Gulls

Dads seem a fitting subject today. My Scottish father passed away ten years this December. During his final couple of months, I flew out to his home in San Francisco to go through the inevitably difficult process of saying goodbye: we knew by then that he wasn't long for this world.
Dad had a great love of books - and poetry was a particular enthusiasm. During one of his final lucid days, we are talking in his bedroom and the talk turned to his favourite poets. He asked me to fetch a couple of volumes from his collection. One was 'From the Wilderness' by Scottish poet Alasdair Maclean. Dad had lived in the city by the bay for more than 20 years by this point but he had never lost his interest in Scottish writers and Caledonian history.
Later, when the time came to choose an inscription for his memorial bench in Sausalito, I took two lines from 'Sea and Sky', one of the poems in 'From The Wilderness':
"I'd be a connoisseur of gulls
And every day I'd open a new horizon"
Gulls gather by his bench to this day, squawking, squabbling and bobbing on the bay.