Notes from Rural America

My father sat at our oval porcelain kitchen table, on a chipped wooden chair that has been in that kitchen, around that table, since my great-grandparents built the house in 1950-something. My father has a dark beard and not much hair. He wears wire rimmed glasses and a t-shirt I gave him last Christmas, from the infamous Los Rios Street in San Juan Capistrano, CA. The kitchen he sits in is over a thousand miles away from Los Rios Street, in a…