The Only Thing Different

Sitting on your heels, you'd plant yourself on the worn wooden living room floor--sometimes with your shoes still on, sometimes in your white crew socks--in front of your record player. Your fine dark brown hair would fall down across your forehead as you worked at your task, your glasses slipping down your prominent nose, the one you passed down to me. Your shoulders were a bit hunched as you assessed your loot. Records stacked or sitting up in boxes surrounded you. You sometimes sorted them by artist, but often you just seemed to be on a roll with listening to your favorites or locating all of the different versions of the same song. How can I forget old Rolling Stones followed by the later Patsy Cline? I wonder which version of "I Forget to Remember to Forget" you were searching for, now that I know you loved that tune as a young man.

Your reel-to-reel was next to you sometimes too--when you were searching for a memory that must have popped up in a dream or in some passing thought that startled you into pulling out those square boxes, the discs inside holding hours of notes and voices, some of them homemade. Maybe some of them are the recordings you forced your sisters into, orchestrating from the status of eldest brother, playing a role you weren't sure of in most other settings. Now we know you were also in the Radio Club in high school. I wonder who you talked to the most about music and if you fell in love to certain songs. When I think about all of the questions I have stored up, it seems even less fair that I can't ask them.

The living room floor is refinished and a framed photo of you sits on top of the record player. We still think of you there and it seems impossible that four years have passed without your laughter warming up a room and without your deep voice singing along to your favorite music. Four years is too long to be without you so we try to take you everywhere we go. Music seems to be the best place to find you.

-ATP

O'Pelletier

I will be thinking of you especially on Saturday, Roy O'Pelletier. Ah, yes, and I will be wearing some green too! xos :-)

It's November 18th again...

You would have been 72 today. Each birthday without you here to celebrate it with is stranger than the last, which I didn’t expect. I thought it would become too natural. It hasn’t. Instead, there is quiet where your laugh would have been and there is an empty chair where you’d have sat and devoured a giant piece of chocolate cake tonight. Every year, though, I do learn more about you, Dad. As I’ve talked to other people who love you, I’ve learned more about your tender side and your brave side and your stubborn side, and as we get ready to remember you today, I know we’ll learn even more about you as we reminisce.

It’s not in hearing a story for the first time that you learn it, you know? It’s when you hear it retold that you get it down so that you can retell it in your own voice. Then there are the things you memorized right away—that poem that stuck or that line a lover delivered that will be tattooed on your heart until you’re gone. Then out of the blue, that thing you knew for sure changes without warning. A song I’ve heard 999 times might suddenly sound new because I thought of you when it played that thousandth time. You left behind memories that are so strong they almost bring you back.

I can still hear you singing.

Birdies!

Birdies, birdies, birdies!!!!!!!!!!!! :-) .....at long last. Enjoy them all. The flowers are trying to break through too. Happy Springtime. xos :-)

March 9, 2011

On this day a young couple became a young family and were overjoyed by it. Happy Birthday to you!!! Here's to you and to all of us. How blessed we were and are. Hope it's a great day. ily2 xos :-)

2/28/66-2/28/11

Doesn't seem like forty-five years since we lost our Mom/Nana, does it? xos

2/3/2011

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birth-day, dear A.T.P.! Happy Birhday to You-oooou! This is the day our family got another great gift. It's a day for many sweet memories and to wish you many more. Love you! xos tiab :-) (Maggie says don't forget mine. I'm 11.)