yesterday was my father's birthday

—but he would never have lived to be 120 years old. Eighteen years after he was born, on his birth date, the Halifax explosion embedded the date in people’s memory, and 90 years after he was born, 14 women, young engineering students, were massacred in Montréal because the killer hated women, and that cemented the date. Jack (he made me call him Jack after he deemed I was too old to keep calling him Daddy) died on his 66th birthday. I remember the irony of the birthday wish, ”many happy returns of the day”. No returns, happy or sad.

I’m just saying.

Tomorrow is another day as someone once said.

And so it goes.