I was thinking of my father today...

He was a Marine. Regimented. Stiff. Everything has it's place and everything belonged in it's place. He hated it when my mother moved the furniture around in the living room.

I didn't call him Dad, Daddy, Pa, Father, or Pops. I called him "Gunny". It was his rank (although, technically, he retired as a Master Sergeant after 20 years, what a Marine typically calls "Top" (E-8), as in the top of the ladder. ("You WILL go in the Air Force, and you WILL like it", he said you a 16 year old MiKell. He was right.)

I came out to him in a letter, back in 1988. I was in the Air Force at the time. There was no email back then, I was too chicken to do it over the phone, and we were on different islands in the Pacific ocean - me Okinawa, him Hawaii.

He didn't take to that very well. My eldest brother and his wife worked on him for a number of years before he came to accept my homo-ness.

He eventually did, especially after I told him I was HIV positive. He came to think as TheHusband as just another of his "sons". Before he died, I eventually thought of him as a friend. How many men feel that way?

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Did I mention that I moved the furniture around in the living room today?

It's the simple things that make me think of him. The picture of him was taken on Okinawa in 1962. I'm told I look a bit like him - sort of a mix of him and my mother's father, also a Marine.