I do very much miss the times I could have spent with my father. My mother said that when I was at his funeral service that I asked to be alone with him. I spent more than 15 minutes in mature silence with him. She said that when she came back to get me that I told her, "Daddy could breathe again if he could just catch the wind." I had just turned 5 years old two days earlier.

Perhaps even more startling is that whenever we passed the cemetary prior to his passing, I would say pointing, "Daddy's going to take me there someday!" I am sure I meant it in the most innocent of ways, remarking on a day when he promised he would take me there to see the different headstones or what-not, but I don't think anyone was prepared for how he did so, except myself.

To this day I feel I have mourned his death and that the time I spent with him was all that I was given the opportunity for. He was often on tour and we saw him infrequently. I loved him very much and I love him just as much today. I used to say that he was in heaven playing a white grand piano on a cloud. Sometimes I feel his presence, as though he is watching over me. In my early twenties I had a few dreams of such intensity and realism that they can only enforce my belief, if skeptical, in the spiritual world.

One dream that I remember occured at a bus stop in New York City. A rare dream painted in grays, blacks, and whites. It was halfway down a downsloping street, the terminal on the right with a park beyond it. There was absolutely no one around. No litter, no animals, no cars, nothing. Just the stark feeling of the buildings trapping the breeze and funneling a vortex of frozen energy around the isolated bus stop. Standing in front of the stop was my father as a young man, perhaps 25 or 30 years old looking eager but patient. I walked up to him adorning a symbolic wife and symbolic children and told him that I was to be his son, about my endeavors, and that these would be his grandchildren and his daughter-in-law. He softly drew a smile that lasted a while. I told him about the life he would have and he conceded to it and grew warm, understanding it all somehow.

I wonder if I had that dream before he died when I was a young child, or if he did as a young man, already communicating it genetically or spiritually to me by my own birth. Destiny is in us all somehow. How it gets there we cannot know before it comes.

But I know that my father enjoyed his life and wanted me to enjoy mine. And that I do. I value every moment of it, and I remember my father all along in everything that I do.