Dear Dad, Happy birthday to me! My special day falls on a Sunday this year. Not that days or weeks or years or celebrations or calendars have any meaning to you anymore now that you're gone. I'm thinking they don't.
But as I wrote the early morning journal entry I gift myself on every birthday, I was reminded that this was the first I would be celebrating without a call from you wishing me the best and asking "How's the weather up there in New York?" and wondering when I'm going to go to dinner using the fifty-dollar gift card to Applebee's you'd put in my birthday card that always, always arrived three days before my actual birthday. As the memories of past birthdays came flooding back—hadn't I already written about them last year and the year before that and ten years before that?—I realized they would evolve into another letter to you, maybe because this day was extra special and very different, simply because you weren't in our world anymore. There would be no birthday card or phone call, but I would still have my memories of you at our annual Fourth of July family barbeque, trying to keep us kids away from that rusty red grill while you waited for the black coals to get their white edges so they would be hot enough for Mom's skinny homemade hamburgers to go on the blackened grate.
My otherwise idyllic summer of 1971 on East Thirty-Third Street in Bayonne had rolled on. I remember waking at dawn in thick humidity that meant it would be another sweltering summer's day..
