PAULA NEAL MOONEY

It sounds cold when you read it -- but those were the words I actually spoke in my mind's mouth, when I kept flashing back to today's date. February 20th. My dad's birthday. Yes, I don't need to call him, nor drive to "The Chi" to visit him like I did one year ago today for his 90th birthday, and sneak away to Pastor Smokie Norful's church service and sob while my sister cooked a fabulous chicken and rice dinner for us all by the time I returned. My Daddy, the photographer, gun at feet I'm glad he's dead. I caught myself in a nanosecond when an automatic reflex said, "Call your dad." Just like I had to stop myself from picking up the phone and calling my mom's number after she died -- that 773-995-5543 phone number that was my parents' land line for years, back before cell phones, obtained after we gave up our "Waterfall 8" (WA8-8417 was it?) number, where I'm old enough to remember the 928-8417 num...

Do tears freeze? That's what I wondered this very morning, standing in 30-degree weather, warmed by the brilliant sun that melted the sheet of ice atop the pond before me. "Make me your kept woman," I told him, staring skyward. "Let all the world see." I know they don't call it "kept" that much these days -- in the era of the verified edu address sporting "sugar babies" online. Kim Zolciak called her sugar daddy "Big Poppa" -- and Marlo Hampton brags about her 80-something-year-old "big baller" billionaire boyfriend that keeps her walk-in altar of oversized bags and red-soled demigods flush with Jimmy Choos and Christian Louboutins. But that ain't the kind of man I'm talking about. Mine is altogether lovely. Mine owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Mine is real and relevant -- and unlike a common man, doesn't whisper sweet nothings in my ear then turn and speak badly about me with his mouth...