Some memories are of the photograph of an event and no longer of the incident itself, but some feel to the rememberer like they are a photo, with the details so clear and so accessible. This is one memory … it feels like I could count the rocks in the creek bed if I would just take the time.

Today is Father’s Day. It is a difficult day for my girlfriend, as her father died in February 2016, a sad fact that brought us together in our house-that-is-becoming-a-home.

My father will be 82 in August 2017. That sentence, while I know it to be factually accurate, has the effect of making me feel like a child lost in the mall. Where am I? Where have I been? If August 15, 1935, is known for anything, it is not known for the birth of my dad but for it being the date that the comedian Will Rogers and famous aviator Wiley Post died when Post crashed their airplane north of the Arctic Circle near Point Barrow, Alaska. (The plane was not de-iced because no one yet knew that that would be necessary. Barrow and Post may have been the first celebrities to have perished in a plane crash.)
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