They said he’d done impossible things. Things no one could do. He once stopped a tank in its tracks with a single flower. Allegedly, he’d been killed six times, once for over an hour. He was a man’s man, my mom told me, often in front of my dad.

Now he mostly just sits in his chair, watching a couple of the other guests play cribbage. I can’t remember the last time he spoke. Every now and then, an old song will come on and for a second you see a light turn on, but then it’s off again.

When I was a kid I dreamt of meeting the Revolutionary. I dreamt of all the things he could teach me about being a hero. But when we finally met, all i learned from him was that getting old sucks.