My father left behind a wealth of photos from his days as a US Air Force photographer during WWII. I've always loved going through them; they are a window into days long past otherwise unreachable to me. Some of the photos are of him, and it is obvious from the plentiful less-than-serious images that he was quite a character. I've often wished for a time machine to take me back to meet this man at that time long before my birth.

It's horrible to say, but he died at an inconvenient time in my adolescence. He had never been home much during my childhood, so how could I know him? His absence, in a typical teenage way, made me resent his presence. We clashed until the bitter end. 

My two half sisters, 15 and 18 years older than me, had prime time with Dad in their childhood. By the time I came along, he had lost his love of life and fallen into alcoholism.  Later, as a recovering alcoholic he rediscovered his zeal and energetically devoted every spare moment of his waking hours to the rescue of the similarly fallen. He would drive to the WPAFB military hospital several nights a week in his old SAAB station wagon to pick up guys from the detox ward and take them to AA meetings. The patients from the ward christened his car the Special A A Bus (S.A.A.B.), and made him a framed mosaic picture of that old green wagon. He loved that picture. It hung on the wall above his dresser until the day we packed to move from the house in the months after he died. 

In the fall of 1978 the headlines read; 900 Jim Jones Temple Cult Members Die In Murder Suicide In Guyana. In the fall of 1978  my father discovered that he had cancer. Before even the first spring flowers came, he was gone. 

At my father's funeral service, the chapel was completely full of grieving people that I didn't know and had never met, people he had touched and helped and given hope and worth. During the flight to DC to bury him in Arlington, my young mind contemplated why I felt mostly nothing, and why I felt more than a little guilt for that nothingness. As my life marched on, the maturity that only years can bring informed me that my father had taken countless hopeless people under his wing and made lasting, positive changes in their lives. My father belatedly became my hero. But, when you are 17 and the man you called your father but didn't know is gone, this is a realization that is still many years down the road.  

One of my favorite photos of his was always  a WWII era shot of Piccadilly Circus in London. When I finally visited the UK  a few years back,  I took a copy with me so that I could line up the exact same shot. Matted together in the same frame, I sent them as a Christmas gift to my niece's daughter - the great granddaughter my father never met. 

Ironically, her name is London.