When Stars Align & Shine

THIRTY TWO YEARS ago, when I was a far younger man, my father's time on earth was inching away.   We did not know it at the time, so well he hid it, that he was fighting an unseen disease set to claim his life on earth within the year.  

My family and I were overseas, living and working in a country he had mainly known through the horrors of war.  His visits to us with my mother, Gerda, to see Austria and their German homeland in times of peace and prosperity brought us closer than we ever realized at the time.  

Today my father's passing in July 1990 is etched in our family's remembrance like a treasured Van Gogh. While our days together were much too short, he lives on in ways I could not have imagined. Memories of him now are the heaven within me.  

My longing words to him on Father's Day in 1989 remain alive to me, and hopefully a beacon of love for all the families he held so dear.

Three Wishes for a Star

Too far apart
to see each other grow
they sit in favorite easy chairs
wishing it were not so...
they think about old family times
when both were younger men,
and in some longing magical way
they wish
those days could come again...

A son nears forty, a father sixty-nine
together in thoughtful solitude 
accompanying the passage of time:
“I miss you, Dad,” he whispers,
wishing upon a star
“Me too, son, me too,” he hears him say,
from somewhere not too far –

It's a happy holiday isn't it
when two men think as one
sitting in favorite easy chairs

a father and his son...