To My Father on Veteran’s Day

Honor, remembrance, and how time flies

(This post was originally written in 2012. My sons are now 26 and 23. And my dad and me. . . Well we don’t want to talk about that. )

Yesterday —

two weeks after Hurricane Sandy ravaged our island,

raged through here flooding, destroying, and

changing the landscape of the northeast forever

(not to mention knocking out our power for 11 cold and difficult days)

— I spent a “normal” day in the city with my parents, my sister and her girlfriend (who is like a sister to me now).

It was an invigorating, special, throwback day to my childhood/teens/twenties.

Two plays (one really stellar one)and a delicious dinner, all the treat of my parents.

The occasion, my sister’s 50th birthday.

Me, photo right. Photo, author’s own. The last time she was taller than I…

I can read that over and over again, but still, it remains unfathomable.

My sister is 50, and soon, I will follow.

Beyond that, my older son is 17, and next year at this time, he will be long gone to college.

Author with her father. Photo, author’s own.

That is my dad with me at my birthday, last July. My father, ever strong and youthful, turns 75 this March.

To see him, you would not believe it.

But there it is. 75.

It is Veteran’s day, a day that always makes me want to honor, yes, all veterans, but especially my dad. Yet, here I am a writer, and wholly at a loss for truly meaningful words.

Nothing I write here will come close to explaining the strong but gentle, capable, loving, and generous man my father is.

Nothing.

There is no father who ever loved his daughters more, protected them better, was more loyal and true to his family. We are so lucky he returned from a year of hell in a M.A.S.H. unit in Viet Nam to raise us.

He is anti-war.