>He died last May and I miss him a lot more than I expected to. I still want to pick up the phone and call him.

It's been 3.5 years since my mom died and I still sometimes walk into the house, look at the answering machine and wonder if there's a message from her. Lately, a lot of news items have made her close to mind. She would have been out protesting over the cuts in Philly schools and she would have been furious over the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act. (I suspect she would have been working with the League of Women Voters, where she was a 50+-year member, on how to respond to the latter.)

Tamar