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Louis R. Tarsitano on the Labors of Christian Fathers
My literature students read a poem called “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden. It begins with a description of the writer’s father getting up by himself on Sundays and making the fire, “with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather.” Called when the house was warm, the writer would get dressed, . . . fearing the chronic angers of that house. Speaking indifferently to him, and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know, of love’s austere and lonely offices? I would like to tell you that these lines move my students to tears, or at least