One Last Birthday

I live in Daly City now. Part time, anyway — several months of the year between working at Guam Bakery and here at The Bread Basket, the place I just bought into with my partners. I do the office work. That was the deal: my cousins handle the floor, the maintenance, the customers downstairs, and I sit up here with the invoices, the payments, the compliance, all the back-office stuff that keeps the lights on and the vendors paid.

The heater isn't working. It's not very cold, manageable, but cold nonetheless — I'm still technically an island boy. There's 80s music playing in the background, some generic station, and I'm in a groove inputting invoices when a song comes on and I just… stop.

I don't even know which song it was. That's the thing. It wasn't a song song, not one tied to a specific memory. Just the sound of that decade. And suddenly I'm not in Daly City in 2026, I'm somewhere else, somewhen else, and my dad is alive.

He's been gone five weeks.

I keep telling myself the nostalgia is about being back in California. Or about being stuck in the 80s, which my wife will tell anyone who'll listen is a permanent condition of mine. Or about the new environment, the new role, the new everything. And it's probably some of all that. But sitting here with a stack of invoices and a song I can't even name, I think the truth is simpler and harder than that. The 80s is when he was the center of everything for me. And the music is finding me sideways, through a speaker in an office in a bakery he never saw, doing work he would've understood in his bones.

There's a part of me that wants him to see this. Where I am now, what I'm doing. I know that when he was still alive, he had asked Mom where I was, what I was up to in Daly City. I don't know if she told him the whole of it — the partnership, the bakery, the desk I'm sitting at right now. I'd like to think she did. I'd like to think he knew.

I got back to Guam in mid-January, in time for his 82nd birthday. I'm glad he made it to his birthday. We had a couple of scares after that, moments where we thought we'd lose him, and I started praying he'd make it to mine — April 18th. He fought for another couple of months. The Good Lord brought him home on April 2nd.

His funeral was supposed to be on April 15th. He almost made it to my birthday.

But Typhoon Sinlaku pushed everything back, and we buried him on the 18th instead. So maybe, just maybe, I got my wish after all. Maybe Dad spent one last birthday with me.