Every April 24 I become quiet. Sometimes I cry.

Sometimes I visit his grave and talk, mostly in silent conversation of the things I think he needs to hear, of what I’m doing now, lost loves in my life, how my mother is doing.

Sometimes it’s easier to do this and sometimes it’s harder depending on the situation in my life at the time.

All I can tell you is there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him, don’t wonder if my mother and I had been home on that April 24 that we could have done something to change the outcome instead of watching him being carried from the house, a white sheet covering his body.

Those thoughts enter my head and I quickly dismiss them, try to look forward instead of back, try to cherish the 15 years I had with him instead of burying my head in pain over the longer period of time I have been without him.

You would think in those short 15 years it would have been easier to take. I think it has been harder for reasons said above, because you missed that time in the critical years of your life and you wonder how things in your life might have been different.

Edgar L. Martin

I regret not a day in my years of awareness that I knew him.

I cherish his military service. I cherish his wit, his witticism, his intellect, his thirst for knowledge.

A service station manager back in the day when the word service meant something and they weren’t convenience stores, he was a renaissance man, who devoured books like the sweetest candy on earth.

He could hold conversations with judges and lawyers. They were at his funeral, one wrote my mother of the influence he had on him, which always makes me wonder if he had the desire to go to college would he have been a great professor.

The late Murfreesboro writer and publisher F. Roy Johnson mentioned one of his adventures in a book. You can imagine how I cherish that book.

A natural historian, the seventh or eighth grade leaf collection he helped me compile while traipsing in the woods of Northampton County is yet another gem in the memories I have of him.

There are so many I could mention, the trips to the Outer Banks in the winter to watch Canada geese on their migratory path, the year we followed the Civil War to Gettysburg and back, so many memories of a man who instilled in me a man can be sensitive and yearn for knowledge while still standing up to those who try to torment you.

These are the memories I have two day’s before Father’s Day and I thank him for turning me into something I think he would be proud of, given his love of reading, the News and Observer and Virginian-Pilot delivered to our home, as well the local paper.

I can only hope he would be proud of me. I can tell you this, I’m proud of him.

For you who still have your fathers in your lives, I can only ask you to tell them you love them, as I told my father and he told me.

To be this long without a father in my life has been a painful journey, eased only by a mother that both my father and me loved. They both worked hard and after his death my mother continued to work hard.

The void left has gnawed at both of us but knowing he loved us makes the loss easier to bear.

Happy Father’s Day — Lance Martin