Love and Longing in Pretend Land

Endless fictional possibilities. Birth to death and back ... all in a pretend sort of way.

Such can be the path of a father's love (or love of a father) which stretches from the beginning point of pretending to be pregnant by hauling on the "empathy belly" — a 33-pound contraption designed to torture men the way nature tortures pregnant women, but without the glow — and carting it around for as long as possible ... no more than a few hours. And that love can go all the way to bringing back dad from the dead, or the closest thing possible as a Vermont man did when he dug up his father's cremated ashes from a graveyard and schlepped pops back home, because "he missed him."