"HAPPY BIRTHDAY", "DIDDY"

Today is my "Diddy's" birthday. His 83rd on this earth...and his 6th in Heaven.

How have the years flown by in such a 'blink' of an eye? How can six years have passed, when sometimes it seems like last week that we had our 10 day trip down the "Nile"??

He is missed as much today as he was when he took his last breath.

He is a fixture in my mind and heart... He is at the center of a "mini" shrine to him in my dining room. He looks at my daily with his smiling face every time that I walk through the room (probably at least 30 times a day) and gazing from picture to picture
I am amazed of the time line and man that I can follow by pictures and documents from his years in grade school, through the Navy and into a blissful marriage with my saint of a Mother (I can state this one on a Bible).

Through our years growing up in a community church....remembering their out pouring of love when both of my parents died.

Now we are left with their deaths...

What do we DO with "That"???

We begin by saying a prayer every morning...

"Thank YOU Almighty One"....for blessing me with the greatest gift an infant could ever receive...two wonderful parents...a childhood full of grace and tremendous memories, and parents to aspire to be like every day of my walk on this earth.

I used to think that I was so unlucky to have had my parents die so early.

Now I know that it was just God telling me that by giving me the greatest parents on the earth...he needed them more than I did, and had to take them back.

A fair trade, in my years and years of trying to make some type of believable reason for losing my parents....this can be my only option.

But as they enjoy their reward... I KNOW that they are with me every day, and look forward to our all meeting again....I look toward that day (hopefully in the far, far distant future ) and know that I have been lucky, blessed and have been given far, far more than millions of other people on our planet.

So happy birthday, "OLE MAN"......and as he would always say..... "That's MISTER OLD MAN to YOU"!!!!

I can still see the car grease under your nails, smell the forklifts that you sold, see you scratching your feet in their white socks...laying on your back after church on the hall floor in your boxers...underneath the huge attic fan...floating on your back in the Gulf of Mexico, always bailing me out of trouble and remember MOST vividly that you worked yourself relentlessly to give me the greatest child hood that ANYONE could ever dream of and one that I feel totally and eternally grateful to have experienced.

Happy Birthday to you! Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday day DEAR "DIDDY"...Happy birthday to you!!!!!!

This is my weak attempt at a tribute to a man that will always have "hung" the moon in my book... and this one is definitely "NON" Fiction.


Till next time.......COTTON