Falling down laughing

2007-07-06-exercise.gifttodays-aj.jpg

Happy Halloween! My father was born on Halloween; he would have been 95 today. Happy birthday, Daddy! My father was a fool for just about any holiday—any excuse to get happy. There was a hedge running perpendicular to our front walk, about five or six feet from the house itself. Behind it was a secondary walk, or sitting area, and my father, after dark on Halloween night, would perch in his lawn chair behind that hedge. When trick-or-treaters approached the front door, he simply would say, in his baritone voice, “Hey.” We’d have to hose off the stoop the next morning. It was a lesson in subtlety for all budding cartoonists in the family.