A birthday remembered

April twenty-seventh. Today would have been my father's eighty-third birthday. He's been gone for twelve years. How the years slip by so quickly.

As I myself get older, I realize how much like him I turned out to be.   He was quiet and reserved for the most part. A man of few words. You never knew what was going on in his head until he was ready to tell you. I'd be hard pressed to remember many times when I saw him really angry, although I'm sure I managed to push him to his limits many times! But when he was mad, you knew it. He was intimidating, yet at the same time he was so very kind and soft-hearted.

I have his eyes. I inherited his back pain along with his heart issues. I share his love of silence. He made me a car lover (and to this day I remind my mother that she was the road block that caused me not to get that '69 Chevelle as my first car, although my dad was pushing for it... but I digress.)

The photographs I have of him spark so many memories. After all, that's what we have left when someone is no longer with us... memories. I treasure the family photographs that I have. I've begun to scan them and do a little restoration work on them as I go. So many of them are blurry, but they are getting scanned along with the rest. We can over look that type of thing when they are old and tied to a memory. We should take care of these little pieces of our histories.

Happy birthday, Dad.