Happy Birthday, Dad

[madrobins]

My father was born in 1913. Before WWI, but after the Wright Brothers. He has been married three times; has two children, a long career as an artist, designer, inventor and raconteur, and turned a working barn into House Beautiful (seriously: from cowshit and holes in the floor to photo-ready gorgeousness in a mere twenty-five years, as a weekend project that we lived in). He designed, or helped design, the Princeton Perception Lab in the 50s; became an Emergency Medical Tech in his 60s (and worked on the local ambulance squad for 20 years), and told astonishing serialized stories to us on the long car-trips from New York to Massachusetts that we took every weekend when I was a kid (one was called "Breakfast in Space." Because it was a serial. Because it was--no, never mind). He used to have a sign over his desk that said "Don't bother me with your reason, logic, or common sense. I'm being creative." And he sure was. In his 80s they discovered that he had macular degeneration, too advanced to fix. Because of his experience studying perception (see Princeton, above) he had the vocabulary to be uniquely helpful to his opthalmolagists, with the result that he's written at least one paper with one of them on the experience of MD from the inside, as it were. When his eyesight got too bad for him to do art in any way that was meaningful to him, he started writing: first a book called Vision Junkie, about his experiences with MD, then vignettes about his life on the ambulance squad. Whatever his private grief at losing a huge part of his life with his eyesight, he has dealt with it by finding other occupations--and by becoming the onsite authority at his retirement community on all low-vision technology.

Today he turns 97. He's a hell of a thing to live up to, but my brother and I are doing our best. Happy birthday, Dad. I love you.