Since Father’s Day is close at hand, I am feel­ing sen­ti­men­tal. My Dad, who was one of the sweet­est, smartest, most gen­tle souls you’d ever met, is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s Dis­ease. I’ve been search­ing for a way to re-connect to him, and given the sit­u­a­tion, that means being a lit­tle bit cre­ative since the usual routes are no longer possible.

I’ve been think­ing about the locket he gave me one year  – I have since for­got­ten the occa­sion. I have it some­where in my stash of col­lectibles, well pre­served and of course, wait­ing for me to have it sol­dered onto my charm bracelet; a mem­ory for­ever linked to the pre­cious moments of my life. He knew I always wanted one and on a sunny after­noon, he left a beau­ti­fully wrapped pack­age on my bed. Upon arriv­ing home from school, I knew what was con­tained within the con­fines of that white card­board box. The style was very typ­i­cal of my Dad’s fine taste: a small, round gold locket with a Flo­ren­tine fin­ish except where a tiny heart and a flower shone brightly against the tex­tured sur­face. Look­ing back now, I’d have to say it was Vic­to­rian inspired — he knew his teenage daugh­ter so well. Lock­ets have been pop­u­lar since the Medieval period and there are superb exam­ples of the Renais­sance jew­els from the reign of Queen Eliz­a­beth I. Those naughty Geor­gians put the locket into mis­chie­vous mode by hav­ing painters cap­ture only the eye of one’s object of desire, leav­ing every­one guess­ing (wink-wink) as to the iden­tity of sit­ter of that tiny hand-painted por­trait. Vic­to­ri­ans heaped upon the locket the bound­less sym­bol­ism of love’s labors — flow­ers and gems spoke an unspo­ken lan­guage — leav­ing the depth of the mes­sage known only to the wearer.

When it comes to the locket my Dad gave me, well, the mean­ing of that gift will always remain safe within my mem­ory. His thought­ful­ness alone was enough to keep us close…and more than words could ever convey.