Dear Dad: Happy Birthday, Grandpa Joe

It was quiet Up North on your birthday. Phoebe at camp in Canada, Judah popping up only when his debit card alerted us he’d spent $3.90 at Jakey Leigh’s Cafe in Kanab, Utah; three dogs cohabitating in close quarters with no table scraps to squabble over.

I would say it was quieter without you, but your cottage presence rarely registered above the decibel level of flour sifting and unsweetened baker's chocolate burbling in the double boiler. In the kitchen, I remember realizing that the sifting was not as fun as it looked and that the chocolate was decidedly unsweetened. We had disagreed about the merit of walnuts.

I went hunting for rocks along Lake Michigan. Were you the warmth I felt in my fugue state among the agate and fossils beneath the cloudless sky? No, it turns out — that was the sun concentrating on the exposed part of my lower back. 

A.J. knitted. I read a book that I didn’t think you would like but, based on the dog ear, you had read most of. I adjusted my posture to avoid contact with the strip of sunburn before nodding off on The Napping Couch. Mom tinkered with the hottub, rekindling it after almost two tepid years. She used lime juice to adjust the pH but stopped short of disassembling the motor.

In the early evening, we took a 10-month-old cherry pie out of the freezer. Of the many ready-to-bake cherry pies you enjoyed during home hospice, this was the only one to survive you. I ate most of it over the course of multiple days before a dog took advantage of the way the soon-to-be-replaced refrigerator would open when you closed the freezer, and polished it off for me.

We uncorked a bottle of Mawby, your favorite sparkling wine. I thought to set the cork aside. Days later, Mom asked me where it was. I was touched that she had something in mind for it. Specifically, she needed something to keep the wasps from nesting in the back of the bird house.

The sunset was beautiful, but take that with a grain of salt (or sand) because the sunsets are routinely beautiful and this was the same sun that had attacked me without provocation just hours earlier.

On the fourth, we went to see the fireworks without you, in keeping with our tradition.