Happy Birthday, pop. You would have been 64 today, and I gotta tell you — I would still need you, I would still feed you. I would still be sending you a valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine. I miss you all the time, and double on your birthday.

I had big plans for a poignant post, which I even started writing; it’s all about old geezers and what a great old geezer you woulda been, and how much it sucks that you barely even got to be a middle-aged geezer. But as luck would have it — and perhaps there is an afterlife and in some subtle way you can affect this — it’s been a crazy busy day and I haven’t had a free minute to spend on maudlin thoughts of how it was your last birthday, when you turned 59, that was the last time you were out of the hospital, and you got to have an ice cream sundae. I guess being so busy is fitting — you would have told me there wasn’t much use in sitting around all sad even if I do still miss you. Of course I still miss you. We all do. But yeah, I guess it’s fitting to be busy, and especially busy with the sometimes peculiar work of textile evangelism.

But your birthday doesn’t get to go by unmentioned and unmarked. Let the record show that I still miss you. And man, what a year it’s been — so many things I wish you could have been here to see, like Nilda, Paulino, and Aquilina at SOAR (not to mention 3 generations of Franquemonts), or me writing a spindle book, or your grandson’s first band concert or him getting an electric guitar for his birthday, or me giving in and knitting a sock because Chad asked. And we saw that NOVA that you were on; first time I’d heard your voice since you died. I cried. I’m lucky to have that. Lucky to have all of it, and lucky to have had you for a dad.

I miss you, Ed. Don’t take any wooden nickels.