Today is my father’s birthday. Each year, I get this uneasy feeling about how it might be his last. This year, though, it is a little more sobering and urgent because he has started losing memories. It’s spooky… and mysterious… and heartbreaking…

In the past, when we talked about sweet (and bitter) and fond memories, re-living the glory days, he might correct or edit or interject details that I had completely forgotten (or magnified or embellished)… or we would share in a gut-aching guffaw about a particular event that set a new benchmark in buffoonery or horrific embarrassment.

It’s different now. It feels like I am telling a stranger my own childhood stories for the first time. They’re funny, indeed. He laughs along, loud and hard… but from a spectator’s point of view, like he’s hearing the story for the first time… not something he is recalling or remembering that he lived through himself.

It’s a real killer. I enjoy my new dad, as much as I can, and we still hang out and have awesome conversations… and I will hold on dearly to these new memories we are making (and forgetting)… because soon, I won’t have this stranger to tell stories to.

Thank you dad for knowingly and unwittingly making me who I am… for not letting me use swear words at the dinner table, even if it was a hilarious joke I learned at school… for that time you spent more than you should have on my hot Roddy bike… for the time you ran into the dark forest I had wandered into, right into a nest of swarming yellow-jackets, and carried me out, both of us covered in angry, stinging yellow-jackets…

for that time when I was 17 and you knew I was lying, but still backed down and let me off the hook so I could save face… for being the only parent who came to every tennis match… for not laughing when I was 18 and threatened to move out of the house in a heated throwdown argument… for trying to teach me about character and courage and happiness… for being the only dad on the block who came out and played baseball in the street with me and all the neighborhood kids… for teaching me about grace and forgiveness… for making me mow the front lawn every week with an un-motorized push-mower…

I love you, Dad. Happy birthday… even though you won’t remember.