Happy Birthday, Dad. Glad to have known you.

My father had his 95th birthday this month. As is my wont on birthdays important to me, I contributed a dollar coin, along with my regular contribution, to the collection basket in church on the Sunday closest to it as a talisman to marshal my thoughts and prayers for him. It's what I did for my middle child as well earlier in the month near his birthday. Then I reflected on that person as I knelt for a few moments after taking communion and prayed for him, in the ethereal or the physical world.

I didn't have any specific thoughts that struck me about my child earlier in the month (I haven't heard from or anything about him in 13 years) other than I prayed that he was alive, well and happy and asked God to continue to give me strength to keep on loving him as a father would.  But as I knelt in prayer for my father at a later service (he died at age 61), something fantastic happened, and for 3 or 4 minutes his life flashed through my mind's eye amidst images I saw of him, even 60 or more years ago, during my life and the superimposed images of him as he was when he was a young man or a boy, even decades before I was born, created from memories of what I knew or imagined of his life when he was growing up and a struggling young family man during and after the war before he became a successful (and affluent) Wall Street lawyer.

I saw him as a red-headed boy hunting with his dad, or alone, in the wetlands around his hometown in Winona, Minnesota. I saw him as a stand-out student and athlete at his boarding school (I subsequently went to the same one) and taking weekends to listen to jazz in New York City and during his matriculation at Princeton walking down Nassau Street. Then he went off to war and survived two harrowing battles in the Pacific, and I saw him at the few supposedly funny or descriptive combat tales I heard (one involved him bathing and unarmed on Peleliu when a squad of armed Japanese troops came upon him--[pause] ["What happened!"]--""They all got away.") (and another involved him getting hit by lightning during a rainstorm on Okinawa when the bolt came down his radio antenna as he was transmitting radio coordinates with the nearby fleet while he was set up on a ridgeline--["I remember hearing a tremendous noise and watching sparks fly from one set of fingertips to the other."] ["What happened next?"]--"After a few moments of sitting there, I got up, ambled about for a minute or two, decided I was all right, and I went back to transmitting." I saw the sparks fly as I knelt in prayer, and I saw him return and greet his wife, my mother, after being away for two years and all the gnawing anxieties about the continuing marital compatibility of this man and woman, who knew each other for mere weeks before they wed as teenagers a few days or weeks before he shipped out, fade away in those first few delicious moments of reconciliation. I saw this war veteran attend four years of college in snowbound Northfield, Minnesota, then three years of law school in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born.

Then I saw him through my eyes and my long-stored memories at our first apartment in Falls Church, Virginia, with him working in the District at a law firm. I saw him in our yard in autumn lift too large a load of raked leaves in a blanket with a grunt and stagger off to the metal barrel where we burned them. I watched our move to Staten Island when he was transferred to New York City by his law firm and him fix up our ramshackle house there, and stagger through snow a yard high after a blizzard to get to the bus stop so he could go to work.  Then I saw him moving boxes as we moved from Stapleton to Westerleigh, I saw him breaking up a fight on our porch between a gang of four toughs and a friend of mine being bullied and me when we accepted the challenge, were being overwhelmed and dad sent them packing with that war-instilled killer's look (the only time I ever saw it) in his eyes.   I sat beside him again as he drove me to my boarding school, or picked me up from it. I watched from above as he steadily climbed a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado during a summer vacation because he thought, unknown to me because I was already at the peak and fine, that I was in trouble; when I saw him I waved and he thereupon immediately took a break and smoked a cigarette, probably in a fury, before he continued more slowly to the top. I saw him in Brooklyn when we moved there, and at his retirement house in Santa Fe. I saw him in his sickbed in the adobe house there when he had lung cancer, and I watched him die. These were a precious three or four minutes for me as I knelt with my eyes pressed closed and my hands clasped in prayer earlier this month focusing on him.  I murmured "God bless you, Dad," just as I had said that terrible summer morning in Santa Fe thirty three years ago when I bid goodbye to his spectral being as it slipped from his failing, ravaged body and passed over to God's right hand. The flashing images inside my head completed, the spell broke and I opened my eyes and sat in my pew. After the final hymn was sung, I went forth from the church more enlightened than when I entered it.