The Loneliest Liberal: Mo...m

By James Knudsen

[Originally published on February 28, 2015.]

Two-thousand fourteen ended with my siblings and me officially joining the ranks of the orphans following the passing of our dad Mo. I commemorated the event by changing the wallpaper on my smart phone to a very “Mad Men” shot of dad that was taken at a studio. This was replaced after a month with a picture of Dad and Mom which remains to this day.

Fourth Saturday’s Loneliest Liberal

Mo...m

By James Knudsen

Two-thousand fourteen ended with my siblings and me officially joining the ranks of the orphans following the passing of our dad Mo. I commemorated the event by changing the wallpaper on my smart phone to a very “Mad Men” shot of dad that was taken at a studio. This was replaced after a month with a picture of Dad and Mom which remains to this day.

Father's Day

On Friday about dinner time, the doorbell rang and we discovered a tall cardboard box sitting at our front door.
    "Happy Father's Day," said my wife.
    "Oh, is this Father's Day weekend? Nice."
    The box said it was from a rose company.
    "We need to bring it in and open it," she said.
    The plant's label card said:

William Shakespeare 2000^TM (Ausromeo)
Superb blooms of richest velvet crimson. Strong Old Rose fragrance. A bushy, free flowering shrub.
4ft x 3ft. Zones 5-10.

This was another example of the incisive thoughtfulness of my wife, who thirty years earlier had given her "suffering artist husband" a little book of selected paintings by Vincent van Gogh.

Apricot Kuchen

And my wife prepared and baked a kuchen for me this morning, using apricots from Visalia, California, a dozen miles from where we met, on Friday, March 4, 1966:

My first piece:

My second piece:

My lunch (with raspberries from Florida, where my wife and I vacationed in the early 'nineties—with our daughter—and in 1995, while the OJ Simpson trial was going on):

My dessert after lunch (with blueberries from Watsonville, California, about 45 miles from where my wife and I were wed on Friday, April 15, 1966):

My dessert after dinner:

Thank you, my dear wife, and "Happy My Father's Day" to you too!

And to Siegfried, shown here distracted from playing with one of the socks I had worn three and a half hours outside this afternoon while stimulating the Bermuda grass to grow in some sparse areas.