Tuesday, December 13, 2016

tom miller day ...

Tonight is the last super moon of 2016. The last of 3 in the last quarter of this year, which is apparently significant. It's also Tom Miller Day ... today would have been my grandpa's 84th birthday. He was arguably one of the most important and influential men in my life, even though he passed the year I turned 11. For those of you keeping track, this was quite some time ago. I have been without him nearly two and a half times the time I was with him, yet I have always felt mystically connected to him. And the moon. Which is probably totally unrelated, yet it doesn't feel that way tonight.

Tom Miller was fun and ornery and full of life. He was brilliant, despite his 8th grade education, and could fix literally anything. He and my grandma met when she began writing letters to him while he was deployed with the Army during the Korean War. Eventually they bought a farm - the farm where I would spend weeks at a time while I was growing up. Together they built many things there ... cars, tractors, lives, the list is immeasurable I suppose. He loved to stir the proverbial pot... He would order pizza and send my grandma to pick it up even though they lived miles from town, and promised to make popcorn in the brand new popcorn maker while she loudly protested. He taught me how to feed the baby calves that were brought to the barn each winter, how to make maple syrup in the Sugar Shanty, and how to ice skate on the pond on the farm. He was the most fun.

I have always felt a rather peculiar ownership of him - he was *my* grandpa. I remember feeling a tinge of sadness last summer when I was talking to my next youngest cousin and learning that she really didn't remember him at all.

Dates are a funny thing for me. I can recall the date of every major {and generally minor} event in my life since I was a teenager. Some before that. I have no idea what my affinity for dates is or how it began, I only know that it's a rather strange thing. December 13. I always think of him today. Actually ... I always call Diane today. And so naturally I did and we talked about how he said he would live to be 100 and, of course, we believed him because he always did everything he said he would. And because I have a love affair with the moon I feel like, somehow, the two events are related if only for me.

So I wish you a Happy Tom Miller Day. I hope you celebrate well.

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