Father time

I don't write about my dad much. He wasn't around for much of my life, he was military and would be stationed away from us for a year or two at a time. Then he died of a heart attack at age 44 when I was not quite 14, so we never got to know each other very well, and when my parents last saw each other they were on pretty bad terms (they were separating and planned to reunite later when he got home from Greece. He was waiting for the plane when it happened) so my last year or two that I was around him were very intense. Sometimes I dream about him, and we have conversations that we never got to have and I try to let him know who I turned out to be. Maybe I'm trying to figure that one out for myself. I've really had no other father substitutes in life, and have always rejected parental-type authority anyway so I didn't seek them out.

A few years ago, I wrote a lengthy post about him.

If not for little things like that, he would be forgotten. My mother has been dead for 15 years, I had no brothers, sisters or children, and his own immediate family is nearly gone (7 sisters, 3 brothers, all their spouses, a mother, father, and 2 step-fathers -- gone all but one sister or maybe two. I'm not even sure). His real name at birth was Junior Bill, kind of a hillbilly name. He was not a "Jr." of his father, he was just the youngest kid in the family. He officially changed it later to William, but everybody called him Bill. I called him Daddy Bill or just Daddy. Always.