The line of poetry went “…Delilah watched
the dark hair of her lover tumble….” — “dark”
being the operative word for him. It just jumped

out at him like the little, dark-haired dog of a
friend jumping on his lap, jumping down and
running all around his friend’s little apartment.

Perception is reality, right? Well, child of Scand-
inavian and Dutch parentage and child of a lily
white church upbringing, he just knew Delilah’s

lover had golden, wavy locks flowing over his
shoulders down to the middle of his fair-skinned,
muscular back. There were paintings on church

basement walls to prove it, as he remembered.
But then as he remembered, you could almost in-
terchange Samson or Solomon, for that matter,

with Sallman’s Head of Christ, Christ at Heart’s
Door, Christ in Gethsemane and The Lord is My Shep-
herd except Samson and Solomon, for that matter,

were more blond and even though Jesus seemed
softer, he had to have pretty broad shoulders
to carry all those sheep. He’d say Jesus could

have been English or German, but not Italian
or Irish. As he recalled, the hair does seem
to have that hint of red or at least auburn but

it doesn’t have the typical tight, Irish curls.
Italians are typically too dark-skinned, black-
haired even if it does flow and brown-eyed. He

remembers blue eyes; surely they had blue eyes.
Jeffrey Hunter’s Jesus had blue eyes. As a kid,
he saw blue eyes everywhere. How could he ident-

ify with a dark-haired biblical hero like
Delilah’s lover in the poem? But then again,
how could blacks and Hispanics and Asians and

Native Americans and even those of Jewish ancest-
ry, who trace their roots back to the biblical
heroes, identify with Moses as they pried

his guns from his cold, dead hands?