Hey Dad,
It’s been awhile since I’ve written here, but I think about you constantly. I miss you even more than I ever thought would be possible. Today, I thought about you and how when we called on the phone, you’d frequently ask us “what’s the password?” before you would allow us to have a conversation with you. It was a Marx Brothers reference; you’d wait until we responded with “swordfish.” I remember being embarrassed by this when I’d call home from a friend’s house, but you insisted. Just one of your many quirks.

Hey Dad,
Right after my sixteenth birthday, you rented a car and packed us three girls up for a trip to Long Island, where you grew up, where you met and married Mom, and where all three of us were born. It was the first time you had taken us back since we moved to Maine in 1983 and you were super excited to show us where you grew up, and for us to visit with your family and friends

My memories of that whole trip are, on the whole, good. I remember how proud you were of us as your friends saw us for the first time in years, some of them the first time in decades. I remember how excited you were to find us good egg creams, since you lamented the fact that you didn’t have a seltzer tap at home to make them the way they’re made at a soda fountain. You took us into the City and we walked everywhere. You took us all over, including to Central Park West to Strawberry Fields (that was in the height of my obsession with The Beatles) and several Late Night with David Letterman hot spots (you were quite the Letterman fan). On the train back to your brother’s house, you scared the crap out of a young woman by sharply telling her to stop popping her knuckles. That was a huge pet peeve of yours and after you apologized for scaring her, you explained that the sound of popping joints just made you cringe.

You also took us to the beach that week. I think it was the first time I had ever spent any time on a sandy beach and you decided to teach us how to body surf. While patience wasn’t always your strong suit I remember how patient you were with us that day; you helped us pick out good waves and watched us to make sure that we didn’t get hurt. I remember I got super sunburned (one of the few truly bad sunburns I’ve ever had) and how you teased me about it. We didn’t take many vacations, this being one of two memorable ones I can remember taking with you. I wish there had been time for more.

Dad, I have so many memories of you that are connected to foods. I bought a pork roast at the butcher the other day and brought it home and divided it into pieces, wrapping each piece in its own freezer paper coating. You would have yelled at me for wasting freezer paper and boggled over the fact that I had no masking tape. You’d have approved of my labeling though; pork shoulder, the weight and the date I was putting it in the freezer. You were such a stickler for that.

Right now I can’t bring myself to eat pancakes. You made pancakes for lunch for us so many times when we were children, in the same cast iron skillet with the same griddlecakes recipe. We used it so often that I’d copied it out onto a piece of paper and stuck it to the side of the fridge. And I spelled sugar wrong, with an e. And on the back of that piece of paper was a horrible sharpie bird that I had drawn. My favorite part was when you’d make a giant pancake for yourself with the last of the batter and dub it The Pancake that Ate Chicago. Or New York. Or maybe we called it that and you just humored us.

Today I took sausages from the butcher and squished them out of their casings. They were sweet italian sausages, one of the kinds you seemed to favor when I was a kid, all full of fennel and deliciousness. The feeling of the casing in my hand reminded me of standing next to you at the kitchen-aid, slowly feeding spiced ground pork into the slippery and damp natural casings. As squeamish as I was, natural casings have never bothered me, perhaps because of their distinct lack of blood or gook. Sometimes now we eat at restaurants and I lament the fact that you’ll never get to try them, indeed that you won’t ever spend time with me in Eugene now that I’ve lived here long enough to know where to take you for a great burrito like you wanted.