This is the way I heard it.

Frank was no saint, and on this particular morning his current condition confirmed it.

Buck Negid, arms to the sky, asked to the wind,

Foulos flapping in the breeze.

Frank stood brazenly in the town square, inviting his father to pound sand.

Mothers shielded their eyes, businessmen harumped and disgust, and long haired teens hooded and cheered.

It was by all accounts quite a scene in a town where anything could happen.

Like most fathers who find themselves mortified by their impetuous and ungrateful sons,

Peter was tormented by the possibility that he had contributed to the hot mess that stood before him.

It was the father, after all, who had pushed the son to attend the very best schools.

It was the father who had insisted the son run his lucrative textile business.

It was the father who objected the loudest when the son turned to booze and drugs and easy women

and all the other temptations that proved irresistible to the privileged teenagers who ran increasingly a muck in his beloved city.

And of course it was the father who did nothing to intercede when the son was called into military service.

And really, why should he?

Maybe a little discipline would transform his hard-drinking skirt chasing ungrateful spoiled brat of a godless boy into something he could be proud of.

Well, Frank was changed by the military.

That's for sure.

But not the way Peter had hoped.

After a year of combat and another year in a POW camp, Frank came home deeply suspicious of the town that sent him off to kill on its behalf.

Gaunt had demaciated.

His drinking and skirt-chasing days appeared to be behind him.

...