A Happy 75th Birthday to My Father

Plunking down his third quarter …

On Tuesday, my father posted this on his Facebook page.

Ordinarily a parent posting something on their Facebook page is a cause for alarm, but this was a happy occasion: My father turned 75 years old on Tuesday. I found this a clever way to announce such a milestone. (I like how the third quarter is the most dinged up.) My father was born on August 6, 1949, the same month as Richard Gere, Martin Amis, Gene Simmons, Rick Springfield, Keith Carradine, Jim Carroll and Shelley Long. We celebrated the best way the Leitch family knows how: With drinks and a big dinner and a couple nights of Cardinals baseball.

My father, like a lot of men, struggled a little bit when, eight years ago, he got older than his father ever made it. My grandfather, the previous William Franklin Leitch, was perpetually unhealthy, smoking four packs of unfiltered Pall Malls every day and suffering multiple heart attacks before dying at 67. The last time I ever saw my…