My father was supposed to have turned 77 today, but instead he passed away on January 27, 2009. We’d left very little unsaid to each other, and I said those things that I needed to say when he was no longer around to hear them earlier this year. So what I write today is more to mark the absence than to add anything useful or illuminating.

There he is below in his high-school yearbook. “Cheerful and happy all day long” is how some anonymous fellow student wrote him him up, and it’s nice to know he was thought of that way back then. While I can’t say that he was always cheerful and happy, he was certainly calm and even-tempered, and a peaceful influence on my life.

He married when he was 21, and I was born when he was 22, so when he posed for the school photographer, I really wasn’t that far away at all. I wonder what he would have thought if he could have seen the path ahead.

Here are a few more photos from our earliest days together. The one on the right was taken at my first birthday party.

And here is our last picture together.

When he was alive, the first thing I’d do on his birthday upon waking was call him. I can’t do that today. And I know, as the day goes on, even if I manage to forget for a moment here and there, each time I happen to glance over at the phone, I’ll remember that call, now impossible to make, and wince, and feel the pain anew.