Props to your Pops. He’s still missed by many, y’know? His stories still live on at our dinner table. I think my Dad misses him a lot.

Maybe, in some masculine way, the angst and rebellion made him proud–or at least felt natural to him? I can’t help picturing him being disapointed in you if you didn’t tussle with him as a boy becoming a man.

And I, too, am way guilty of beeing a teenage shmuck. I think I’ll have to work on that…

K

Glad to see you here, man. I dug up some pictures of us hunting groundhogs with Dad, actually. Gleefully holding the corpses of fat little mammals! Good times.

– c.

Happy birthday, Mr Wendig.

Regret in this case many not be worth it, but here I’m incapable of holding it back, either. It’s a living thing, and I can’t contain it.

Angry Teen was one thing; I was Angry Young Man for longer than my teen years possessed me, unfortunately. It wasn’t until after college that I started slowly getting on with my father again, and even then it was a slow build. A build that really never got to its completion, I think. Or maybe it did, right at the end. But that’s too late.

– c.

Regret, it probably isn’t a thing worth feeling, and you have to take your relationship with your parents with a grain of salt. We were all Angry Teens, it’s a part of development. We’re usually at our worst with generally good parents because we must fight harder to break away from them. Like my mother said to me, years later, when we were talking about what a shithead I was, “That wasn’t you, Mena. That was you trying to become you.”

Enjoy the hunt when you have it.

The toughest anniversary in my experience is the year in which you realize he has been out of your world longer than he was in it.

Thank you for sharing him with us.