CogBlogged Tagged ‘dad’

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Sorry I missed your birthday yesterday, Dad. I did get my calendar reminder, and woah, you’d be 87. Twenty years ago you were in Phoenix to climb Camelback Mountain for a special day. And the last one we celebrated together for your 75th is bittersweet with sadness and foreboding. Our birthdays less than a week apart, we shared our Taurus signs, for all the foofah that is astrology. but we shared that. I find myself relishing the time working in my yard, landscaping and nurturing the land, just like that guy i remember dutifully cutting the grass and trimming those monstrous forsythia bushes. And trying to get that dogwood tree to thrive. It feels familiar. I remember noticing at social events you tended more to listen than talk. It feels familiar. With much fondness I remember how much you [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photo, In the alternate path universes, today I am calling you in Florida to wish you a happy 85th Birthday. You will want more to hear me talk about me than me talk about you. I might be talking about the next trip down I have planned. Instead I am looking through just digital images that are fragments of memories, and I seem to have more of your objects than your face (there are more of those in the boxed photo albums 2000 miles away in a closet). I want to have one more conversation with you, yet the closest I can get is that imprinted memory of your voice. Does it even matter if I can recall it exactly or just more I can tap into it? I hope for anyone whose fill in the blank verb for [...]

What started out as another set of family pictures for the Dear Photograph (or Return to the Scene of the Crime) ds106 assignment sprawls a bit more as I find connection points– let’s see by the end if they lead anywhere. Perhaps a path. Made of bricks. It has to do with bricks and paths and making the latter our of the former. I start with this photo of my Dad doing what he enjoyed, an outside task with his hands. Here he is laying some brick for a walkway outside the patio of the house in Florida (or how they say it here, outside the “lanai”). Look at that smile. And he is wearing an ASU hat I sent him (which I found this week in the garage). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, I see you Dad, carefully making a brick walkway. [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Another August 27th clicks by, another notch marking one more year since my Dad passed away (2001). I love this picture of him (not sure how old) at Coney Island (he grew up in Newark, NJ)- he looks sort of serious in is driving role and his suit (people got more dressed up in the 1940s to go to amusement parks), yet there is a very very faint twinkle in his eye, or at least I want it to be. This is from a series of old photos I had scanned when I last visited my Mom, and part of the project to continue digitizing the stories recorded in 1994 by my grandmother (his mother). In one segment she described a series event that happened when Dad was 7- he and so neighborhood kids were playing King of the Hill on a pile [...]

It’s been 8 years since I have been able to say directly “Happy Father’s Day”, and 2001 was not the best one as Dad was in the middle of his 6 month bout with cancer. For a man who had some many names/nicknames– “Morris”, “Mike”, “Mickey”, “Blackie”– by any other name mattered not for the man I knew as Dad. A man who was not one for saying a lot in spoken words, he was almost a different person in the written form (those old fashioned things called “letters”), one thing was always sure is how proud he was of me and how much support he gave me for whatever choices I made in life, even the ones he did not understand. That kind of un-conditional love is the hallmark of Dad-dom. From his tribute I created after his death in August 2001, I never tire of the old 8mm [...]