Marrying Tricia Nixon - Bill Dickinson

[Larry Robinson]

Marrying Tricia Nixon

I woke up this morning recalling that Thanksgiving Day in 1962 
when my seventeen-year-old self, having moved on, like a skin-shedding snake, 
from his terrible, world-ending imaginings during the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous month, 
had persuaded my boss, Dudley Stephenson, the wimpish, 
vaguely effeminate  bachelor librarian at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher 
(with forty-seven lawyers then California's third-largest law firm), 
to drive up Doheny Drive to Trousdale Estates, in the upper reaches of Beverly Hills, 
park in front of Richard Nixon's house, and indulge the fantasy of a kid, 
not two years liberated from the banal exile of foster care, 
that my hero with the five o'clock shadow, 
no doubt still licking his wounds from his recent loss of the California governor's race, 
would drive out in his powder blue Oldsmobile 98, 
take note of me, cheer up immediately, 
and come to decide that I should, of course, marry Tricia.

	- Bill Dickinson