Father's Day

I last saw my father at the age of three. Fifty years later, I learned he was murdered for his car, in 1948. After ten years spent with an abusive step father, I was left totally fatherless. Author Phillip Wylie became a sort of unknowing father figure to me, for many years. I grew up not caring enough about my father to check on him, for he and my mother had a rough relationship, before she ditched him to join the Okie flood to California. I think I was over forty before I began to feel a need to know the man. It was a feeling of being left unmoored on one of two pillars, the other representing my mother. I don't think one can feel complete without knowing both sides that contributed to their origin. I salute my father on this day. I hope he had a good time of it in the short time he had after we left him.