I'll Be Seeing You
Feb 6, 2014
My father, Bob Horowitz, died February 1 after living many years with Alzheimer's. He was 89 and married to my mother for 65 years.
The family consensus is that almost all those 89 years were very happy ones for him, with the likely exception of 1944 and 1945, when he was an infantryman fighting in France and Germany. "I'll Be Seeing You," something of an anthem among American GIs overseas, remained one of his favorite songs, though it's gooey and sentimental and he was not in any other respect a gooey-sentimental-song type of person.
What he was was the type of person who named the cat Rover and who put a racing stripe on his Ford Econoline van. And I'm here to tell you that that's the kind of person you want for a father.
In this picture, he and my mother are holding me on my first birthday.
Here's Jimmy Durante singing "I'll Be Seeing You." Here's Billie Holiday. And here's Frank Sinatra.
Like they say there in the ending to the song: When I'm looking at the moon, I'll be seeing you.