For my daughter on her 21st birthday.

So this year marks a different observance of this most singularly horrible day in my life.  My little girl would have turned 21, or in at least a legal sense, become an adult.

As you've read so often on this anniversary, it's hard to believe that it's been this long and she would be that old had she lived.  That part you know.

Words fail today.  It's rare that I don't have words on this anniversary because I've always had some way of conveying some sort of feeling, some expression of hope and happiness despite the fact that she never drew a breath of air.

Not this year.  Not today.

Instead of thinking of what might have happened had she lived in the best of situations, this year I can only think of the reality of how things happened and what she would have had to have gone through at the hands of her parents.

She would have been 3 years old and waiting on her brother to be born when her mother and I separated, four years old when my dad passed away and 5 years old when her mother and I divorced.

Finally, she'd have been 11 when I got sick and lost my foot.  We could have imagined a life better than this for her,  and you've read them here,  but reality took hold this year and I felt I owed it to her and her memory to write them here.

I do so not to turn this into a bigger downer than this blog usually is,  but to ask myself the same question to her that I always do every year,  and one I ask silently to my son,  who himself will never answer it and indeed, never fully understand the pain his father carries every day:

"Have I done a good job, being your dad?"

Happy birthday, my sweet Angel,

...your daddy still loves you.

October 29, 2017.

Rich Lohman: 49.

In 1990, mostly as a joke, I purchased "Bill Cosby: 49" for my father on his birthday.

At the time I was 21 years old embarking on the beginning of my adult experience with little or no concept of getting that old.   Now, I'm here.  I am three days into my forty-ninth year.

If you forget the recent shenanigans surrounding Bill Cosby right now, that show is some of his best stand up comedy material.   As it so often does though...and it's true with any stand up comedian...what he makes jokes about is true of real life.

As I've cruised through my thirties and forties, my hair has gotten thinner and grayer, which I expected, I am all but deaf in my right ear and I am currently typing this blog entry wearing bifocals.

That last bit I found funny and when I was told I'd need them,  I immediately thought of the riff Cosby talks about when he talks about needing trifocals, which is hilarious.

I just thought it was funny and share that with you.

They're growing up: Two commencement ceremonies in a week...

Last week I attended the commencement exercises for Broken Arrow High School and Sapulpa High School. 

These are the first commencement exercises I attended since my sister graduated from Northeastern State University in 1997 and the first high school graduation since my sister graduated high school in 1989.

So needless to say, my ftiends, with the 30th anniversary of my own graduation and my son's graduation just two short years away, I am feeling old this early morn.  The commencement ceremonies were for the daughters of two of my girlfriends, one an ex and the other with my current.

The whole experience had me thinking back to that May evening in 1987 when my 13 years of formal education came to its end.   Shockingly,  I remember it like it happened just last year in vivid detail.  I was festooned in what my son will be sporting two years from now in the red cap and gown with the tassle with a small brass 87...he'll have an 18 on his.

It was at the Oral Roberts University Mabee Center,  and as I recall the day dawned stormy but cleared before the evening ceremony.   The only family I had attend outside of my immediate was my step aunt and uncle,  my mother's stepbrother and his wife that I had seen married just a month earlier.   My grandmother on my father's side couldn't make it based on her being hard to transport due to her advancing age and my mom's stepmother didn't come either for reasons unknown.

At the time my class was the largest to graduate from Union with 536 students.  In the 30 years since that number doubled as this year's class topped 1100 in their ceremony.   Neither could hold a candle to Broken Arrow High Schools class that hear 1400 and change.

It's humbling to realize a quarter century has come and gone.   The things that have happened in history and the advancements in technology into the 21st Century boggle the mind...and I'm not deliberately being clichéd when I say that.  

The device I'm blogging on right now was unheard of in 1987, for example,  and cable channels stopped under 100. 

There was no HDTV and when you went to the movies you didn't watch them in theaters that have recliners and stadium seating.

Star Wars only had three movies and there were no plans for prequels or episodes beyond Return of the Jedi.

MTV played music videos,  and Michael Jackson and Prince were alive.

I could go on and on.

You'll read in this volume of the Sean graduation two years from now and it'll be worse.   I guess this is a primer for that entry.