Thinking Of My Father

It was my father’s birthday yesterday. He died in 2003 and I miss him a lot sometimes. He had some charming qualities like his sense of humor, and his charismatic personality. His moods and actions could change in an eye blink, but when he was ‘on’ there was no better entertainment around. He was highly intelligent and quick-witted, as well as tall and handsome.

I sense him around me sometimes when I work out at the gym. If it’s truly his spirit I feel, and not just my active imagination, I guess he approves of me taking care of my body.

I miss hearing him say: ‘Oh, run down, tired, used up – doing just fine’ – or several variations – when I’d call and ask him how he was. He could bark exactly like Dino from, The Flintstones, and could make up fantastic ditties, poems and limericks on the spot. He told me that he had gotten drunk at a party one time in his twenties and began ‘speaking in tongues’. There was a woman at the party who told him he had just spoken perfect Gaelic. My father is Scots-Irish, but never knew any Gaelic.

It’s unfortunate that we never developed a better relationship, but I am forever grateful that he apologized to me for his violence and terror when I was a child, and for not being the parent he should have been. Regardless of that being somewhat ‘too little, too late’, it is certainly better than not at all.