Happy Birthday, Dad

My father would have been 69 today.

It feels weird to type that. He's been gone eight and a half years already, though it doesn't seem like that long.

We didn't always get along. In fact, we didn't really get along at all until I turned 21 and graduated from college. But when that happened, it was like a switch was flipped somewhere in the universe. For almost eight years after, we had that perfect kind of golden father-daughter relationship that the Lifetime Network loves.

He was a strong presence. One of those people who took over wherever he was--from the marina docks to the boardroom--without trying to at all. It just happened. His viewing was packed. You almost couldn't walk across the room, it was so crowded. People came out of the woodwork. And almost no one knew he'd been sick; his death was sudden to them. So it was shocking for my mother and my brother and me to see what seemed like half of Baltimore crammed into a funeral home parlor to say goodbye.

He had three passions: our dogs, his business, and his boat. The last dog died about three years before he did. The business was packed up in boxes and eventually shredded. And the boat was sold a few months after he died, but not before someone raided it and made off with the GPS, radar, and (inexplicably) a little lighthouse sculpture, which was the only thing my mom wanted from their floating weekend home.

Knowing my father, he's CEO of the afterlife by now. And he has that 50-foot Hatteras he always dreamed of outside his back door and a yard full of labrador retrievers.

At least, that's how I like to picture him.

Happy birthday, Dad. I love you.