Poopdeck is 69!

I am one of the fortunate ones. I grew up knowing what it feels like to have my daddy looking lovingly at my mama and his own mama, too. Which means, of course, he looked at my sisters and me lovingly because he'd already had practice.

Yep.

I can speak of the day that you came up to my elementary school in a three-pieced suit before work just to tell some little girl who'd "found" the Timex watch you'd bought for me in third grade that it had better "find" its way back to my wrist by the end of the day.

It did. You bet it did.

And remember when we drove my Geo Prism from California all the way to Nashville, Tennessee to start medical school in 1992? We hit the world's best second-hand store and filled my apartment with what might has well have been something fit for HGTV. When you left to go back to L.A. I cried the most primal cry ever. I clung to your neck because that moment felt like some pivotal divide between being a child and a grown up. 

More milestones came along. A wedding day with you there to give me away and then your selfless contribution to helping us to train up our boys in the way that they should go. All of us, the fortunate ones.

Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the day that you were born. And man, oh man am I grateful for you. Yes, that you're here but mostly because you always have been here. Which means you always will be.

Harry tells me of what it feels like to miss his father. He speaks of those days where that void of having his dad no longer a phonecall away aches somewhere deep. But far more he tells me what it's like to be whole because his daddy loved him. "Nobody can take that from you," he says. I believe that.

And so. 

Happy birthday to you, my sweet Poopdeck. Thank you for your full participation in my life and for helping your daughter to become a woman who believes that she is everything you constantly told her she was--even before she knew it for herself.

I know the advantage that a father's love gives to a child. And thanks to you, I know it first hand.

And they will know a grandfather's love which, I believe, is something extra special.

***

Happy Birthday, Dad. And shout out to every dad like you who "got it". . . and then gave it.