November 19, 1988
Red and green indicator lights from the appliances watch m pay bills online in my black coffee living room somewhere around 6 a.m. as the dawn creeps around the edges of the closed curtains on the patio window. Toggling back and forth between the web bill pay screen and the calculator on my dashboard, my eyes fixate on the calendar date 19 in a font size of at least 300. Quickly I type into the calculator 2011 - 1988 to see how many years have passed...23; and it dawns on me, all I really needed to do was remember how old my son is and subtract a year. My son was a year old when my father died of pancreatic cancer 23 years ago on this day in 1988. I wasn't close to my father; at least not emotionally but then my father wasn't the kind of man you could get close to emotionally. In retrospect, we are a lot alike. A friend of mine told me once I am a hard nut to crack. That was my dad. He was a nut; always clowning, cracking bad jokes, telling tall tales, never r...