HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A GREAT DAD

Happy birthday, Dad, and the day – today - somehow feels more like it is his birthday than all those when he was here for birthdays, whistling as ever an

obscure tune in his unusual off-the-tongue tone.

In my youth, he was just my father, the disciplinarian, font-of-all-knowledge, and most aggravatingly a brilliant mathematician which I most decidedly wasn’t.

 I couldn’t comprehend how he could divide, add, multiply with such ease.

 AN AIR RAID

 He suspected that mental laziness was the reason I couldn’t.

I entered the world during an air raid, I’m told, with strafing and bombing by enemy crew grateful for the ease of navigation Salisbury Cathedral provided.

 He was at work, working on Spitfires, when I arrived.

As he did voluntary duty as a sort of street night-watchman in that ancient city, he missed my entrance altogether.

Memory includes him next in early boyhood as the disciplinarian, insisting that I ‘eat it all up’ at our appalling Sunday dinners.

I hated the taste, if that’s the word, of food during those war years of extreme rationing, and doubtlessly he hated the percentage of wages that went to buy the food, and the number of rationing coupons. … Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventuring book, Sailing to Purgatory, at http://sailingtopurgatory.com/index.php/feeds/444-happy-birthday-to-a-great-dad