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Simply one of the best classes I've ever taken! The album track was called Evolution, and since I had just finished another mini album about myself, I made this one about my dad, and how our relationship evolved. The journaling is printed on the 4x6 cards you see in slide #8. I had really wanted to hand-write it, but it was just too many words. It reads :I know the outline of your life as well as I know my own, milestones well-documented for posterity: that you were born , 1948 in , New York, to Bob and Jean , the 2nd of four children, and that you preferred to be called by your middle name, . I know that you were baptized in Baptist Church, that you were in Boy Scouts and a whole host of team sports, and that in high school you marched the halftime shows in your football uniform. I know that you graduated from High School in 1967 and that you went to the University because you wanted to go skiing. I know that you met Mom in cell physiology class your senior year and married her on , 1972. I know that you served 20 years as an officer of the United States Air Force, retiring as a Major in 1992. I know that you had two kids, me in and Jeff in , and that you traveled all over the world. I know that you were diagnosed with colon cancer in January 1994, that you died quietly and with dignity, holding my hand, on March 12, 1996 in , and that your body was laid to rest with our ancestors in the Cemetery in . I have been there, & it is achingly beautiful.But this is the story of a life distilled into a shallow list of accomplishments; it is the rest of your story that, as an adult, I realize now is missing, and I have begun to seek it out. The everyday details of your ordinary life, the deceivingly mundane little things that defined you as you, an original. The things that shaped your life and made you the man you were, that shaped my life because you are my father, that now warm my heart and fill me with a sense of peace + enlightenment + connection to something greater than myself. That comfort me in your absence.I love listening to stories of your youth; the crazy days of bachelorhood and the early years of marriage; even your life as an adult, when I might have paid more attention had I not been so absorbed in my own small life. I love the stories about you and Bobby playing and hanging out together always, and about your squabble with Phil over the Lucky Strikes Halloween costume you made (and your struggle over growing up that it revealed). About your “all for one + one for all” outlook on life; about you defending the honor of your little sister; and about the two broken windows that were the inevitable result of a dozen rambunctious boys playing baseball in the backyard. About the marijuana plant you slipped into Nain's garden one summer! About your subsistence on liver and onions in college, and your dislike of vegetables. Does that explain the soy sauce on your green beans at dinner? That you dreamed of becoming a doctor but settled for the Air Force. That one of your career goals was to earn a six-figure salary, and that you were terribly disappointed about being passed over for promotion to Colonel time and again; but even that wasn't enough to convince you to play the military politics game. That you greatly admired specialists, and always thought of yourself disparagingly as a “jack of all trades, master of none.”It is all these little details, which as you see are not so little after all, that make your story not a dry factual report but a novel, rich and alive with characters that spring to life. A story that, through your children and now your grandchildren, will never end.


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