Language Change

Maybe one day I'll stop having to remember to add "would have been" when speaking of my late parents' birthdays, but on this second birthday after my mother's death that day hasn't arrived.
In the photo she's twelve. It's February of 1943 and the man she's looking at is her big brother who is a Marine fighter pilot during the war. Later, he would fly early jets in Korea, fighter bombers. He was an excellent pilot and taught others to fly. One he taught was so good that my uncle made him his wing man: Ted Williams, the baseball player. The two were friends for life.
My uncle died in November of 2011, just a few weeks after my mother.

First Anniversary

This is the first anniversary of the death of the Complete and Total Loser's father, who died this day at age 91.
That's the Loser's father on the right. It was taken during World War II on one of the rare times the Loser's father was actually on board a ship. The Loser has no idea who the man on the left is, but he can tell you this: That guy is far cooler than the Loser's father was. His father's lack of cool annoyed, depressed and rubbed off on the Loser in life, but the Loser loves him for it now and misses him intensely. 

It's hard to believe, isn't it?

It's hard to believe that the 91-year-old man who lay dying, gasping for air on a hospital bed, unresponsive for two days, was ever a young man who grinned easily and had over half a century of healthy years before him. I found a letter a woman had written to my father during World War II, years before he met my mother. They were far apart and he'd surprised her with a telephone call. "Hearing your voice was like rain in the desert," she wrote.
No one's ever said that about me.

My father in his Navy uniform during World War II.