Happy Birthday Daddy. I used to make you cards, little drawings, write you little poems, I was so worried that they wouldn’t be good enough. Now you are gone and I have no need to make a card, or write a poem, but I do still think of you. Your complexities. Sometimes you could turn on your flash, your eyes would sparkle and you were there. Other times your body was simply a hull, your self had left, it was far away doing something else in another realm. I don’t understand it but I know that it happened. You lived in two places Earth, and somewhere else that none of us could go and visit. As the years passed and I grew up, pushed harder, needed more attention you drifted to this other realm more often. It is possible that you were sicker then, then any of us knew. It is strange how the years can tumble by coming to July, the month that you died and I married is always washed in various emotions, I miss you still, but I am also celebrating another year with my loving husband. Its interesting to have these two anniversaries coupled together bond tightly in to the constrains of a single month. I always remember your birthday as the time Spring started in Sonoma County. The daffodils would show their sunny yellow flowers, and that huge ornamental crab apple tree would burst into bloom a thousand tine pick blossoms. I often wonder how it would be to still have you around, what you would be like, what our relationship would be…but alas all I can do is wonder, wandering the twisted streets of memory and dreams.