Still going through my old journals looking for details to work into my book about Ben (working title - "3,500: An Autistic Boy's Ten Year Romance with Snow White"), and I came across something I wrote back in 2004 about my dad. This was written late one night, immediately after getting home from seeing the movie Big Fish. It was a few months after I had moved from Seattle to Orlando, and my then-fiance, now-wife Kris had not yet made the move so I was living alone in a new city with no friends or family nearby.  It was odd stumbling across this only a few days after my Father's Day post earlier this week, and I feel like it really gets to the core of some of my own mixed up feelings about my dad.  So anyway, here it is, resurrected from eight years ago: I spent about fifteen or twenty minutes this evening hiding inside a bathroom stall with my face buried in my hands; I was crying, sobbing as quietly as possible because I didn't want to have to talk to anyone or explain what was wrong. Of cou ...

On this Father's Day, I would like to take a little time to remember my own father. He passed away nearly sixteen years ago, a victim of colon cancer, and I still miss him.

Growing up, we had kind of a distant relationship. It wasn't horrible or abusive, I know so many people for whom "father" was synonym for "monster", but we were never particularly close. My parents separated when I was very young, and I only have three memories of the time in which I lived with him in the same house.