I can’t believe that I got so overwhelmed yesterday that I didn’t spend a minute sharing a “Happy Birthday” with my long departed dad. Ack. It would have been his 94th. I think he would agree that he had a good life and lived it based on his own set of beliefs. I always thought that he’d outlive mom, partly due to her illnesses in later life and partly because he was just a character. But that wasn’t the case and he checked out 10-years before mom. I miss them. They often were an “acquired taste,” but under the surface, aren’t we all. 

Thanks dad, for giving me my first baseball mitt, a right-handers mitt, even though I was decidedly left-handed. But that was during an era when one did not complain and I learned to play baseball (poorly) as a right hander. I guess I learned to work around or maybe through mistakes. I don’t know, it just makes me laugh now when I think about it. Either hand, starting out, probably wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. We just muddled through and sixty years later and 11-years since you left, I have something that still makes me smile.  Thanks dad, and happy birthday.