Happy Birthday Dad

This is my Dad. He would have been 83 yesterday. He moved on 5 1/2 years ago and he has been missed every day since. He loved movies, old sci-fi, horror, comedies and westerns. He loved the outdoors. He was an avid hunter but in my lifetime the only thing he shot while hunting was pictures from his blind. Most importantly, he loved his family.

I have trouble writing about him. Maybe to use a television crime drama cliche “I’m too close to the situation” to do so (he would have liked that joke) properly but I’m here it goes….

There are many types of people who change the world. Some are decorated visionaries, some are patron saints, then there are those like my Dad; the ones who touch people’s lives without them even realizing it.

He didn’t set out to do it; he didn’t call out for platitudes, he just did. At his funeral, there where people from 30, 40, 50 years past that showed up. People the family didn’t know or had long since forgotten about that showed up just to show respect and relate what my father meant to them. Sure that happens at all funerals but if you would have seen my Dad on the street, you’d of never guessed he touched so many lives and that’s how he preferred it.

I used to toy with him on the phone (yes, back when we used them to talk on) because he never said good bye, probably because he loathed talking on it but I’d always repeatedly day Bye over and over until he’s do his Dad giggle and say curtly “bye” and hang up!

LOL I love that man…. My Dad, My Hero, My Idol. When what it is that’s me is all said and done, there is only one thing I long to see. Not heaven, not a re-birth, not even a Bond girl in a bed on a yacht out in the middle of the ocean saying “Oooo Dan” (another joke he’d like) but my Dad, standing there waiting to greet me for the next chapter of my existence.

Happy Birthday Dad!