I don’t know who puts up the Christmas lights at your house, but in my family, as soon as I was able, it was always me, pretty much by default.
I grew up in sunny California, but my family always celebrated Thanksgiving as though we were living in the snow-covered peaks of Vermont.
Joanie and I talk to each other at least once a year, and that is always on August 12, the day both of us were born in the year 1946, not long after WWII ended, when every husband, who, if he wasn’t a father already, returned from the battlefield with a strong desire to start a family. My dad was in the Navy in the South Pacific; her dad was with the Navy in Europe.
I would like to salute my father-in-law William Lange, who just passed away peacefully May 31 at the age of 91, by relaying a brief story about his father who was an infamous major league baseball player.
Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Tris Speaker – legendary major league baseball players all. There’s another man whose name belongs on this list: my wife’s grandfather, William Alexander Lange, Sr., but unless you’re a true-blue dyed-in-the wool aficionado of America’s greatest pastime, I doubt you have ever heard of him or any of the monikers he went by, including Little Eva, Big Bill, and The Port Townsend Boy.