My father was born 100 years ago today, August 2, 2017.

This is one of the earliest photographs of me, my brother and my father. I’m on the right.

I’m not sure I actually have any memories of those days. I must have been only about two years old, so that was around 65 years ago. Is that a lens cap I’m holding?

My father spent a few of his years as a young adult in Europe, where he met a few of the natives. That’s him on the left.

Although the houses might be from a lot of different places in Europe or even Britain, this is almost certainly Belgium, since my father’s division was the first to travel directly from the US to the mainland of Europe. Some Belgians still remember his division, 104^th Infantry Division (the Timberwolf Division), with affection and respect for their role in liberating them from the Nazis.

He did some preparation for his trip to Europe in the American West.

This could be Arizona or possibly Colorado. It might also be somewhere in Oregon, although I haven’t seen enough of Oregon to be sure there is anywhere there that looks like this.

He was not a desert rat, but he looked like one.

It’s the goggles. He’s still wearing the crossed cannons of the artillery rather than the muskets of the infantry.

It might not be immediately obvious, but even typewriters played a part in winning the war.

When my father returned from Europe after World War II, he and my mother lived in Akron, Ohio, for a few years. That was where my brother was born. They moved back to Rome, Ga., in time for me to be born in 1950, and they spent the rest of their lives there.

By the late 1960’s they had sold my old home place on Redmond Road to a medical clinic and had built a house on the other side of town. That’s where this photo was taken.

This is me, my mother, her mother, and my father. You can get an idea of the date from the pants I was wearing: purple, button-fly bellbottoms. My lack of facial hair dates it to around 1973 or 1974, when I was working for the Augusta (Ga) Chronicle. I had a beard when I interviewed in 1973, but the managing editor wanted me to shave. So I did, until he died a year or so later. Then I grew it back.

My parents retired but kept busy. This must have been when they were about to leave to attend some sort of fairly formal event, possibly when they were singing in the community chorus in Rome.

This, like the previous image, is a scan of a Polaroid print.

Time passes while you’re busy doing things, which is a good recipe for missing a lot of other things. I was lucky enough to have quit my full-time job and gone back to work as a part-time consultant in the late 1990’s, which allowed me the freedom to accompany my parents on a few of their long RV trips.

This is a picture of my father at Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho.

He has a kokopelli on his hat and he’s wearing a sweat shirt with a timber wolf on the front. His Nikon F2AS is hanging around his neck. This photo was taken probably around 1997, twenty years after he bought the camera. I remember because he ordered it but had to leave with my mother on one of their months-long RV trips before it arrived. My father arranged to have his brother mail it to me at Lake Tahoe where I was living at the time. My parents stopped there for a couple of weeks. They left from there for Yosemite. I rode my motorcycle down from Lake Tahoe to see Yosemite with them.

They say that the sense of smell is directly wired into the brain in a more visceral way than the other senses. That may be true. To this day I can still recall the smell of their Airstream trailer, a distinctive smell I associate with traveling, the West and my parents.

This Craters of the Moon photo was taken before my father started showing obvious symptoms of the pulmonary fibrosis that would eventually cause his death. That death came in 2000, seventeen and a half years ago, when my father was 82 and I was approaching 50.

So 100 years. A century. One tenth of a millennium. In other words, a long time ago. There is almost no one alive today who was alive when my father was born. There is almost no one alive today who has first-hand knowledge of the world my father grew up in. I’m fortunate that my father told us a lot about his life when he was growing up. In fact, I think he did a lot to make the experiences of my brother and me like his own. We grew up a mile from where he grew up and spent a lot of time walking along the same railroad tracks and throwing rocks into the river at the same places he did. In some ways I think he relived his own boyhood with my brother and me.

I wish he had told us more. I wish he had been able to stay around a little longer.

Today, January 12, 2017, would have been my mother’s 94th birthday. She died almost four years ago shortly after her 90th birthday and pretty close to 13 years after my father died. I posted a picture in 2013 of her, Leah, my brother and some of his family at a Japanese restaurant we took her to for her birthday celebration.

Over the years since my parents died they have become younger. Not young, but at a younger old age, after they retired and before they became too infirm to travel. The saddest part of their old age was their declining health. Sometimes when I think of them and wish they were still here, I realize that long before today neither one of them would be healthy and strong enough to even want to be here. It’s like they were given a few extra years and then robbed of the value of those years.

So the best thing for them and for me is to hold them in my memory. That way they are safe from any further insults the world might want to throw their way, at least for as long as I am alive and can think clearly. Once my brother and I are gone, they will be pretty much gone, too. I doubt that either of their grandchildren (my nephews) think much about them or, for that matter, even remember that much about them. So much the worse for them.

Every good feeling I have about Christmas today is a remnant of the excitement and joy I felt as a child at Christmas.

When we were kids, there always seemed to be a huge pile of presents around the tree for my brother and me. It was hard to wait till Christmas to open them. Putting all those presents around the tree and making us wait to open them was like putting a bowl of food in front of a dog and not letting him eat. When I was old enough to go to school, my mother took a job in the office of a textile mill in Rome. We always called her when we got home from school. When Christmas was near, we called and begged her to let us open just one present early. It must have been pretty annoying, because sometimes she gave in.

This is one of my earliest Christmases. It must have been around 1952. I would have been two years old and my brother would have been five.

I’m holding a toy truck, possibly a garbage truck, and my brother is torn between the train set and the Motorcade service station and car wash. I remember the metal Motorcade, with the elevator to take the cars up to parking on the roof and the ramp that let them scoot back down to the floor. It looks like we also got a ten-pin bowling set and a toy telephone. My brother got a cap pistol. The picture was taken in our living room, and what you can see here is the entire room.

This was a different Christmas. We got Lincoln Logs.

The bike is my brother’s first. It was green.

Here is my father and my brother Henry at yet another Christmas. This might have been before I was born. The sofa and chair are the same but without slip covers.

Here’s Leah with her familys’ tree.

When I look back at my family Christmases, I have no idea how my parents managed. In those days, my mother kept a budget down to the penny. Here are two pages from her spending record from 1949, before I was born. My parents and Henry lived in Akron, Ohio, at that time.

Some of the expenses look amazingly small today. Car insurance was $4.00. The house payment was $14.00. The electric bill was $1.75, and the gas bill was $3.00. My mother had bought a sewing machine and was making payments on it. But look at groceries – $26.00. Sounds low until you realize that was for two weeks at a time that my father was making under $200 a month.

By the time I was born in May 1950, my family had moved back to Rome and bought a house on Redmond Road. It was one of around two dozen identical duplexes that had been built as temporary housing for staff at Battey General Hospital, which opened at the end of Redmond Road in 1943 as a hospital for sick, wounded and disabled servicemen. Each unit of the duplex had a living room, eat-in kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. My parents rented the other side of our duplex to a divorced woman and her child. More than a half a century later, that woman would share a room with my mother in a nursing home on Redmond Circle, an extension of Redmond Road.

Here is a page from my mother’s spending record from July, 1950.

The house payment was now $66.36. Groceries were $30.00. Henry got a pair of shoes for $2.00. It looks like my father was paying off insulation he bought for the house. My father worked at the Post Office then. It looks like his semi-monthly salary was $113.00, which they supplemented with $42.00 in rent for the other side of the duplex. At the end of the two-week period, they had managed to save a little over $14.00.

So, I don’t really know how they managed Christmas for us two kids, but I know why they did.

My mother continued to decorate her house and a tree in her living room, right up to the time she died.

She loved Christmas, and I imagine that part of that was because of her own memories of Christmas when we were young.

When my mother and Leah’s parents were alive, we decorated for Christmas.

Leah is decorating the tree. My last doberman, Zeus, is trying to snooze on his living room bed. The late, great Zoe is peeking out the sliding glass door. Looking for Santa, I suppose.

My parents are gone now, and so are Leah’s. We have no children and no close family here. We don’t decorate or celebrate Christmas. We’ll probably eat some turkey sliced for us at the Walmart deli, and maybe we’ll fix some packaged dressing. But really, all that’s left of the holiday for us is the ghost of Christmas past.

My father was a Buick man.

Here he is standing near the front of the first car I can remember.

Buick men were natty dressers.

This is a better picture of the car.

It’s a 1949 Buick with 1950 and 1947 model Paris boys. I’m the one with ears sticking out. Leah says I’m the cutest one I think I can remember riding in the car, and I can definitely remember fiddling with the knob over the rear view mirror that rotated the radio antenna. It was probably a Super. It was a straight eight cylinder engine. If you look carefully you can see the reflection of my father in the windshield.

Our ’49 was a four-door sedan, but Buick made a two-door fastback coupe around that time. I would love to have one of these.

Somewhere in the deep, mostly inaccessible recesses of my memory, I think a famous author (Hemingway?) mentioned that the Buicks of roughly that vintage had huge fenders. I tried unsuccessfully to find some reference to that online. I did find that Ernest Hemingway owned a 1947 Roadmaster convertible. It was royal blue with a red leather interior. He also bought a 1950 Buick station wagon in Key West.

The next car was a 1955 hardtop coupe Buick, maybe a Super or possibly a Century. My father was proud of how fast it was. This was the year model that Broderick Crawford drove in the late ‘50’s TV show Highway Patrol. I don’t have any pictures of that car, but here is one from the Internet.

Ours was also blue and white, although I remember the color as somewhat different.

The next Buick was a 1957, again, probably a Super. Here’s another Internet picture. Ours was a two-tone with cream and metallic bronze.

And then there was the 1964 Buick LeSabre, the first new car our family every bought. Again, no pictures of it, but here’s a very similar model from the Internet.

This one is very similar to the one we had. It was a hardtop coupe with a roof styled to look like a convertible top.

Next came the 1966 Wildcat coupe. About the time my parents bought this car they got interested in recreational vehicles. They bought an Airstream trailer and towed it with the Buick. Here is my father with both of them.

This picture was scanned from a very dark slide, so the quality is not great.

The Wildcat was definitely the sportiest and coolest of the Buicks my parents bought. I drove it a lot, since I turned 16 in 1966.

After that, RVing became more important to my parents, so their next car was not a Buick. It was a Jeep Wagnoneer, which was more suitable for towing a trailer. But they kept the Buick for a long time afterwards.

I’m not a Buick man, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Buicks of a certain vintage. I can recognize Buicks and guess the year model from around 1949 to around 1967, which corresponds to just before my birth to around my 17^th birthday. After 1966, Buicks and cars in general started meaning a lot less to me. I suppose for me it must be something like music; it seems that a person’s favorite kind of must is fixed sometime during their youth. That’s why I like rock and roll from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and that’s why I like cars from around the same time. If you gave me a choice between a new Corvette and a perfectly restored 1959 Corvette, it would be no contest.

My parents bought another Buick sometime in the 1980s (or so). I think it means something that I can’t remember what year model it was. After my father died, I urged my mother to trade it for a safer car; it had no airbags and the seatbelt was one of the type that was attached to the door so you had to slide in and close the door to have a seatbelt. She considered a 2000 Ford Taurus and a 2000 Buick. She bought the Buick.

Buick went through a bad spot for a few years before and after that model. To this day any time Leah sees a Buick of that vintage, she calls it a “Doris car.” It’s usually the same beige color of my mother’s. Apparently Buick recovered, since it survived General Motors’ near death, unlike Pontiac and Oldsmobile.

I’m not a Buick man today. If we had a pickup truck full of hundred dollar bills, I would probably buy some Buicks, but the newest would be at least 50 years old.