Thanks, Dad.

For 37 years, our dad has taken your photographs. He’s been at your weddings, your first communions, your school photo days. He’s been the one to capture your last moments with grandparents, husbands, wives. He’s been the one to capture your first moments with new babies. He’s covered your kids in bunnies, and even got Santa into his studio. He’s captured your awkward moments in high school sports, and at your best for senior photos. He’s told you to poop your pants, and made you think you have a booger, and made your young selves giggle until you were purple with the tickle stick. 

He’s going to keep doing these things for a while longer. He’ll still be taking photographs. But it’s going to be different. Now dad will be running Portraits by Buff out of our home, to care for our mom full time in between photo-taking. Yesterday, he officially sold that building that has stood on Main Street for 37 years.

And so we wanted to pause for a moment to tell dad, good job. For in the midst of the greatest darkness our family has ever experienced, he has done one of the hardest things a person can ever do. To close a piece of his life’s work. 

It’s that work that has allowed our dad to focus these last 37 years on his favorite job, being our dad and mom’s husband. And we want him to know how grateful we are.

For our entire lifetimes, we cannot remember a softball game, a baseball game, a cross country meet, even a cheerleading performance that dad missed. 

He was our Art Presenter in grade school, and would bring art from the Buchanan Center into our classrooms with stories and lessons, and even fruit and vegetables because he didn’t think young students were eating enough. 

He would show up to our schools with a welder’s mask when there was a lunar eclipse and insist all the students be able to go outside to see.

We’d go camping in the summer down at the river, and beg to stay an extra day, and another extra day, and he’d always say okay.

Dad’s business hasn’t been a fortune maker. There are questions and worries about money that our parents enter this next chapter with. But the way he operated his business led him to raise a pastor, a doctor of physical therapy, and a baseball playing airplane pilot. He’s led his business in such a way that when mom has needed him to be home to care for her, he can. And these things can’t be measured with money. For these uncountable things, we are most grateful.

Dad, you’ve done a good job. We are proud of you. Thank you for being our dad.