I was sure I saw George Washington’s jowls staring at me from a collage of auto parts on the wall of the junk shop but when I looked very carefully, it was a pair of ordinary jowls, not those of the father of our country and certainly not those of the boy who cut down the cherry tree since the ones I was looking at were flaccid and aged and absolutely nondescript, could not have belonged to anyone who would ever amount to anything or had any greatness in his life, yet they did remind me, the more I looked, of the tango drummer, Don Felipe, in Buenos Aires, who grew only more accomplished with age, and how his jowls would flap as he hit the drums, how like they were to the small breasts of those elderly African tribeswomen who danced to the drumbeats of their men, the men who sang so much, their taut facial muscles allowed of no jowls whatsoever, so they would widen their cheeks and jaws, with disks of wood and each of them would take into battle the name of George, and they would be brave, crossing the Delaware and all that.

Bio: Philip Wexler