For 15 years, Bill Cosby and my father have conspired to make my life miserable.  The two of them took every opportunity to make me feel guilty and ashamed.

But Sunday, Father’s Day, I finally redeemed myself.

Long before Cosby became an international television comedy on the air, he was successful stand-up comedian and recording artist.  My father was apparently a fan of Cosby’s.

Soon after I learned to work a phonograph, I found three Cosby albums in his collection.  I played them again and again.  I shared the records with my friends and we laughed until we cried as Bill told stories about Fat Albert, Weird Harold, Russell and the rest of his buddies.

We had “discovered” Bill Cosby and soon my friends were begging to borrow the albums.  One thing let to another and I eventually loaned them to another friend who loaned them to another friend and so on until the records became irretrievably lost.  I just sort of lost track of them.

My father never forgot.

Did you ever find out what happened to those “Bill Cosby records,” he would ask. “Those are probably collector’s items, you know.”

He asked the question every time we met.  And each time he asked, arrows of guilt pierced my heart, he had no idea how terrible I felt.  I had lost some of my dad’s prized possessions with no apparent way of ever finding them.  I was crushed.  It eventually became too painful for me to even watch “The Cosby Show.”

Not that I didn’t try to find the albums. I asked Roger and Jimmy and Steve and all the rest of my high school buddies about the albums, but none of them could remember where they were.  After all those years, the trail had grown stale and cold.

But my father never gave up.  Each time we returned for a visit, I waited anxiously for “the question.”  I knew he would eventually ask, “Have you ever been able to track down those Bill Cosby records?”  Each time I would have to admit that I hadn’t found them yet.

Finally, it dawned on me, if I couldn’t find the originals, I would track down replacements!  I began scouring the bargain bins at record stores.  I became a familiar face at used record shops in the area.

For months, it was a fruitless search.  I began to appreciate how right Dad had been.  Those records were collector’s items.  Finally, as despair began to cloud my outlook, I located one of the records in Des Moines.  My search gained new vigor.

My quest for the remaining two albums was long and arduous.  I was nearly prepared to offer the single album to Dad as a token of my sincerest apology, when, on a side street in Marshalltown, I found that a tiny record shop has connections to a network of used-record dealers.

I don’t know where luann at D.J.’s Tapes and Records found them but the albums were in beautiful condition.  When she finally laid the two albums on the counter in front of me, I could hardly believe my eyes.  After 15 years of guilt induced by Bill Cosby and my father, the ordeal was nearly at an end.

The price of the albums was no less that you would expect for such collector’s items, but I paid it gladly.  I would have paid twice as much (but don’t tell luann).  I carefully padded and packaged all three albums up and sent them off in plenty of time for Father’s Day.

I called Dad on Sunday.  “How did you like your present?” I asked.

“I was listening to them when you called.  Thank you,” Dad said sincerely.

Those were the words I’d been waiting for 15 years to hear.  Now Dad has his albums back and I’m free of my guilt.  I don’t know which one us received a better gift on Sunday.