Dear Reader:

Happy Father’s Day! My only wish on this day is that I had more memories of my own father. The few sketchy “memories” I have of daddy are based more on second-hand accounts…. heard from adults in my family talking about this or that story of him.

So the image and deep knowledge of my father is shrouded in more hearsay than actual recall. And even memories can be quite deceptive. What we think we remember and what actually happened years ago are usually not quite the same when laid out side by side.

It was hard to get mother to talk much about daddy so, even as a child, there were many gaps in my time-line with him in this life. But, on this special day, let me share with you some impressions that still linger within me of my time with daddy.

He will always be daddy in my mind because he died so young (31 years old) when I was so young- five. He is “Forever Young.”

It is hard for me to grasp the concept that my youngest child, Tommy, has already lived longer than my daddy did. (And he died leaving a wife and three children at that tender age.) Eva Cate (6) is now older than I was when I lost my father at five.

This photo was the last picture taken of me and my siblings with daddy. By the next Easter he was gone. (kidney disease)

Daddy died at Duke hospital on April 15, 1954 leaving his heritage behind in the form of three children. Me, David, and Ben.

I only have a few pictures of daddy but I chose the one of him and mother taken soon after their marriage (as the title photo for the blog) because I always loved looking at them loving each other. As a child and now an adult it was and is still quite romantic.

They would only have nine years together but it was quite a love story….one that would have to last an eternity for both in different ways.

I remember mother telling me (when I specifically asked how they met) she met daddy on a blind date. He was home on leave before shipping out to England….(he would end up with the rank of sergeant in the Air Force during WWII and play a pivotal role in the famous D-Day invasion.)

So much of their “dating” was through postcards and letters passed between them throughout the war.

*I am so grateful mother saved this 1944 Christmas card because it is the only piece of writing I have of my father who had a limited education because all the boys in the family had to quit school at 16 to help on the tobacco farm in Smithfield, North Carolina.

Mom and dad married in 1945….the year the war ended and two years later my older brother Ben arrived. I arrived two and half years after that and my younger brother two and a half years following me.

* I was always jealous of this picture….first-born children always get the most pictures made, especially with the parents….the rest of us are the “forgotten” children. Neither David nor I got a picture made with our parents together. Not fair! By the time the second and third come along…one parent is taking the picture of you and a sibling. (I want a picture of daddy holding me!)

My father’s family was of Scottish descent and obviously they were very proud of it. Daddy and his brother, J.D. managed to get leave at the same time (during the war) and meet in Edinburgh for pictures in their Scottish heritage kilts.

*For this reason this is the one  country I still wish to see and try to trace down my daddy’s family ancestry.

I can’t help but think how life in my own family would have changed if I had died at 31. I would have only left behind two children, Mandy and Walsh, since I didn’t have Tommy until I was 32.

I have to believe that God has a plan for people taken in the prime of life, but for the life of me, I have yet to figure it out. I will have to wait until the next world to discover the answer I believe….Sure hope it is a good one because I needed a daddy in my life to carry me and a little brother to tag along behind me.

(Every little girl needs to be a princess in the eyes of the first male figure in her life. It sets the tone for the rest of her life. I was….but my tiara came off way too soon.)

*A friend of mine, Kathy Worthington, sent a beautiful comment on an earlier blog this week when I was feeling sorry for modern generations who will no longer have letters from the past to remember loved ones by….she recalls:

I am lucky to have kept letters my daddy wrote me from Korea when I was just a little thing. He was such a comedian, always wanting to make me laugh and telling me to take care of mama until he came home. My favorite is one where he started in the middle of the page and wrote in circles like a pinwheel! What treasures they are – and how our grandchildren will never have such things – sad for them.

My only vivid memory of daddy was him coming home from a business trip with treats for me and my brothers. The “surcie” was a ‘two-headed’ lollipop. There was just one stick but two lollipops….one on each end of an extra long lollipop stick.

You had to eat it like you were twirling a baton. It is still so clear in my mind…that moment when I twirled the lollipop stick between my sticky fingers… licking first the cherry side and then the grape. (All the neighborhood kids were envious….nobody had ever seen a lollipop like this before.)

I remember feeling so proud to be daddy’s daughter with a special treat for me. I must be the luckiest little girl in the world to have a daddy who brings home such treasures. I was.

So until tomorrow….To all the fathers who have gone before us, but not before molding us into who we are or were to become…thank you!  That is the greatest treasure, the longest-lasting gift of all. I once was loved and that is all that is important in life.

I love you daddy! Happy Father’s Day!

“Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh

They were married in 1945, the year the war ended.