...how much I miss my dad.

My dad passed away three years ago this past Saturday. We had some very stormy times beginning at my adolescence and ending (kind of) shortly before he died, just a couple of weeks before his 91st birthday. I wish that we had been able to enjoy each other more during that long stretch of time, because he was a brilliant man. He was a voracious reader, consuming at least one book per day--he would drive to Borders or Barnes and Noble out in Tucson once a week, and buy a briefcase full of books. He would have them all read before the next shopping spree. Shortly before he passed away, we donated most of them to the library in his little community--so many that there was not enough shelf space for all of them.

Dad spoke at least seven languages fluently, including French, Mandarin Chinese, and Swahili. He spoke enough of many other languages to communicate with native speakers. He co-authored a book of limericks when he was a student at Carnegie Institutute of Technology (Carnegie Tech)--now Carnegie-Mellon Unversity. The book was a class project for printing engineering; the students were required to publish a book. This included creating the ink, the typeset, the paper, the subject for the book, and binding it. Enough copies were made for each student and for the professor. The entire class got an "A", but the teacher confiscated the books because the limericks were too "obscene" for the times. My dad taught me a few of them when I was a kid, and although I didn't understand what they meant at the time, he said one day I would. And that I should memorize them because they were "part of my heritage." I would post a couple of them here, but am afraid my blog would get removed for being too obscene! An interesting thing--I bought my dad a couple of books of limericks about 30 years ago as birthday presents. He was quite pleased to see some of his and his former classmates' limericks in print, but was irritated that other people had taken credit for writing them.

Dad was very musical, as well. He played the bagpipes; in this photograph, he was a member of the Kilty Band at Carnegie Tech. I guess he must be around 25 or so. He graduated from high school at 16, from his first college at 19, attended MIT for a year, took classes for one year at Fordham University, and graduated from Carnegie Tech before going off to WWII. He played the trumpet, French horn, and piano, and an ocarina. My son, Matthew, inherited his trumpet, but I believe my grandma sold the French horn and bagpipes after he left for war. I don't know what happened to his ocarina; the last time I saw it was when I was 18. Matthew inherited his musical ear, but Monica, Meeghan, and Mallory inherited his brains. Meeghan has his naughty sense of humor. So, even though he's not physically here with me, parts of him live on through my kids. And, sadly, we get along much better this way.