Today is Sunday, September 22 and there are only 94 days until Christmas.  If you listen closely, you can hear retailers raising prices in preparation.  Today’s birthday wishes go to Paul Muni, Henryk Szeryng and Debby Boone.  On this day in 1692 the last person was hanged for witchcraft in the US, President Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation speech in 1863 and in 1973 Henry Kissinger was sworn in as America’s first Jewish Secretary of State.  It is Independence Day in Mali, Press Sunday in the US and Wheaton, Illinois is having their Autumn Harvest Festival.

This week is a sad time for me and my family.  My father passed away this past Thursday.  He was 92. While making the final arrangements for his funeral, my brothers and I had the opportunity to reminisce about some of the things he used to say and do that made him unique.  He once told his mother that the reason he stopped playing the violin was because my mother had cut the strings on his bow.  When heading north on the parkway he would get off at the Bloomfield Ave exit because the toll there was ten cents cheaper than going the extra mile to Hoover Avenue and paying a quarter.  The fact that driving through all the back streets of Bloomfield to get home probably burned ten cents more in gas never occurred to him.

He once drove home from work with the windows open in his car and then another time with them closed and the AC on to see which would use less gas.  As you might guess, he was, in his words, frugal.  In our words he was cheap.  I have quoted him in this blog on several occasions and his comments will appear in future writings, too.

Most notably, as we have always been proud to say, my father, and my mother by the way, helped end WW II.  My father was drafted into the Army in 1944.  He claims that if you look, you can still see the fingernail marks in the sidewalk in front of my grandmother’s house from when they dragged him away.  Because of his degree in chemical engineering and his experience in munitions, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project and helped develop the atom bomb.  My mother followed him out to Los Alamos from Pennsylvania and also worked on the project, in a lab.  They were married out there.

As kids, we got to go on a number of vacations to places like Nova Scotia, the Rocky Mountains, Pike’s Peak, the Grand Canyon, Texas, Louisiana and other places.  We have great memories of those trips, like the time we had to stop and go pick up my brand new cowboy hat after I let it blow out the window in Arizona.  Another time my brother let our map fly out a window and we had to go looking for it along the road in a Florida swamp.  We got to throw snowballs at each other in July while in the Rockies.  We saw the Alamo and were disappointed to find out that Davy Crocket looked nothing like Fess Parker.

Until a few years ago, my parents’ wills had us kids going to live with my Uncle Fred if both of them had died.  Fortunately for Uncle Fred, the wills were updated and we are on our own now.  I think if he and Aunt Joan thought we were on our way to Austin, Texas to move in with them, they would have moved and left no forwarding address.

During the past couple years Dad’s health had declined and he had to be admitted into a nursing home in April.  He developed additional problems and his overall condition went steadily downhill.  One of the last conversations my brother had with Dad was when he asked when Halloween was.  We are not really sure why that was a concern.  Fortunately we waited to buy his costume.

 
When his time came he went quietly and did not suffer.  I guess, in the end, that is all any of us can ask for.   He had a good life, he had three grandsons and two great grandsons.  He left behind a family that will miss him and a number of memories that will help keep him with us.