I miss my daddy. He had six decades and then a really stupid, rare autoimmune disease called amyloidosis killed him in a hurry-scurry. Had he nae died on 20030917 (or since) he'd have turned 72 today. I wonder what he would have looked like by now. Presumably not bald but maybe all gray or white, given that his beard was turning well before he hit 50:

 (^^^That's my hat Dad's wearing, in case there was any confusion.)

Dad didn't want to leave us but did so with startling grace and composure. When the doctor had delivered his carefully worded but concrete Death Sentence in the hospital room (viz., "Yeah, keep whistling for that heart transplant. That and thirty-fi' cent..."), Dad picked up his Uno hand and said, "Whose turn is it?"

Before we look at the older photos, here's my favorite late portrait of my dad:

So that's my brother Bob, standing between Aunt Marie and Mom and holding Dad's ashes, which we had traveled to Indiana to scatter, as Dad requested.

Das ist mein pop, before he escaped his mother's vehement and oft-proclaimed distaste for beards. ("They just look dirty!") Dad's shaving in the bathroom at 4 Patricia Court, Wharton Park, Mullica, New Jersey, where my parents lived when they were first married. When I was very young and thus not paying attention, my grandparents offered their only son and his wife an extremely generous house-swap: John and Peggy would move to the Wharton Park house and Gordon and Sandy would move into the house on Mays Landing Road in Folsom...

That, so far as I know, is the only existing photo of the dining room at 1331 Mays Landing Road (back then our mailing address was R.D. #6, Box 541) showing a solid wall (at left) between dining room and kitchen and a single living room (through the doorway) with a few shelves on either side. Dad pretty quickly knocked the upper half of the kitchen wall out and put in a counter and stools, and built a sort-of wall (solid bookshelves on either side, paneling with a pocket door in the center) to separate the living room into two rooms. That "captain's wheel" mirror moved to the little space of wall behind my high chair (it looks like there was a tiny cameo portrait there in this photo?) and lived there for decades as THE non-bathroom hair grooming spot for the family (hair dryer, curling iron, Vitalis, etc., all within arm's reach).

Presented without comment:

Oh, and while we're trotting through Memory Mews, and at the certain risk of being untoward and indecorous, I just have to ask: How freakin' doable was my dad in the late 1970s?

I think "foxy" was the mot du temps. Mom's got it going on here, too. That goofy child, on the other hand? Clearly adopted. (KIDDING! Sorry, Bob. Love you!)

Wait, here's that same child affecting mouth-breathing idiocy just to annoy me. It worked. I think Dad is pretending to read the Colonial Williamsburg map and schedule but is really stealthily amused by my consternation. This (BTW) is stop number one:

Dad and I had an unfortunate, tumultuous couple of years in my mid- to late teens (his mid- to late 30s, an age range I left behind a decade ago... ugh!) during which we understood each other precious little and fought a great deal. That situation was much improved after my high school graduation...

... and even more so with my coming out to my parents, the general passage of years, the healing of old wounds, and the mellowing-with-age of Gordon Gary Geise (th'original).


One more memory, just for fun. I've always been pleased with this pic: some very basic swing ride in King's Dominion, probably torn down long ago... that's Mom and a sliver of Dad in boat #11 ahead of me, and Bob's on the ground looking up.