Happy Birthday

My dad wasn’t an easy person to shop for which made birthdays and holidays a little difficult for me. He didn’t play golf or fish, he wasn’t much of a reader beyond the daily newspapers (we had both a morning and an evening paper back when I was a kid), he didn’t use tweezers to glue together tiny sailing ships inside of glass bottles, and while he had a workroom down in the basement, it was more for practical purposes – like actually fixing something that needed fixing – rather than for putzing around with woodworking or electrical projects.

Dad’s hobbies were pretty limited to two things: taking care of his family and working. Since taking care of his family meant working, he did a lot of that.

He worked long days, and as a salesman who always worked on a small draw against a commission, he worked a lot of the time: Saturdays (stores were closed on Sundays back when I was a kid) and evenings when the store was open. So even if he had enjoyed things like golf and fishing and making little ships inside of glass bottles, he didn’t have a lot of time for them. The free time my dad had – when he wasn’t busy working or being a husband or a dad – he liked to spend working out on the yard.

Not a lot of good gift ideas for that.

Happy Birthday, dad. Here’s a garden spade.

Happy Father’s Day, dad. Here’s a garden hose with matching sprinkler.

Years later, after the state began selling lottery scratch cards, shopping for my dad got much easier because my dad fell in love with those scratch cards. He knew the odds of winning were against him, and while that drove me away from ever playing them (can’t say he didn’t raise a sensible son), those steep odds, the attraction of that “what if” chance to turn a dollar into a thousand, was, to him, like honey to a bee.

If today were like year’s past, I’d be out this afternoon buying a slug of lottery scratch cards and folding them all up into an envelope alongside a birthday card.

But today isn’t like year’s past.

Happy Birthday, dad. I miss you.