My Dad was born in Texas in 1932, but did most of his growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, in California. I guess it was a good place to grow up. He’s a good guy.

Some men are just good at taking care of things, and family, and small animals. Dad can fix anything but a broken heart and the crack of dawn.

These are not good quality pictures, I guess. I have better ones, but these seem somehow right for the day.

Happy Birthday, Dad! You’re the best. Here’s a paragraph from the book I’m writing, just for the helluvit.

It never rains in Cortina in June. That’s what everybody was saying in the Peterbuilt Cafe, the morning after it did just that. It rained half the night, sometimes hard and almost fierce. A massive cutoff low stretched half way to Hawaii, and brought the dark and heavy clouds in long bands from Watsonville to Point Arguello. They rode up and over the Santa Lucia mountains, watered the crops in the Salinas Valley, crested the Diablo Range without hesitation, and fell on Cortina tired but hardly spent. The town and the hundred farms around it got good and wet, but the storm never saw the Sierras. It was no match for the pressure of impending summer in the San Joaquin.