This letter was a little hard for me to transcribe. It's from 2011, when my dad was 79, still living on his own in his condo. His health would start failing soon after, and by the time we went to South Florida a year later for his 80th birthday, I believe he had moved up to Jacksonville to live with my brother. A year after that he was diagnosed with the cancer that he would beat back twice before it killed him in 2015. That said, this letter is funny …
“For every hour he spends with mankind he needs 3 hours in his closet” (letters from my father part 3)
Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of Harv's passing. I thought about him a lot, and I thought about how he would like to be remembered aside from my sharing his wisdom with strangers and friends (which he might have only secretly enjoyed). Though this is a heavy week, no doubt my dad would have wanted me to enjoy myself and think of the good times. And so, in that spirit, I'm posting a sweet, pretty light-hearted little number; also in that spirit I …
Cromagnum man, moving to Sweden, and “do a nice nice” (letters from my father, part 2)
My dad disliked "Hallmark holidays" — his relationship with them fell somewhere on the spectrum between apathy and antipathy. But as I've built this series (started last week) around Father's Day — today — and his yahrtzeit, it seems wise to post a particularly meaty missive from Young Harv. This one lacks an envelope and, as my father was unlikely to put years on his letters and even less so months (he was more into days of the week in his …