Happy Birthday to My Dad
As I have done every March 17 since I started this blog, I am wishing my Dad a Happy Birthday.
He would have been 88 today.
I told this story on the anniversary of Breitbart’s passing, but I’ll repeat it here.
Speaking of dreams, I dreamed about my dad last night. We were all sitting around a table, I think at a cabin in Big Bear (which he never visited). He wasn’t doing so well and he said to all of us: “The time has come. I want to say goodbye to all of you.” We all started to protest: he shouldn’t be giving up, he had time left, etc. But he was very calm and confident about it, and I decided he was right. It was time to say goodbye. I decided to give him a hug, but as I started to get out of my chair and stand up, I woke up.
It’s a recurring theme in my dreams: the desire to have that one last hug. The next best thing is to hug the folks you still can. Everyone reading this: please get up from your computer and go do that, right now. To paraphrase the standard pitch from talk radio guys: tell ’em Patterico sent you!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Ding!
Patterico (9c670f) — 3/17/2013 @ 12:01 pmThe future’s uncertain and the end is always near.
Words to live by. Don’t put off showing those you love that you do.
Jcw46 (0af03c) — 3/17/2013 @ 12:04 pmMine would be 73. I miss him too.
SPQR (b12eb9) — 3/17/2013 @ 12:17 pmErin Go Bragh! Happy Birthday Mr. P, Sr. And to all Dads may we all hoist one Jameson in honor.
reff (b479a1) — 3/17/2013 @ 1:03 pmHappy birthday Mr. P.
Ipso Fatso (1e3278) — 3/17/2013 @ 2:12 pmHappy St Patty’s Day, Patterico, and Dadderico.
JD (b63a52) — 3/17/2013 @ 2:17 pmI can’t hug my dad because he’d knee me in the groin. Which is a huge, huge improvement over when I visited him after his head injury last September and he didn’t know who I was. And, if you recall, I was desperately seeking someone who could play taps at a funeral the news the neurosurgeon was delivering me.
Happily the old guy is now back to cussing me out just like in the good old days.
Steve57 (60a887) — 3/17/2013 @ 2:25 pmMy dad just turned 86 last month.
Steve57 (60a887) — 3/17/2013 @ 2:26 pmToday my maternal grandmother would have had her 124th birthday. She did make it to just beyond her 82nd one (older than either of my parents made it to).
roy in nipomo (160066) — 3/17/2013 @ 3:06 pmHere’s to all our parents, whether departed or extant. Patterico Go Bragh!
Bradley J. Fikes (2c3aa5) — 3/17/2013 @ 3:09 pmAs I listen to trolls prattle on, and poseurs try to score points over partisan nonsense, Patterico reminds us all of what is truly important.
I had a chance to tell my mother goodbye last October. My brother is visiting us now. I call my father twice a week. But none of us—not a one—have guarantees about tomorrow.
Somewhere along the line, we decided as a society that having manners and a sense of courtesy were weaknesses, and began to confuse honesty with tactlessness. We have no trouble at all sneering at people who do things of which we do not approve…yet have trouble telling people who do things we appreciate that we…well, appreciate those things. This is true for family, for colleagues, for friends, and even people we have never met in person.
So, Patterico, thank you for all you have done for this website, and for me personally.
Simon Jester (2d62a6) — 3/17/2013 @ 3:34 pmHugs to all!
Mom and Dad are going to be 93 and 96 in a couple of weeks. We’ll make it down for at least one of the birthdays.
htom (412a17) — 3/17/2013 @ 3:41 pmMy father, who was also born on March 17th, 1925, died in 2004.
jl (0d357f) — 3/17/2013 @ 4:32 pmDad passed one year and three days ago. Every time I’d kiss him those last two and a half years that he was ill, I’d kiss him twice: once, because I loved him and second, for all the years to come without him.
What I wouldn’t do to hug him one more time. He’d be 88 in another 3 weeks.
J.P. (bd0246) — 3/17/2013 @ 8:19 pmMy sympathy to you, Patrick.
Eighteen months ago, my mother – who has always been amazingly healthy – died. Well, a team of 15 doctors got her heart started again and brought her back, but she spent two minutes without a pulse as a clot the size of a baseball tried to make its way through her heart.
I got to hug her again; she never got to hug her dad again, who died six hours after she got out of the hospital.
bridget (55e4a2) — 3/18/2013 @ 7:55 amReading this at work during my lunch break. People wondering why I’m walking up hugging them. I think they called the cops for fear that I’m about to blow up the building.
Oh, wait, that was just a dream :):)
My dad would have been 85 this past Dec, been gone 10 years. I miss him more every year-
NeoCon_1 (9dccdd) — 3/18/2013 @ 11:37 amThanks for that, Pat.
As longtime readers of my sporadically-updated blog may know, my father passed away in 2011. I’ve become a sort of evangelist when it comes to parental appreciation, and when young people express frustration with their folks, I tell them that acting on it for the tiny things will seem like valuable wasted time when they (and you) get older.
L.N. Smithee (b6535d) — 3/18/2013 @ 3:53 pm