Happy Birthday
Today is my dad’s birthday.
I always felt a little sorry for him, being born so close to Christmas. He tended to get just the one present to cover both events. Of course Granddaughter the Younger has now taken up that mantle as her birthday is on the 30th in a couple of days time.
Sadly, my dad is no longer with us. He died nearly fifty years ago, otherwise he would have been 122 today. 122 years old? Not bad going if only he had made it.
He would have been fascinated and somewhat bemused by the technology of today. I couldn’t even begin to describe stuff that we take for granted today but would have seemed impossible back in the seventies. How do you describe the Interweb to someone who has never seen a computer? How could you convince someone from the seventies that a little slab of material in the pocket is not only a personal phone but is also a computer in its own right? Plucking a thousand or so television channels out of the sky? You have to be joking. So many impossible inventions that we now take for granted.
Of course he never met Daughter, his granddaughter. Nor even his Great Grandkids. He would have loved them, just as they would have loved him. he was that kind of bloke. He never even met Herself, though she was on the horizon back then. He has missed so much.
Yes, he would have been fascinated and intrigued.
Happy Birthday Dad.
I’m thinking of you.
Two weeks ago my own dad would have been 112, I salute him every year when âhisâ day comes round, he made me what I am, for better or worse.
Dying in 1998 so, unlike yours, I got the chance to show my dad the computers of the 90s, even some basic e-mail â he spent his entire working life in the printing trade and the sight of word-processing, desk-top publishing and laser-printing, even back then, blew his mind, whilst causing him deep concern for his younger ex-workmates, whose future he could see heading down the pipe.
We often donât realise how much progress we have seen in a lifetime, it leads we old-timers to wonder what huge leaps forward weâll never get to see after weâve eventually shuffled off.
I miss my father something terrible at times. He was Born in a logging camp in Washington state 02/08/1910. Passed June 12, 1976 (heart failure).
He was a WW2 veteran and the best man I ever knew.
It’s my birthday on the 27th Dec also. Dad’s was on the 24th. One present for Christmas and birthday allways riled me.
I paid it back with my own children; son on 23rd and a daughter on the 19th Dec.
I have a daughter (one of four) in the same boat, December 31st.
Now that I’m what they would call and “old man” I find I rarely think of my parents. I suppose that’s strange but I was never one to be typical when I came to personal nostalgia. These days it takes up a lot of my attention just to walk down the stairs without having an accident.