Happy Birthday, Daddy

I missed a Father’s Day message this year, but today was my father’s birthday so I’ll do one for both.  We often celebrated the two together, almost always with strawberry shortcake.  And beef.  He was big on eating beef – we didn’t know then what we do about cholesterol, and what it combined with the family history of heart attacks might have done to his health.  Nope, beef was good for you.  When we went out you were supposed to order a hamburger, and sometimes we’d order a hot dog just to needle him.  Once he had heard or read that watercress was good for you, so every day all summer we had to hike up to the old springhouse that was part way up the pasture hill and pick some for him to have with supper.  He had a multitude of interests.  Not sure how it started, but when my mother got into having her antique shop, he became interested in paperweights.  He read up on them, and had a good sized collection of them.  He’d travel to auctions, or to places where they were made to try to get new ones.  He got one at an auction in Chatham, where the folk singer Harry Belafonte was sitting in the row in front of him; Belafonte asked to see the paperweight and held it,.looking it over – so it was known as ‘the paperweight that Harry Belafonte held’.  Belafonte was a special celebrity to my father, because one of his movies “Odds Against Tomorrow”, was shot in Hudson with several scenes done at the place my father worked, so he got to talk to the stars and watch them at work.  Another paperweight was purchased directly from the man who made it, in a little town in the mountains of West Virginia.  They stopped there on the way back from Florida, and my mother said he was so excited to be at the artist’s studio – he went inside and came back to the car and said “He’s in there – sitting at the table making a paperweight - just like the picture in the book”.  My sister and I have the paperweights now and I think of him every time I look at them.  And a lot of other times, too. There are still things I’d like to ask his advice on.  Happy Birthday, Daddy, and Happy Father’s Day, too.