From a Distance...

I have long since run out of fingers and toes with which to count the number of family gatherings and celebrations that I have missed since we moved here. With rare exception, I can only experience these vicariously through telephone conversations and the pictures that they send me.

I do not remember the last time I was in Southern California for a Father’s Day celebration, and I regret that I missed this one as well.

This one had special significance, because it was the first Father’s Day that our Dad has been great grandfather and the first one that my brother has been a grandfather.

By the time the paterfamilias reaches 91, at least in these parts, there are usually 5 generations present in the photograph. It didn’t work out that way in our family, but I am very thankful that we can at least have a photo of 4 generations. 

I am so excited for my brother that he gets to be grandpa to this little girl. I know he is going to be a great one. He knows how to have fun and have adventures, and she is going to have a wonderful time.

At some point in the distant past, our grandfather, who died in 1986, 2 days before his 94th birthday (my sister went to the facility where he was being cared for with birthday balloons only to find he had just died, poor thing), started a tradition of “pointing...”

when photographs are being taken...

 And the four of us have carried it right on.

Wish I could have been there this time to point too… Maybe next year…