(QH5 + G6 CHECK)

What I remember about my father I will share with you, although, as the days and weeks slip by, I remember less and less. Without the odd peek at a fading photograph, even his face is slipping away into the time fog. I have since forgotten his birthday, his age, and the date he died, remembering only that I was the one to close his eyes, and draw the sheet over his face.
He was a large man, from whom I draw my considerable size and height. As a child I remember having to jog just to keep pace with his elongated strides. Each time his left foot struck the ground, it was accentuated by the song of keys he kept, which made me think that being a grown-up meant having keys and being responsible for things. The other pocket contained his well-worn wallet; stuffed full of smaller bits of paper, phone numbers, lottery tickets, and quotes from dead men or people the world had forgotten. He was a logologist, like me. A geek for the written word. There was seldom any money in his wallet.
He had served 20 years in the Air Force, flown halfway around the world, and seen a great deal in his time. But in the end, when the cancer began to eat away at his brain, he could remember very little of his own exploits. Instead, the conversations turned to money, purely nickels and dimes, and the ghost of this financial monkey lingers on. To this day I am terrified of becoming penniless and homeless.
After he had died twice, been revived twice, and his logic centers lost radio contact with the rest of his brain, things got a little on the creepy side. He was convinced I was trying to kill him. If he left his medication unattended in the same room with me, he would storm in and snatch it away, exclaiming it wasn’t going to be that easy, as if he had outwitted me again, the victor in some secret chess match. (Qh5 + g6 check)
He had the basement door taken off the hinges after he locked himself in, and blamed it on me. At the time, I was passed out on a friend’s couch on the other side of town. He would purposely tell visitors that I no longer lived there, that I had moved away and he hadn’t seen me in years, while I sat in my room, oblivious.
Now that he is gone, cold and decaying under a white stone in a veterans’ graveyard somewhere on the east side of town, a stone I saluted as a twice-decorated vet during the lone visit I paid, I miss the man he used to be. I really hate it when I tell people I miss him, and they get all sniffy-eyed and tell me he’s probably watching me, because I don’t believe in that sort of superstitious bollocks.
I wish I had a magic quarter that would let me call him on the phone. That’s all. I just want to talk.