Always My Dad

Noel Johnson - Daddy of the Outfit 

Today is Father's Day. Today would also be my Father's 90th birthday.This is a picture of him in 2008 on his 85th celebrated at my home in California.  It is the last time he was here.

The hat says, "Daddy of the Outfit" which was a name he gave himself to describe his duty as family patriarch. It was the perfect combination of Daddy love and military nomenclature. That could also be an apt description of my Father.

Daddy blowing out the candles on his Birthday cake. 
Sandi (mother of my children) not aware I wasn't 
counting to three before taking the picture.

After his passing I wrote a more detailed blog about my Daddy.

I can't do the math as well as my Dad could but every few years, according to the calendar,  Dad's June 16th Birthday falls on Fathers Day Sunday.  I don't recall how many times this happend when I was growing up in his house.  I always remember the two events were close together.  We called that third Sunday in June FarBir's Day, the contraction of Birthday and Father's day for my Dad. It was always a family Sunday-celebration of Daddy.

  

So, here it is Sunday, June 16, 2013 - FarBir's Day. I would like to propose the perfect toast to my Dad. I want to thank him for being a great Dad on Fathers day, and I want to celebrate the birth of an incredible man. Is that possible? The perfect toast has rules and one of them is brevity. It should be poetic, insightful, inclusive and clever but no more than a sentence long.  How do you include a life's worth of memories into one phrase? There just seems to be too much to say in a short toast.  

However, priding myself on writing good toasts and book forwards here is my attempt to toast my Dad. He will toast with Baileys Irish Cream. A tea-toddler most his life he developed a taste for Irish Cream Coffee in later years. A tea-toddler myself until I was 21,  I will raise a double of good bourbon, in my mind wishing I was at the "Smoking Dragon Pub". We all raise a glass to my Father, and since a toast is always spoken extemporaneously and not read, I say aloud:

"Happy FarBir's Day to Noel Johnson-Daddy of the Outfit - emeritus." 

As you were,

Jay