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Blog 501 – 12.21.2016
Happy Birthday, Daddy!

Had he lived, my father would have celebrated his ninty-third birthday today. He exited this stage nineteen years ago. It is sometimes hard to believe that he is gone because he is so much a part of me. I still see him everywhere especially in the mirror and in my son, Jay. When Jay was little we sometimes called him “Little Jake” because he was so much like his grandpa. I hear dad in my head all the time and I have told people for years that he is my default mode. When I don’t know what to do or say his ever present example always offers me the choice to do as he did and to say as he said.

Someone very close to my dad once described him as an angry old man. And that dad could be opinionated and had anger issues I do not dispute but I learned to see through his “grumpy old man disguise” to the tender hearted person inside him. You see I believe that we are all at least two people and most of us wear many personalities and disguises like hats. But beyond all the roles we play to fit into all the different demands of life there is our true self.

My daddy loved the outdoors. Hunting and fishing were really just an excuse for him to get out in nature where he was most happy and his truest self. When daddy was a young man he joined the CCC – Civilian Conservation Corp, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s finest programs to train poor young men in the construction and building trades and give them the education and the purpose that many of them sadly lacked during the Great Depression. Dad worked in Northern California and Oregon building structures in our great National Parks. I suppose one of the reasons I have intended to get a work assignment in that area for so long is that I would like to see the sights that so inspired my dad.

With his birthday so close to Christmas my dad like many of you with birthdays close to Christmas received a lot of combo gifts. But my dad never felt short changed. After dad passed I found some autobiographical stories that he had hammered out in all caps on an ancient Underwood typewriter. I put them together, wrote a little preface, and put a cover picture of dad in his sailor suit in Honolulu with a Hawaiian girl in a grass skirt. I lifted a quote from one of his stories and titled the little book,  “More Than My Share.”

No, Sir or M’am, my dad never felt short changed but that he had received more than his fair share of the good things in life. An attitude of gratitude goes a long way in making up for a sometimes gruff exterior. Tenderhearted people often act tough and mean, it is their armor against getting their hearts broken, which all of us have more than once. Happy Birthday, Daddy, thank you for my inheritance. Dad used to say, “Don’t you wish your dad had been born rich instead of so doggone handsome?” My brother and I would laugh thinking him a bit delusional. But I have come to see my dad for the handsome loving man that the was and he was far richer than even he knew.

Someone has defined rich as, “Enough.” I supposed that is why many very rich people will not admit to it because their pile isn’t high enough yet. My daddy was a rich man because even in his own estimation he had received, “More than his share.” Me too, how about you?

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White