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What Our Late Parents Leave Behind Can Tell Us Just How Much They Enjoyed Our Company

Jim Moore
6 min readAug 9, 2020

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Remembering a trip to Aspen with my Dad, thanks to his receipts

My father’s receipt for ski rentals in Boulder, CO, for our Aspen trip in 1969

An unearthed paper trail tells a tale

A father-son trip more memorable to him than I knew

Parents can find ways to surprise you even when they are gone…have been gone for many years.

Case in point: In the process of going through family records and various documents to support a book I’m writing, I found a small stack of receipts and lined note paper with accounting notes that my father organized after a trip he and I took to Aspen, Colorado, in late March into early April 1969. He’d flown out to see me at school in Boulder, where we rented skis, boots, poles, and a roof rack for the rental car he’d picked up at the Denver airport.

My father’s rental car receipt for the Aspen trip. Remember, these are 1969 prices

A former World War II fighter pilot and then a Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber pilot, Pop was still on active duty in the Air Force, working at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) across from the Pentagon. I was beginning my sophomore year at the University of Colorado, and…

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Jim Moore
Jim Moore

Written by Jim Moore

Journalist, former Capitol Hill staff (House and Senate), former Cabinet speechwriter, editor, photojournalist and bird photographer. Top Writer Quora 2016–2017

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