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2006-11-20 - 1:02 p.m.

sunday was my dad's birthday. he would have been sixty years old yesterday, had he still been here to celebrate with us and join us for our traditional "dad's birthday" dinner.

the dinner celebration that he always insisted on for whatever reason, was a low-key family gathering at florentine, a local, mediocre-at-best, italian-esque restaurant chain. in the spirit of tradition, and in honor of dad's birthday, we still go to florentine every november nineteenth for a sub-par italian meal.

and for some reason, after our dinner i remembered a time back when i was probably seven or eight, when the family was all piled into our old blue ford van, on our way down to visit grandma and grandpa in monterey. i must have been arguing with tony or complaining about something that i can't recall, but whatever it was, at some point, dad had enough. he pulled the van over on kiely blvd, right next to the smythe buick dealership, yelled something at me, and then finished with, "you little fuck."

i had never heard anyone called a "fuck" before.

my dad had certainly never called me that before, and i remember being as scared by that fact as by the words themselves.

but what really bothered me about it, and why i remember that particular incident, was that the sentence didn't make any sense to me. he called me a "fuck," and "fuck" was a verb, not a noun. at seven years old, i didn't know what verbs or nouns were yet, but I knew that the words didn't fit together right.

how can a person be a verb?

and between dad's incorrect sentence structure and the angry face he was making, i knew i had done something really bad, so i started crying.

that story, of course, has nothing at all to do with his birthday, but it came to mind for some reason, and so there it is.

happy birthday, dad.

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