December 7th

My father, Hugh M. Hyatt, better known as Poppa Bear, today is his Deathday. It's also Pearl Harbor Day. Cicero was assassinated in 43 BC. Edison demonstrated his gramophone to the editors of Scientific American in 1877. Max Planck, in his house at Grunewald, on the outskirts of Berlin, discovered the law of black body radiation in 1900, laying the groundwork for what would become known as Planck’s Constant. Apollo 17, the final Apollo, launched in 1972. Galileo spacecraft passed the North Pole of the Moon in 1992. The final flight of STS 80, Space Shuttle Columbia, ended with her final landing in 1996.

And in 2002, my father died on this day. By comparison, it doesn’t seem like it’s on the same scale of those events and yet, it overshadows them for me. It also seems so appropriate. So many science firsts on this day. So many giant events.

He picked his day with care. You can’t tell me that he didn’t. For those things to be significant on this day? Things that mattered so deeply to him? No.

He chose well.

I miss my father so much today.

The girls are running around and making noise. He would have given me such gleeful hell about being run ragged by them. He so would have delighted in their quick minds and argumentative natures. Gods, he would have fed and fostered those traits. Goaded their competition. Challenged their views and beliefs in the nature of the Universe. And demonstrated just how damn stubborn our family can get by his own intransigence.

So much to never exist. So much. But in my imagination, it does. In my mind’s ears, I can hear his chuckle as he teases and teaches, see him writing equations on little sheets of yellow paper from Grace’s collection, interspersed with his Acme cartoons. Diagrams on napkins for Jane and music from her room as he sits down at her piano keyboard, strains of Misty and Gershwin and ragtime.

Coffee and eggs and newspaper at Jinky’s in Studio City, too early in the morning, because I finally found a good breakfast place and me growling at him as he pokes at me, all perky and awake and me not before my first coffee. Margie Mom smiling indulgently at us both.

I can imagine it so well.

Sometimes, being a writer is a curse.

I can see it so well. But I can’t touch it. I can’t touch him.

All I can do is tell that enormous full moon out there how much I love him. Ask Her to carry my words to him, wherever he may be. Pray that he can hear me somehow. Because I need to believe that he can hear me this year. I have to believe. I have to.

Oh Daddy.

I miss you.

This year is hard. My brain and body are not as resilient as they once were and I am at war with both. I can’t breathe and my brain is trying to kill me. You’d probably poke at me about it, and piss me off, but honestly, that abrasiveness might very well be what would help. It so often did. You’d piss me off and I’d stomp off to prove you wrong. And there were equally times that you just told me that you loved me and we’d talk physics and space flight and future.

You would have adored Interstellar and Gravity. You would have had bones to pick with the first two films.

He could never let the science in those things go unchallenged. But he’d be so on fire by their existence. So delighted in their depictions. So impressed that they got made.

I so want to sit and talk with you again, Poppa Bear, a pot of tea between us. I so want to hold you one more time. Tell you how much I love you.

So I just tell the Moon.

I love you, Old Bear. I love you, I love you, I love you. Till the stars go out and beyond.

Tell him for me, Lady Moon. Tell him. Please.