{"id":7612,"date":"2010-05-31T12:57:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-31T16:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7612"},"modified":"2023-05-29T16:11:15","modified_gmt":"2023-05-29T20:11:15","slug":"he-wouldve-been-86-two-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/he-wouldve-been-86-two-days\/","title":{"rendered":"He Would&#8217;ve Been 86 (+ Two Days)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 1.5em;\" title=\"It's me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/budwwii_meactuallyworking_sm.jpg?resize=275%2C419&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"275\" height=\"419\" \/><span style=\"font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.25em;\"><em>[Twenty-year-old Dad-to-be applies an arc-welding torch to a tank, somewhere in Europe, 1944-45. Handwritten caption on back: <strong>It&#8217;s me again. Actually working. I told you so!<\/strong>]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>For years, this has been a psychologically complicated few days &#8212; at least for those of us in my family given to psychological complication.<\/p>\n<p>In no particular order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dad&#8217;s birthday was May 29th.<\/li>\n<li>The Missus and I were married on May 29th. (About which, more later this week.)<\/li>\n<li>Memorial Day &#8212; because of my parents&#8217; fondness for and involvement in drum-and-bugle corps &#8212; was pretty much the biggest national secular holiday for us, throughout the 1950s and into the &#8217;60s. (And of course, in that much different time, it was always held on May 31 rather than the vague albeit convenient &#8220;last Monday in May.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>It was at a Memorial Day family cookout in the late 1980s that Dad took me aside and told me of the pain in his shoulder, which I was not to tell Mom about because she&#8217;d likely recognize it for what it was: a return of his supposedly <em>gone<\/em> cancer.<\/li>\n<li>Dad died on June 4, 1988.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Although I&#8217;m sentimental about Dad (and many other things), I know &#8212; intellectually &#8212; that picturing him 20 or 30 years older, but otherwise <em>unchanged<\/em>, qualifies as just a comfortable fantasy. If he hadn&#8217;t died in 1988, he might have died later, in an even worse way. And even if still alive and healthy at this moment, he might (who knows?) be 22 years&#8217; unhappier. So yes, I know.<\/p>\n<p>But damn, I sure wouldn&#8217;t mind talking with him every now and then&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I recently saw a TV show in which a character continued, obsessively, to call his girlfriend&#8217;s cellphone number &#8212; long after she&#8217;d died &#8212; because her voicemail was still active and at least he could listen to her voice reciting something like, <em>I&#8217;m out living my life and can&#8217;t talk right now. Leave it at the beep!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Yeah: <em>that<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Comments disabled for this post, obviously, and the title shamelessly ripped off<br \/>\nand altered from the title of a post at my kid sister&#8217;s blog on Saturday.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Twenty-year-old Dad-to-be applies an arc-welding torch to a tank, somewhere in Europe, 1944-45. Handwritten caption on back: It&#8217;s me again. Actually working. I told you so!] For years, this has been a psychologically complicated few days &#8212; at least for those of us in my family given to psychological complication. In no particular order: Dad&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,15,247],"tags":[61,110],"class_list":{"0":"post-7612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-family","8":"category-ruminations","9":"tag-memory","10":"tag-dad","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1YM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7612"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26285,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7612\/revisions\/26285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}