My tenth Fathers' Day

The first one was the best one. I remember standing up at Mass looking at my wife and baby and asking, "Who me?"

Today we went to Mass with my father, ate breakfast, and then took a memory tour by car around Birmingham. We saw my great-grandmother's house on the Southside, my maternal grandparents' house above Highland Avenue, my paternal grandparents' house on Cliff Road, Ramsey High School, the spot now covered by UAB where my great-grandparents lived and from which my father walked to the streetcar to join the U.S. Navy in 1943, downtown where my father worked, Phillips High School, the first house I lived in, and the house in which I grew up. Dad and I told stories. My daughter has heard most of them, but one day neither of us will be around to tell them again.

As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

More historic postcards archived at the University of Alabama here.