Today my father would have turned a hundred and five. I would have called him at my sister’s and shouted into his hearing aid across two time zones. Yesterday he would have opened the card I’d mailed—nothing too sentimental, not his style. I remember his ninetieth, the family assembled to bicker and feast, the kilted bagpipers already skirling when they trudged up the driveway through a blizzard, Mom up and dressed, in the last year of her life, and early the next morning Dad in the street digging my rental car out from a snowdrift. Hours later, from the air, I watched Lake Erie swim with long blue strokes between the ice islands.
gorgeous, you poet you!
So well crafted.