and kidneys failing.  
His liver did finally fail, about four years ago, cirrhosis, but I didn't 
have anything to do with his drinking to death.

     Maybe I did.

     It made him proud that I went to the University, but he stopped paying 
my way once he realized I wouldn't try out for anything.  The car was already 
in my name, so I still had that.  I worked my way through school as a trail 
guide at a state park.  It wasn't so hard, I didn't have to worry about 
coming home for holidays.

     When Pop died, I did go to the funeral.  I was amazed at myself.  I 
didn't hate him.  I didn't resent him.  Nothing, blank slate.  I just stood 
watching the coffin descend into its pit, and all I could think was, "What 
a waste of dead organic matter."

     I still think about him sometimes.  Perhaps more now than ever.  I even 
talk to him sometimes, usually upon finding an old-man.  I keep a mushroom 
garden in the woods behind my house, and I make an arrangement every 
Thanksgiving, and lay it on his grave.