I both look forward to AND dread the Fall season. Not only did I have both my weddings in September, but I retrieve my tall boots from the back of the closet in August, just to get them ready to wear on the first crisp day. And yes, we do always go apple picking and then I proceed to get sick eating too many cider donuts. It’s a small price to pay.

Another reason Fall is bittersweet is because it reminds me that my birthday is around the corner, just a few short dreary months away.  And when I think about another birthday happening, I remember that for every year I get older, is another year without my father.  This is how I’ve always thought about it. I take the number of years old I am turning, then deduct one. That is always precisely how many years Mickey has been gone. Forty-seven years. Today would have been his 78^th birthday. 

I broke my routine of going through these letters chronologically – technically it is still the Summer of 1965 – so I could find a letter from around his birthday back then.  In this letter dated October 10, 1966, he’s turned 23 years old.  Twenty-three years old and he is madly in love with Arlene, and knows he wants make a home and raise a family with her.  (When I was 23, my love life was a hot mess and I had no idea what I wanted my future to look like.)  

The letter includes the usual litany of love proclamations, and he recounts how he spent his birthday at the movies.  But my favorite part of this letter is how Mickey spoke about the LA Dodgers, or in his words, the Los Angeles Benedict Arnolds!

Living so close to Yankee Stadium now, I can’t help but think how great it would be to just go to the ballpark with Mickey, have a hot dog and sit in the sun, hoping for a foul ball to come our way.  

I guess I’ll just have to settle for rooting against the Dodgers this post-season. Those lousy bums.

Happy birthday Mickey.

As some young kids do, I liked to dress up and play pretend.  My grandma would let me put on her fancy shawls and wear her special evening bags; she had a limitless supply of beaded and tiled bags in all colors.  These were the ones she would take to “an affair.”  “Meri Darling, we’re going to an affair at the such-and-such” she would say. 

I would also go into my mom’s jewelry box and play with her jewelry.  I’d put on sparkly necklaces but there was only one ring that I dared to put on my finger – her wedding band to my father. It was soldered with his and because of that, the ring was pretty chunky. It was made of white gold, with thin lines running around it.  I always knew how special it was, an object that had such proximity to my dad.

When I got older, my mom trusted me to wear it. (It fit my small finger perfectly.) For almost thirty years, I took care of it. Because it was so thick, it was like wearing a brass knuckle – many times I accidentally knocked myself in the head. I never wore it to the beach. Or in the winter when I knew my hands would be cold and it might slip off.  It was one of my most valuable possessions.

Then one day, the worst thing I could have imagined happened. I lost the ring.  I can remember almost every detail of that evening. We went to dinner and a movie screening in Brooklyn, to see a film by Todd Solondz with a Q&A afterward. 

Sometime after the movie began, I felt something was off. My ring was missing. I had a full-on panic in the theater, checking in my pocket, inside my bag, in my coat, on the floor, between the seats of the theater.  I was a basket case. I made Andy leave the movie so we could go back to the restaurant and ask the staff there. I looked in the bathroom, and in the trash. But it was gone.   I remember being inconsolable. And I didn’t know how I was ever going to look my mom in the eye and tell her I lost the most precious thing she gave me.

When I did tell her, she reacted better than I was preparing for.  She accepted what happened, though I sensed her disappointment and that cut me deep, too. I still beat myself up for losing that ring.

And the movie stunk, too.