To a father gone, and not so

We went through our parents storage units a few days ago, and again I could hear my dad. This happens often these days, now that he has passed. He is gone but never gone, not there but always there, somehow, even though we can longer go see him or hear his booming laugh or watch the way he brightened whenever we walked in his room at Kingston Memory Care.

The day we went through the storage units, for instance, my sister and I could both hear him howling  "What are you doin' that for?" every time we pitched something. Because my dad never threw anything out, nor my mother, either.

The consequence of this is I now have a house strewn with reminders of him, from his old baseball glove and the lead soldiers with which he played as a boy, to photos and mementos from his International Harvester days, to his old Civil War re-enactor's uniform, which now hangs in my front hall closet. And I have his voice, which never seems to leave me.

When the mercury plunged to Zero Dark Icebox last winter, I almost expected the phone to ring -- as it did on a similar night when I was 21 and working my first newspaper job  -- and to hear my father reminding me to bundle up because "it's terribly cold out there."

When I see or hear or read something outrageous, which is frequently these days in a world that seems to have lost its collective mind, I can hear Dad's disgusted benediction: "Oh, good grief."

And when I discovered a TV channel called Grit, entirely comprised of Dad's beloved westerns?

I could hear him telling me about Tom Mix again, and how he was Dad's favorite radio cowboy, and how he fixed the bad guys' wagon every single time.

Then he would tell me how much he loved this new channel, because what man of his place and time wouldn't love a channel that delivered 24-hour helpings of Audie Murphy and Randolph Scott and the Duke?

"Dad would have loved Grit TV," I told my sister. "He'd have never changed the channel."

I, too, can't change the channel, and that is blessed thing. This will be the oddest of Father's Days, because it is our first without him. But of course we're not really without him. And he is with Mom again, which is a blessing all its own. They are whole, and young again, and if I close my eyes I can hear the two of them, sitting in their chairs as Dad falls asleep in front of a TV no doubt tuned for all eternity to either the Grit channel, or "Walker: Texas Ranger."

"Bill! Go to bed!" Mom is saying.

"Good grief, Jackie," Dad is answering.

Makes me smile every time.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. You were the best. And you'll never be gone.