My Dad Turns 99
Yesterday would have been my dad’s 99th birthday. Irascible and sentimental. I recall a time about 10 years ago when I was flying east for work a lot and stopping at my folks’ house for an appended weekend. I always had a rental car, and parked it in the same place in their driveway apron, well out of the way of anyone driving by what he might have seen in his windshield 20 years ago.
On one of these visits when leaves were adorning their place we were in the driveway and he said something like it made him happy to come outside and see the bare pavement where I always parked. Why, I asked. He said, “that’s because it reminds me Phil was here”.
In the tumult of life wherein jet engines throb and continents await and boarding passes hasten, the momentary quietude of a rectangular piece of northwest Ohio asphalt becomes an unlooked-for token of love.
💞