Remembering

I hope you don't mind a little nostalgia. This past week marks fifteen years since my dad passed away. The first years without him really hurt, but then I think we recovered a little and learned a new normal without him. And then I got married and had kids, each of those moments making me miss him a little more because he wasn't there for those happy times, but also because my family will never get to know him in this life.

It seems like the older my kids get, the more I long for them to never forget someone they never knew, and so we talk about him, and look at pictures of him. But I have also tried to incorporate little things that remind me of him in our home, whether it be a milk can from his ranch or a collection of nick nacks that he collected from his dad.

Recently I found a stack of his guitar music. Actually mostly only lyrics to popular songs and folk music from the 60's written out in his rambling script with guitar chords above in red. And in the back of a yellowed notebook full of these songs was a chord chart in which he had carefully hand-drawn every chord he wanted to learn. My dad wasn't an accomplished guitar player and he didn't really play a whole lot, but he had a deep, rich bass singing voice that even fifteen years later I can recall with perfect clarity. This chord chart is beautiful to me, and I had to display it in our music room, because looking at it immediately takes me back to my childhood, him singing The Marvelous Little Toy to us, and me begging for him to sing it one more time.


If only he could sing it one more time.