I'm twenty-five years behind my dad. There's more than simple mathematics behind this. When I got married at twenty-five years of age in 1999, I remember that my dad had turned 50, and I kept thinking about how I was getting married while I was half of my dad's age. I have no idea why this struck me at all, but it did. Perhaps I never really thought about my dad's age before. Ten years later, four kids later, my first decade teaching and my dad is now sixty.
This new age for my dad bothers me. My grandparents, on my dad's side, passed away in their sixties, but my dad, except for his back, is in much better health than they were. I know that this fear of his aging prompts me to want to spend more time with him. I want no regrets, and I feel that as I have grown older we've grown closer.
Saturday night, the day before he "officially" became sixty, we celebrated with a party at my parents. It always seems like another world, a separate lifetime when being at my old home. Some parts of my house look familiar while others don't. It was nice barbecuing on the back deck with Joe and Tim, remembering the many nights, while a college student, that I would sit back there to get some piece of mind, to get refocused. I loved looking at the trees swaying in the wind. It brought a certain type of calm to me.
The party was a good time with relatively low tension (That's a whole 'nother blog entry.) I gave my dad the usual (cd's, dvd, shirt), but I also finally gave him the picture of he and the brothers at the LEAVING IOWA event that was dedicated to him. I wrote a little note about noting those "perfect moments." May the days ahead be full of those "perfect moments."
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