Dad

A quick inventory of the partial contents of an envelope Dad left for me last year. I just opened it.

1. Many b-&-w family photos, including one from 1925 featuring four generations (brother Glenn, mother, grandpa, great-grandpa, b. 1845)...
2. Our first family photo, from 1957.
3. Class photo of me from 1966, another from1970 inscribed to Uncle Glenn and Aunt Lucy.
4. Winterton Curtis monograph from 1957, "A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie"
5. Commencement program from Dad's graduation from Vet School, 1960. (btw: I took a walk this morning and saw the new clinic just opened by the two young men who bought his practice last year.)
6. An aerial photo of (old) Busch Stadium, with exploding fireworks above, 9.8.98 (the night Mark McGwire hit his 62d home run).
7. The letter I wrote to our older daughter on the day of her birth, reporting a forgotten but (if I say so myself) prescient personal conversation with Bill McKibben about the environment and our obligations to future generations
8. A copy of Vanderbilt Magazine from 1999, in which I reviewed John Lachs's In Love With Life.
9. A newspaper clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dated 9.18.74, featuring a letter to the editor written by yours truly defending "President Ford's courageous, though untimely, attempt to put Richard Nixon behind us."
10. Another clipping, dated 12.25.89, called An expression of love: a father's letter. It begins: "To our sons: We are fathers, and we find it hard to say 'I love you.'" It concludes: "We reach out, and this time we say, 'I love you...' Love, Dad"

Thanks, Dad. I love you.

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