This Friday our oldest son, Cash, graduates high school and in August he leaves home for college to study music. We have an additional event Thursday when our youngest son, Damian, graduates 8^th grade. Last week was prom and every parent’s nightmare, the ‘prom house getaway’. It is a time of milestones, transitions and the associated celebrations and events that accompany them, and as a result Father’s Day was sort of eclipsed this year. So I was caught off guard when on Saturday Cash told me, “I forgot! I got you a present while I was away,” and ran to his car to get it. Surprised he would think to pick me up a gift during his beach trip, I opened the brown paper bag. Inside was a perfectly preserved vinyl of Janis Joplin/Full Tilt Boogie’s ‘Pearl’, released in January of 1971. He found it in a store on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, he said, knew I would love it, and had to buy it for me. Immediately my Dad’s presence flooded the room, despite his being gone for 11 years.

Joplin was one of my Dad’s favorite singers. ‘My girlfriend’, he called her. A picture of her, nude and wearing nothing but love beads, hung in his office for years. He sang her songs ‘Mercedes Benz’ and ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ so many times throughout my childhood I may have been born knowing the words and my kids know them too because they grew up with me singing them. Both appear on ‘Pearl’, which was released a few months after Joplin’s death. Dad not only admired the gritty mezzo-soprano voice that infused her vocals with such expressive power, but her fierce and unapologetic individuality. In many ways he lived his life like that too, minus the drugs thank goodness, that cut Joplin’s life so short at 27, though cancer would claim his at 67, and I doubt the cigarettes helped.

Another thing about Dad was that he was the most thoughtful gift giver I ever knew. When I was Cash’s age, he took me on a trip to New Orleans the summer after my freshman year in college. We were eating at Felix’s, the famous oyster house, when he found a fully formed pearl in his oyster, a rare occurrence. Delighted, he put it in his pocket. I forgot about it until ten years later when he presented it to me in a sterling pin he had made by the local silversmith containing Cash’s birthstone, a ruby — and right next to it, the pearl he’d discovered on that trip. I cried when I opened it, just like I did last Saturday when my son gave me the aptly named vinyl album.

I know not everyone believes our lost loved ones are watching over us, or able to bear witness to the events that give our lives meaning, or cheer us on and protect us in times of trouble. But at moments like this one, I do. At the very least they live on in spontaneous memories at times of celebration and sorrow, or in a trait or mannerism they’ve passed down to us, be it blue eyes, a love of certain songs, or a talent for thoughtful gift giving.

Dad had a presence like Joplin’s voice: big, unrepentant, and wholly his own. He relished holidays, ceremonies and milestones, and it does not surprise me he chose now to remind us he is still with us, to gift us from beyond with another pearl.

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