I missed my father’s birthday. It was Monday, August 2. He would have been 104 years old. And I can hardly believe that.

I posted some photos a while back from some albums I got not long ago. I have found a few of my father when he was young. This is what I think is his high-school graduation photo from 1937. High school in those days went through Grade 11, so he was just 17. Or would have been by August.

I don’t know how old he was in this photo.

He looks like a young intellectual. It’s the glasses. I didn’t know he wore glasses in his youth. He didn’t wear them for most of my youth.

Here he is, fresh out of Officer Candidate School, so probably in 1942 or so.

He stayed in the Army Reserves after World War II. This is an official Army photo from Fort Benning, Ga, when his unit was on their annal two weeks of active duty. It was taken on September 6, 1960.

This was the 3rd Rocket/Howitzer Battalion. The men are in front of an 8-inch howitzer. I also have a photo of their rocket, which was an Honest John.

If my father is in this photo, I can’t find him. I don’t know why he wouldn’t be, since he was the commanding officer. There is a man standing second from right with what looks like the right rank, but it’s not my father.

This would probably have been around the time he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Our father would sometimes let us come for part of the drills. Once we were watching from the side while my father was standing in front of the battalion. Someone handed us a small box and told us to go out and give it to our father. It was his silver oak leaves.

Our father would try to come up with useful training for the battalion’s weekend drills. He once set up a compass exercise at my great aunt and uncle’s farm in Texas Valley, not far from where we now live. Two men managed to get lost. Our father had my brother and me try to reach them by radio for a long time. They never answered, but they eventually found their way back.

Our father told us about another occasion when a man had to answer the call of nature in the woods. When he was finished, he grabbed some leaves off a handy vine to use as toilet paper. It was poison ivy. I don’t like to think of the results.

I have wondered if there is any record of his existence in the old reserve center, which we pass every time we go to the grocery store. I have thought about trying to call and see if they would let me go inside. I doubt that they would. Things used to be a lot more informal.

Today, Thursday, August 2, 2018, is the 101st anniversary of my father’s birth. He died 18 years ago.

It has seemed for some time, and more so today, that my life is divided into at least two parts: before my father’s death, and after my father’s death. All the things that happened to me in the before time seem to have happened to a different person in a different world. But it all seems as real and as recent as yesterday.

When Leah and I visited Henry’s wife a few weeks ago, she brought out a metal fishing tackle box filled with memorabilia. My brother had taken it to his home when we cleaned out our parents’ house after my mother died.

A lot of stuff in the box is military. There are shoulder patches for the Army divisions he served in, Army branch insignia (artillery and infantry), rank pins (first and second lieutenant, major, lieutenant colonel — there should be captain’s bars somewhere but I didn’t see it). His dog tags are in there, as well as his service ribbons. The paper on the right is my father’s 6th grade report card for the 1928-29 session. He made pretty good grades. The paper at the top is my mother’s application for a position with the federal government on September 23, 1943. She had already been working for the War Production Board in Washington DC prior to that.

There is also a statement from McCall Hospital dated May 22, 1950. It’s the bill for my birth, a total of $72.50 for the delivery and four days in the hospital ($40 at $10 a day for board and nursing, $10 for operating room expense). My father’s Post Office insurance paid all but $20.

There are a couple of pin-on badges that my parents wore back in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s when they square danced. The badges say “Circle 8”, but I remember their square dancing group as the Western Promenaders. They danced at Rome’s old civic center, built in the 1930’s. When Leah and I drive to our current vet’s office, we pass a building with a sign for the Western Promenaders, so they seem to still be in business.

A careful examination of the photograph will reveal a Nazi lapel pin, one of my father’s war souvenirs. I wonder who wore it.

The hand-drawn and colored map of South America was done by my father sometime in his school years.

Everything is an artifact. Going through them is an exercise in archeology, digging not only into the objects themselves, but also into my own memories, and even into times before I was born.