Happy Father's Day!

[Rob Wick]

As 2013 is a year of "firsts" for me, this Father's Day is the first to have special meaning. I haven't known a Father's Day since 1969, but I've been wondering what might have happened had coronary bypass surgery been as commonplace then as it is now. Given the type of man my father was (taciturn, not one to share his feelings) I don't know that he would have even admitted something was wrong, but he did see a doctor on occasion. My father is more like an apparition to me as my memory of him is fuzzy, and that threatens to turn him into whatever I want him to be given that he has no real form other than what I provide. My siblings, who knew him better, have different remembrances given their own history. For my sisters he was a gruff and sometimes hateful man yet for my brother he was a hero. My mother could never talk about him for very long so she never recalled more than a few wisps of memory that never put him in any real perspective. Friends of his knew parts of his life (his time in the Marines, working as a mechanic, beginning to smoke at the age of 6 and at one point much later smoking 5 packs a day) but were just as opaque on the whole of who he was.

Long ago I accepted the fact that he would never be fully formed in my mind. Yet that doesn't stop me from wishing I could know more. Maybe some day.

Best
Rob