I decided to get my walk in early this Father’s Day morning and let Spotify create a playlist for me. The computer decided “Forever Young” would be a good first song and did it know how ironic the choice was? This is the saying amongst my peer group: “Growing old isn’t for cissies.”  Ain’t that the truth, though I am blessed to be relatively healthy at this moment of my growing older. (Not that you would know it from the number of pills I count out each night and morning.) When I ended my hike, the algorithm had me at “Papa Was A Rollin Stone.” If you don’t know the song, it is about an absentee father, “wherever he laid his hat was his home and when he died, all he left us was alone,”

It got me to thinking about my father. His name was Charlie and when my mother and he were having a loving moment, she used to call him Sir Charles and he called her, Lady Marilyn (her middle name). In my memory, those moments weren’t as many as we would have liked them to be. My father worked hard all his life. He was a pharmacist who had his own drug store before I was born and then worked as a pharmaceutical rep and subbed several nights and weekend days in a drug store in Waltham, Mass. I remember him compounding meds and measuring potions with great care. I also remember him letting me play at being a soda jerk at the fountain where I made a great Lime Rickey. He catered to my mother during her illnesses. But after his car accident on the Maine Turnpike which put him in the hospital in a coma in Lewiston, Maine where we spent an upside-down Passover waiting to see if he would regain consciousness, there was an angry side of him that surfaced.

They say you are supposed to be slow to anger and quick to forgive. He struggled with that, and if I am honest, so do I (the quick to forgive part.) But I’m not going to talk about me – I’m going to remember the moment before my father’s funeral when we were alone in the chapel and Eileen took out three cigars from her pocketbook and placed them inside his coffin. You see my father never went anywhere without a cigar. The smell of cigar smoke, no matter what quality, brings me right back to him. And to the affable, personable salesman with a trunk full of samples that he felt were meant to be shared.

I took the picture above early in my walk this morning. The Lake is calm; the bullrushes (is that what you call them?) are straight and strong. The waters and the sky reflect each other in peace. So may it be with us.