Living, remembering
Dad would have turned 95 this month.
A good number of years ago he’d set his sights on making it to 100 – a good round number, he thought, and a fine excuse for a good party.
Well, it seems he fell a bit short. The spirit, as they say, was willing, but the flesh gave out. Still, 94 years, seven months, four days was an impressive enough shuffle along this mortal coil. Even so, I think everyone concerned was more than a bit disappointed when it came to an end.
Some guys, we want to believe, are just going to live forever.
It sure seemed that way to me. He was 26 when I came along, so we had a good long time to get to know each other, and did get to know each other pretty doggone well. We’d known each other long enough that, in these last few years, a stranger looking down the bar was less likely to see a father and son than two old farts who looked strangely similar, nursing beers and telling lies about stuff they wished had happened years and years ago.
And y’know, that stranger wouldn’t have been entirely off the mark.
It’s hard to say just when it happens … and looking around at other folks I can see it doesn’t always happen … but there comes a time when fathers and sons also become friends, confidants, co-conspirators even.
It takes time. One day you realize that the guy who didn’t know a darn thing when you were 15 has gotten a whole lot smarter … and he seems ready to acknowledge that the kid is finally catching on. And, for guys as lucky as I was, it goes on from there. The stories get better, the advice goes deeper, the jokes get funnier. He helps you remember some of the things you’d just as soon forget, then levels the field by telling you the dumb stunts he pulled at that same age. In time you learn what he was up to before you came along, before Mom came along. Things you’d been too young to know about, too young to understand, too young to care. You learn he had dreams and disappointments, fears and triumphs, loves and sorrows that help give your life … and his … a deeper perspective.
And because he was there, he knows the same about you.
It’s hard then, to part with someone you’ve known all your life. Hard, of course, in the way the death of anyone you love, are close to, is hard. But after the intensity of grief has passed, there comes a different, maybe deeper, sense of loss.
It’s there in the stories. Those shared stories that can be shared no longer. Now no one can tell me how I looked when I unwrapped the giant caramel Sugar Daddy sucker – big as a canoe paddle – I found under the tree on my fourth Christmas. There’s no one to remember how I missed the bus after my first day at school and hitchhiked home with the slightly bewildered neighbor who happened by the bus stop. Even more so, I’m the custodian of memories not of my making -- of a lemon yellow Model A soft top with a rumble seat, packed with nine people on a summer road trip to the Terp Ballroom to celebrate the end of a war they wouldn’t have to fight in. Memories of hard times and of good times. Times that made him … and me … who, what, we became.
A man learns a lot in ninety-some years. He has a lot of stories to tell. It was my everlasting good fortune to share them as long as I did; have them to remember and pass along, always with the wish he was still around to tell one more. Yeah, a century would have been a good round number, but even then, not long enough. Not nearly long enough.