One man dies, a baby is born...

Every once in a great while, the calendar catches the eye and reminds the viewer how fast it turns. A birthday, the summer solstice, the monthly reminder chime on your Blackberry about the dog's medicine...there's always that moment that screams "Didn't I just (insert action) the other day?"

The stock market is at a high for the year, signalling the recession is ending, although the job market says otherwise right now. The new movie from the Coen Brothers is being released, reminding one of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, and how groups of people would cluster outside of the theatre, chain-smoking and holding cups of terrible coffee, huddled together discussing the marvel they'd just seen. Through all of this, I think of my father.

He died eighteen years ago. Today.

By doing some rudimentary math, that means that Dear Ole Dad missed out on a whole bunch of developments that would have fascinated him. He was an '80s technodork, with the calculator watch he gave me for my tenth birthday one of the best presents I can remember getting. (Although my mother and brother teamed up that year to get me my very own 19" black-and-white Philco television. I remember plugging it in, adjusting the antenna, and watching the first thing that came on. It was an episode of 'Get Smart', and I put on my socks and sat there in bliss while it unfolded...) What would that man have thought of this Internet, of LED TV's, of Blackberry's and iPhones, of even this blog, written by his youngest, available to the world at no fee? His fascinating and curious mind lives on in the uncontrolled morass that operates between my ears, but I can only imagine what he would have done the first time he linked a Palm PDA via Bluetooth and downloaded files bigger than the first computers he worked on in the '70s could even store.

He also missed both of his children getting hitched, missed the wars in the Middle East that he incessantly predicted would happen (Called it within a year of accuracy when the first Desert Storm-style invasion of Iraq would happen. Even guessed correctly that it would be driven by one country invading another over oil reserves, and that the United States would be forced to 'protect its interests'.) The last real conversation we had was about Magic Johnson and HIV. Magic's press conference announcing that he had 'attained' (Magic's word) the HIV virus and would be forced to retire happened two days before Dad passed on, and we talked about an athletic idol retiring before his time. Dad predicted that Magic would live on for "at least five or ten years...he's too healthy to lose the battle." (Magic, of course, is very much alive and well some eighteen years hence) As much as Dad caused me the headaches that teenage boys have when dealing with authority, it is hard to dispute that he was a smart sonuvagun.

Dad missed a bunch of stuff that it would have been handy to have him around for, and more things that would have changed the course of the future for some. I'll always be a little bitter he doesn't get to meet his grandkids (that are not en route yet, but will be sometime soon), and my negative opinion of him fades slightly as each year goes by. Time may indeed heal all wounds.

The only thing that repeatedly comes to mind today, however, is that the day Dad left this mortal coil, there were babies born. Lots of them. To think that a day that holds an anniversary of sorts for me is also a cherished day of freedom for literally thousands of young men and women...bizarre. All of these little runts that now can drive after dark without an adult in the passenger seat, that can now vote and file tax returns and such...they did not exist when my Dad was alive. I cannot believe how time goes. I never will understand that part, but will always be fascinated by it.

Happy birthday to the new cadre of kids born November 9, 1991. Embrace your freedom, and do good things with it. Make those who left before you got here into what history makes all of us: stepping stones into a new and better world.

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I purposely did not make posts during the last week or so, due to my mind being overwhelmed by the amount of dumb things that happen and would provoke columns of the sort I normally post. In the good news department (for you loyal six readers), 7DB seems to be drawing up some of that old-fashioned angst again, meaning that many columns will be flying at you in the near future. Stay tuned...and thanks for reading.