May 18. A very special day 73 years ago in a home in East London. The Riley family welcomed its fifth child, a baby boy. In an old photo, baby Eric, dressed in a white gown, sits on his mother's lap surrounded by his brother and sisters. He's scowling and serious and not very happy looking. But the stories he told of his childhood were very happy. The little grandmother who lived with the family and nurtured in him his life-long love of birds and poetry. The mischief he would get into with his brother Freddy. The years when he was evacuated to Wales, and we heard nothing of the horrors of war, but only of the charm and beauty of the countryside in Ross-on-Wye. How, in his first year of schooling, the symbol on his school box was (prophetically) a little hammer. His love of wood and carpentry. Hours spent on a riverside fishing. Paintings of England (and later America's barns, Atlantic Ocean, Delaware Canal). He was an Englishman through and through. But he came to see America and stayed for half his life. In his later years he was drawn more and more to his beloved England. And now, wherever in Heaven it most resembles an English countryside, is where I think he is.
But, I also think, most of his earthly thoughts are about his family. Does he think of the little grandchildren he loved: Oak, Caleb, Meadow, Adelane, Juden, Eden. And the little ones he left too soon to meet: Dove, Ella, Lily, Naya, Sophia, and of course his little namesake Eric Ian Riley Sulik, who when he furrows his little brow and looks quite serious, resembles his Pop-pop. 
He is very much missed, but, yes, he is truly Home.
