For immediate filing among those factoids that never really occur to you, right up until they do, today is the centenary of my father’s birth on March 7, 1925.
That’s one hundred years, the sort of nice, round number we find ourselves drawn to.
Roger George Baylor has been gone a while now; he died in 2001, just before I turned 41. Our relationship was complicated, which is not to say troubled. I’d describe it as a state of ongoing, mutual puzzlement.
In his own way, my father was an exuberant and passionate man, with his primary issue being how to define and express his emotions, or not.
Positivity for him came through sheer physicality, first through sports, and then by blunt force hardcore work in the great outdoors: baling hay the old-school way, walking fence rows, mowing grass, building and maintaining and improving things.
It was as if he awoke each morning (very early, a former dairy employee’s lifelong habit) and confronted the world’s existential indifference by coming out swinging until he dropped from exhaustion many hours later.
I think these really were internal struggles, and absent a formula for talking them out into the open, he chose instead to try battering them into submission. We’ll never...
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