Tag Archives: father

Keep On Keepin’ On

[NOTE: IF THIS COMPLETE BLOG-POST LIES IN THE BODY OF THIS EMAIL MESSAGE, CLICK ON THE TITLE TO READ THE PIECE IN ITS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT ON MY BLOG- SITE. IF ONLY A LINK TO THE PIECE IS PROVIDED IN THE EMAIL, CLICK ON THAT TO TAKE YOU TO THE SITE.]

It has been postulated by persons wiser than I that time does not exist, neither past, present, nor future.  If our lives were a metaphorical hourglass—the top bulb representing the past, the middle stricture the present, the bottom bulb the future—we would find ourselves at the middle, living in the moment.  That moment, however, would be but the instant it takes for one grain of sand to pass through the stricture, followed by the next, and the next, ad infinitum, each gone too rapidly for us to grasp.  And therefore, the theory goes, the present cannot actually exist.  Similarly, because we have no conception of the bulb above us or the one below, no way to perceive them, the past and future also do not exist.

Perplexing, no?  But not a theory I agree with, and I would urge those who espouse it not to tell me time doesn’t exist. 

Given my longtime fascination with and study of history, I’ve always believed there to be a past.  Mind you, I’m able to consciously recall it only from the late 1940s onward; everything that happened before that, I must accept as it’s been told to me. 

I’ve always believed in the present, too, perceiving it not as a mere instant in time, but as a continuous progression or sequence of events in which I play a part—at least while I’m awake.  While sleeping, of course, I have no awareness of the present.

The existence of a future is something I’ve always taken for granted, as well, though I have more yesterdays behind me now than tomorrows ahead of me.

My parents, whose lives spanned parts of ten decades, nonagenarians when they died, are part of the past I remember.  My wife and two children are part of the present I inhabit.  And my grandchildren represent the future, most of which, alas, I shall never see.  But it’s my comprehension of these three elements—past, present, and future—that allows me to carry on.

I remember visiting my father as he neared the end of his life, and hearing him complain (for the zillionth time) about the number of prescribed medications he was taking.  He had a small, plastic pillbox to keep them organized on a weekly basis, a device I silently laughed at, so cocksure and smug in my late forties.

“I saw the doc last week,” my father said, “and I told him to take me off some of these damn pills.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Said he’d do that if I told him which ones to cut out.  Said he wasn’t sure which might be the ones keeping me alive.”

“So, what did you say?”

“I told him, in that case, forget it.  I’ll carry on with all of ‘em.”

“Good move, Dad!” I said.  “Keep on keepin’ on.”

We had that conversation thirty-five years ago, and my father’s been gone for more than twenty of those, a part of my past forever.  To my everlasting astonishment, I’ve now entered my own ninth decade, the octogenarian I never contemplated becoming, and my present looks more and more to me like his did to him back then.

I, too, have a plastic pillbox now to organize the eight medications I take daily, five of which are prescribed to control cholesterol, regulate blood pressure, promote prostate function, and bolster bone density.  The other three are over-the-counter supplements I like to think will help me compensate for my lost and lamented youth.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!  I imagine my father, wherever he is, must be chuckling knowingly at my plight—my past making fun of my present.

I have a friend whose espoused goal in life is to live more years retired than he spent working.  It’s a noble goal, one I share, and that moment will arrive for me seven years from now.  Another of my goals is to accomplish what my parents did, living into a tenth decade, which will happen when I hit ninety, a mere nine years off in the future.  Both my folks remained mentally acute and physically viable almost to the end, a state I devoutly wish for myself. 

A third goal is to live life fully right up until I die—a sentiment I wrote a poem about, I Haven’t the Time, which you will find and enjoy at this safe link—

https://tallandtruetales.blog/2020/01/08/i-havent-the-time/.

Our two daughters visited us for a week in Florida recently, without their husbands and children.  Although we love being with them all, this annual visit from our girls is part of a future we look forward to every year, our ‘core four’ together again.  But the realities of past and present do have a way of inserting themselves. 

I encountered both of them on their first morning with us as I lurched into the kitchen—unshaven, hair askew, eyes still half-shut.  They offered a cheery good morning and warm kisses as I plugged in the kettle for my green tea—decaffeinated, of course—and watched me spill my pills into my hand from the pillbox.

“How many pills do you take every day, Dad?” the eldest asked.

I told her, explaining what each was for in more detail than she probably wanted to hear.

“Do you really need to take that many?” her sister asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said, an unbidden image of my father flashing before my eyes.  “But I don’t know which might be the one I need to keep me alive, so I just carry on with all of ‘em, y’know?”

“Good decision, Dad!” the eldest said.

“Yeah,” her sister echoed.  “Just keep on keepin’ on!”

And so I shall—proud of the past, relishing the present, anticipating the future. Given what I know to be true, no one can tell me they don’t exist!

You Never Know

[NOTE: SUBSCRIBERS WHO FOLLOW THIS BLOG RECEIVE EACH COMPLETE NEW POST IN THE BODY OF AN EMAIL. BUT IF YOU CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF EACH POST, YOU CAN READ THE PIECE IN ITS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT ON MY BLOG SITE. READERS NOT SUBSCRIBED AS FOLLOWERS RECEIVE A SHORT MESSAGE FROM ME WITH A LINK TO EACH NEW POST, WHICH TAKES YOU AUTOMATICALLY TO THE SITE.]

The latest weekly prompt from my Florida writers’ group was to write a story featuring the phrase, ‘You never know!’ This is my response—

The ball leaps off the bat with a loud thwack! and soars skyward in a graceful parabola above the seven of us milling below, before curving back to earth, slicing right toward my little brother who prances nervously on the grass.  He’s using the almost-new fielder’s glove I let him have for this occasion, while I use my beat-up old one.

I’m twelve years old, which makes Allan nine, and he’s a fair bit smaller.  It’s the first time he’s been allowed to play ball with my friends—a game called 500, where we earn points for fielding balls hit to the outfield by a lone batter—and I’d coached him beforehand, especially emphasizing the need to call everyone off before making a catch so we don’t all collide under the ball.

“Just yell out to warn the guys you’re makin’ the catch,”I told him.  “Everybody else will back off.”

Now, as the ball plunges toward him, I see him raise the glove over his head, his other hand poised beside it, just the way I taught him.  “Call for it!  Call for it!” I yell.

And he does…sort of.  At the very last moment, he shouts, “Yours!” and ducks away.  The rest of us watch disgustedly, disbelievingly, as the ball thuds into the grass, bounces once, and lies still.

“You don’t call Yours!” I yell at my brother, embarrassed in front of my friends.  “You’re s’posed to call Mine! Mine!  And then catch the ball!”  Allan just offers that shamefaced grin he affects when he knows he’s disappointed me. 

One of the other guys, a kid I don’t really like that much, gets right on my brother, shouting, “What a dork!  What a chicken!  What’re you even doin’ here?”  Allan quails in the face of the attack, drops my glove on the ground, and trudges off to the sidelines, head down.

“Shut up, Gary!” I say to the kid, wondering if this is when we’re going to have that fight we both know is coming sooner or later.  “Leave him alone!” 

Gary glares at me, but chooses to let it drop.  He tosses the ball into the batter, and we all trot back to the game—all but Allan, who sits on the grass to one side, holding the old glove I tossed to him when I reclaimed my newer one.

He’s not there when the game ends an hour or so later, so I head home without him.  As I’m getting a glass of cold water at the kitchen sink, my mother says, “Where’s your brother?  Supper’s in about twenty minutes.”

“I thought he came home,” I say.  “I didn’t see him at the park when I left.”

“He’s probably still there,” she says.  “Go find him, tell him it’s suppertime.”

With an exaggerated sigh, I make my way grumpily back to the park, which is only across the street from our house, but the trip seems like an unfair burden on me.  Nobody else is there now, and I can’t see Allan anywhere.  As I’m about to turn homeward, I hear a strangely-familiar noise coming from behind the maintenance shed on the far side of the ballfield.

Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk!  Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk! 

I trot across to the shed, and behind it I find Allan tossing a ball over and over onto the slanted roof of the shed.  Each time he tosses it, the ball lands, rolls erratically down the torn and curled shingles, and bounces off the gutter, where my brother waits, trying earnestly to catch it in that beat-up glove.

Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk! 

And now I remember why I recognized the sound!  I used to practice the same drill by myself a few years ago, when I’d been told I wasn’t good enough to play with the big guys.  Allan doesn’t know I’m there, so I watch for a few minutes, and I hear him quietly calling Mine! before each attempted catch.  He drops more than a few because the gutter deflects the ball’s expected trajectory at the last moment, but he keeps trying.

And then he spots me.  “What?” he says defensively.  “You used to do this.”

“Yeah, I did,” I reply, ashamed now of my reaction in front of my friends earlier.  “You wanta know a trick I learned to make it easier to catch ‘em?”

He nods, so I demonstrate how to hold back a bit as the ball rolls down the roof, then step into it at the last moment, tracking the bounce off the gutter.  “It’s easier to catch the ball when you’re movin’ towards it,” I say.  And we spend the next little while with me throwing the ball onto the roof and him catching it, more frequently now. 

Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk! 

And every time he moves in for the catch, he yells, “Mine!”

We’re interrupted all of a sudden by my father’s gruff voice right behind us.  I don’t know how long he’s been standing there watching us, but he says,  “Boys!  Your mother’s waitin’ supper.  We gotta go!”

Allan runs to him excitedly.  “Didja see me catchin’ the ball, Dad?  I’m catchin’ most of ‘em now!  Jamie says I’m doin’ good!  Didja see me?”

“Yeah, I saw you, son,” my father says, tousling my brother’s hair with one big hand.  Throwing his other arm around my shoulder, he leads us back across the park.

“I’m gettin’ better, Dad,” Allan says.  “You think the big guys will let me play with ‘em tomorrow?”

“You never know,” my father says, giving my shoulder an affectionate squeeze.  “They might, but you never know.”

“Yeah, they will,” I say, “or they’ll be playin’ without me!”  And my father squeezes my shoulder again.

Ciao For Now

A recent prompt from my Florida writers’ group asked us to make up a story about a person whose time is running out. This is my make-believe offering—

In all the years I knew him, I never heard my father use the word goodbye.  Not to anyone, not ever.  At every point of farewell, he’d offer up a substitute or synonym for the word—Pip-pip!  So long!  Good night! Cheerio!  ‘Til next time!  Toodle-oo!  See you later!  Take care!

Occasionally, he’d venture a foreign language—Adieu!  Auf Wiedersehen!  Adios!  Sayonara!  Towards the end of his life, he came to favour Ciao for now!  But he’d never use the word goodbye, and I used to wonder why.

He tried to explain it once to a mildly-curious, teenaged son.  “The word is too permanent, that’s all.  It implies the end, the finish, that there’ll be nothing to follow.  I prefer to think I’ll be meeting the other person again.”  But I confess, I didn’t really see the difference, callow as I was.

Although born and raised in Canada, my father was an Oxonian—a graduate of Oxford University, Balliol College, class of 1932, a member of the rowing club—and among his lecturers were C.S. Lewis and the great J.R.R. Tolkien.  Gainfully employed back in Canada with a PhD in Literature, he was one of the earliest to enlist after Canada went to war in 1939.  He served as a medical orderly until demobbed in 1943, when he returned home in time for my birth.

“Despite our best efforts to save them, we lost a lot of good fellows,” he would reflect from time to time in his later years.  “We knew their time was running out, but I never said goodbye to any of them.  I wanted them to believe there was still more to come.”

Somewhere over there, with his comrades at Oxford or in the obscene battlefields, he learned a nonsensical, British ditty about farewells, not goodbyes, and he used to sing it to me and my siblings from time to time, usually when we balked at having to go to bed.  He was an enthusiastic, if somewhat undisciplined, singer, but we came to love that song.

Eventually, of course, the fateful day arrived, as it does for all of us, that my father’s own time was running out.  Home from hospital for the last time in the deep mid-winter, he was with my mother and their five children and our spouses—the ‘dirty dozen’, as we had long styled ourselves.  We all knew the end was nigh, though none acknowledged it, and small talk prevailed until my father raised a frail hand.  We waited, breath bated, and in a faltering voice between short gasps for breath, he sang that song one final time—his way of letting us know this was not goodbye.

Most of us, I suspect, did not believe that, but no one let on.

A few months later, when the frost had left the ground, we gathered again at the family’s burial plot for my father’s interment, joined this time by his grandchildren, his sister, his nieces and nephews, and a few cousins.  In keeping with his wishes, it was a simple ceremony, and two of us spoke on behalf of the group before his ashes were lowered into the grave by his eldest grandchildren.  And then we all stood around, staring awkwardly at the ground, as if reluctant to leave.

At that point, with an exquisite sense of timing, my younger brother stepped forward and began to sing our father’s farewell nonsense-song, his voice soft but firm.  Before he could finish the first line, all of us who knew it had joined in—a sad farewell, yet a joyous acknowledgment that this was not goodbye.

Pip! Pip! Toot-toot, Godspeed,
Toodle-oo, toodle-oo, toodle-oo,
Ta-ta, old bean, Ting-ting, old thing,
Chuckeroo, Chuckeroo, Chuckeroo!
This parting brings us sorrow,
We hate to say adieu,
So, we’ll say Ting-a-ling, old tin of fruit,
Cheerio, cheerio to you!

Now, within hailing-distance myself of the age at which he died, I think of my father often, and I hear that little ditty echoing in my mind, just as he sang it so many years ago.

“Cheerio, Dad,” I murmur each time.  “Ciao for now!”

I Believed ‘Em All!

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back!  Tell a big lie, your father will die!

I remember chanting this doggerel over and over as I pranced along the sidewalk as a young boy.  I have no idea where I first heard it, but I wasn’t the only one whose sing-song voice could be heard uttering the same incantation.

To this day, I try to avoid those sidewalk cracks, and most of the fibs I’ve told over the years have been small.  I swear!

That little ditty was just one of many such learnings we picked up as children from playmates, kindly old aunts and uncles, even parents.  And for periods of time, I believed all of them!

Eat your carrots, sonny!  They’ll put hair on your chest.  I’ve always loved carrots, especially raw, and I do have hair on my chest—gray now, of course, but still curly—so that advice bore out, I guess.

Drink your milk!  It will make your bones strong.  I readily believed that, but when I was that age, we were drinking powdered milk my mother mixed up from a box.  Even when ice-cold, it tasted vile, and I always wished we had a cat I could feed it to—but not a black one.

Superstitions played a big part in much of the advice I was given, even though my parents told me superstitions were premature explanations that had overstayed their time.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that meant.

It’s bad luck if you ever let a black cat cross in front of you!  To this day, if a black cat crosses my path, I detour.  It makes no sense, yet I do it, anyway.

Don’t walk under a ladder!  It will bring bad luck, too.  That seemed logical to me, but I would sometimes tempt fate by doing that very thing.  Today, though, a grown man, I always walk around ladders.  I mean, a piano could fall on me, right?

Bad luck will follow if you open an umbrella in the house!  I can attest to the truth of this one because I did open an umbrella indoors one day, just to test the proposition.  As it popped open, it struck a vase on the ledge beside the front door, sending it crashing to the ground.  That led to one of those rare occasions where I told one of those small fibs I mentioned earlier.

Look for four-leaf clovers if you want good luck!  My friends and I spent many an hour doing just that, and found lots of them, as I recall.  And because no great tragedy ever befell us, I suppose the statement was accurate.  One friend insisted on calling them shamrocks, and said we might find a leprechaun.  I never did.

Don’t pull on the wishbone ‘til after you’ve made your wish!  I tried earnestly to comply with that advice, but my brother—more interested in winning the contest than having his wish fulfilled—always pulled first and usually won.  And as a result, my wish that he would magically disappear never came true.

Keep your eyes closed and the boogey-man won’t get you!  I had a lot of faith in this one, especially in the dark of the bedroom I shared with my brother.  I would sometimes hear terrifying moans coming from the vicinity of his bed, so I’d cower under my blankets, eyes screwed shut, praying the advice was well-founded.  I never wished for my brother to be taken, but I did prefer it be he rather than I.   

Don’t cross your eyes for fear they’ll stay that way!  I remember my friends and I daring each other to try it, all of us fearful it might be true, none of us willing to be the one who found out.  I know now there’s nothing to it, and I attribute the fact that I have to wear corrective eyeglasses to some other factor.  But I did look cross-eyed at one of my teachers once, and was surprised when she did the same back at me.  She was one of my favourites ever after!

As I entered adolescence, the nature of advice I was given by well-intentioned relatives changed, although most of it was equally preposterous.

Don’t pick your zits!  You’ll end up with boils all over your body.  The spectre of boils was terrifying, but so, too, was the mortification of acne.  For a while, I tried to convince myself I was developing freckles, but I knew better.  A variety of creams and lotions entered the fray, but I did resort to picking at my zits out of desperation.  Sixty years on, I’m still waiting for the boils.

Beware the devil’s hands, boy.  If you succumb to his entreaties, you’ll go blind!  Well, all I can say to that is, although I do wear glasses now, I never once lost my sight.

Yes, you can borrow the car again.  But see that you bring it back!  This command from my father on every occasion I asked for his keys, was aggravating at the time, but has since become a standard family joke among my siblings.  And it’s a source of wonder to me now that one of my granddaughters owns and drives a car I used to own.  She brings it back every time she visits.

There are other gems of wisdom from my childhood, most of which I no longer follow, some of which I do.  They pop into my mind at the oddest moments, sometimes evoking a laugh, occasionally a tear.  They are milestones along the road I journeyed as I grew up, and they helped bring me safely to the cusp of my ninth decade.

And once upon a time, I believed ‘em all.

Babysitting

As a sometimes-hapless father, one of the things I learned about parenthood is there really wasn’t a lot that was new.  Most of it was just the same stuff I experienced in childhood, happening to my own children with me in the role my father once occupied.

I took a certain delight in discovering that.  It was fun to watch as my daughters encountered many of the same situations I faced when I was at their ages.  And it was comforting when I saw them reacting to circumstances in much the way I had.  It reinforced the notion that the values and beliefs my wife and I espoused were being passed along to them.

The tough part, of course, was watching what happened on the few instances when they made an unwise decision and had to face the consequences of their mistake.  I often wondered if my parents had felt the same conflicting emotions as I did on those occasions.

The hardest thing of all was resisting the temptation to tell my daughters what to do in every situation, to provide them a shortcut to what I’d had to find out on my own, sometimes through bitter experience.  But I’d managed to convince myself that keeping quiet was often safest, that the process of figuring out the best way to proceed was more important for them than just being given the right answer.

“They learn best through discovery,” I would tell myself.  “Not by being instructed.”  And I made myself believe that.

But the difficulty with that stance was brought home to me on the occasion of my oldest daughter’s first babysitting job.  Watching her go out the door, climb into someone else’s car, and drive off without so much as a backward glance was a bit of a wrench.

I could still remember how it felt when I went out like that.  From the time I was thirteen until I finished high school, I regularly picked up extra money by babysitting little kids in the neighbourhood.

Mostly, it involved spending time with them before bed, then packing them off before the Saturday night hockey game started on TV.  After getting them settled, I’d sit on the sofa, munching peanuts, sipping a cola until the parents came home.

To me, babysitting seemed like such a simple job back then.  Nothing ever went wrong.  And even if it had, there was always the telephone with the prominently-displayed number where the parents could be reached.  And in a pinch, I knew I could always call my mother.  Babysitting was easy!

But when it came my daughter’s turn, I was no longer so sure of that.  Seeing my little girl go off to her own first job caused me some worry.  At thirteen, she seemed awfully young to me!

Mind you, she was certainly well-prepared.  She’d enrolled in a babysitting course with several of her friends in order to prepare herself for the role, and had proudly received her certificate as proof of her readiness.

During the next few months, she’d taken on a couple of pseudo-babysitting jobs, looking after young children while their parents were still in the house.  By all accounts, she was a competent, confident, and caring babysitter.

I remember watching her pack her tote bag before going out on that first job.  She put in a couple of storybooks she thought the youngsters might like, a deck of playing cards, two of her favourite stuffed toys, note paper and a pen, along with sundry other items.  The only thing she didn’t have by the time she left was any doubt about her ability!

Nevertheless, I worried.

I remember leaping for the phone (uncharacteristic of me!) when it rang a couple of hours later.  But there was no problem.  She’d called only to let us know the kids were in bed, sleeping peacefully, while she was listening to one of her portable cassette tapes, and reading.

When she arrived home around midnight, flushed with the success of her first assignment, elated at the windfall of cash she had earned, I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Babysitting’s easy, Dad,” she said, and I heard the echo of my own younger sentiments.  “There’s nothing to worry about.”

There hadn’t been for her, I guess, just as there hadn’t been for me when I was doing it.  But her experience drove home the fact that, for me as a father, those babysitting jobs weren’t so easy after all!  And when her sister joined the babysitting ranks a couple of years later, those same worries carried on apace.

But now, our lives have sallied through another cycle, and my daughters’ children are striking out—babysitting, weekend jobs, summer employment.  I don’t fret so much about my grandchildren, though—partly because I’m more removed from them as a grandpa than I was as father to my own girls, partly because they have good fathers of their own to do the worrying, and mostly because the five of them are so darned competent at everything they do.

“Babysitting’s easy, Dad,” my daughter had said.  And looking back on it now, on the whole parenting thing, I can almost convince myself she’s right.

Who Abides?

The Dude abides. 

That’s a line from the 1998 film, The Big Lebowski, which has achieved almost cult status.  The dude in question is the main character in the film, Jeff Lebowski—played by Jeff Bridges, and based on Jeff Dowd, a real-life friend of the moviemakers, Joel and Ethan Coen.

The significance of the line has evolved over time, from a simple declaration that the character exists, to a more profound interpretation that he endures the many perturbations in his life and survives them.  In other words, he not only is who he is, he is cool with it.

I, however, have always taken a slightly different meaning from the line, one more in harmony with the archaic meaning of the word abides—to remain, to continue, to stay—as in the old hymn, Abide With Me.  Under my interpretation, the Dude is defined by those traits and attributes that constitute his individuality, the personas he inhabits, and which remain a part of him to the end.

In the film, we see the Dude as he was at the age of forty or thereabouts, over a period of a week or so in 1990, a small sliver of time in what we might assume was a lengthy life.  We do not see him as he was in his formative years, nor do we see what he might have become in his dotage.  Thus, the character abides in our memories only as a sliver of his entire self.

By contrast, if I look at myself, I see a more complete range of the personas I have occupied from childhood to present-day, many of which have overlapped.  These include son, brother, student, friend, employee, husband, homeowner, father, investor, player-of-games, writer-of-books-and-blogs, singer-of-songs, traveller, retiree, and grandfather, to name a few.  Over time in these various guises, I have journeyed from self-centredness to a broader awareness of the world around me; from a laissez-faire perspective to a questioning of the status quo; from near-certainty in my thinking to more patience for countervailing arguments; from confidence in my physical prowess to a reluctant acknowledgment of my increasing frailty; from a blithe belief that life would last forever to a comfortable concurrence that it won’t.

As Gibran wrote, Life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.

Several months back, I wrote some haiku verse about the link between boyhood and manhood, influenced by Wordsworth’s statement, the Child is father of the Man—

from my aging eyes,

the boy I once was looks out—

hardly changed at all

now well beyond my

diamond jubilee, the

man is still the boy

While the sentiment is true in many ways, it is ultimately false, for I have had to abandon more of the incarnations I have lived than I’ve been able to maintain.  And many of those that abide are more passive now.  I am a father still, but not one who is actively needed on a daily basis by his children; I draw from my investments now, rather than adding to them; I am a player of far fewer games than during my halcyon days, and those that remain are much gentler; my travels are more curtailed, even in non-pandemic times; I roll creakily out of bed every morning—gratefully to be sure—but no longer bounding into each new day.

If, as the haiku verses claim, the man is still the boy, and if that boy is looking out unchanged, he must surely be exclaiming, What the hell happened?

Despite that, however, this tract should not be construed as a complaint, as a railing against the coming of the end-times.  It is intended, rather, as a wry observation of the inevitable decline that accompanies the march of time, to the accompaniment of  gentle, knowing laughter at the conceit that it could ever be otherwise.

The question does arise, though, as to who exactly I will be when I eventually cross the bar.  Which of these many personas will still be present to accompany me out, and how many more will have already taken their leave?  The answer, which matters to no one but me, lies partially in the list above; and I know it will not be I who will decide.

Still, I wonder.  I have been so many people over my almost four-score years—some of whom I liked, some I regret being, some lost to the fog of time, and some still a part of me.  In spite of my years, I remain convinced that I will continue to grow, to adopt new personas even as I shed longstanding ones.

Is that what we might have seen happen with the Dude if that long-ago movie had allowed a broader viewing of his life?  I like to think so.  And had that been the case, the opportunity might have helped me to find an answer to my own ultimate question.

Who abides?

Making Babies

“Gramps,” says she, almost absently, “you and Nana made babies, right?”

“Ahh, that’s right,” says I, a tad taken aback by her question—out of the blue from an early-teen granddaughter.  “Two of them, beautiful sisters.”

sisters

We’ve been sitting on a swing-chair in the lanai, each of us tapping on our phones, together yet apart.  I turn my attention from mine, but she is still engrossed in hers.

“Like Mum and Dad did with us, right?”

“Exactly,” I reply, wondering where this is going.  “Like they did for you and your sister.  But we did it first.”

She smiles to herself.  “Did you ever make babies with anybody else?”

I shake my head.  “No, the only one we made babies with was each other.  Your mum and aunt are the only babies we ever had.”

“Did you ever try with anybody else?”

Another shake of the head, this one to clear the surprise I’m feeling.  “Nope.  I didn’t want babies before I met Nana.”  I’m trying hard to answer the questions as asked, without offering anything extraneous.

“Was she your first girlfriend?”

“No, I went out with other girls before we met.  But she was my last girlfriend,” I say with a chuckle.

steady

Eyes and thumbs still on her phone, she smiles at that.  “How did you guys know you were the ones you wanted to make babies with?”

I pause, gazing skyward, taking myself more than fifty years back.  “Well, I guess it was because we sort of clicked right off the bat.  After going out with her a couple of times, I didn’t really want to date anyone else.  Lucky for me, she felt the same way.”

“Yeah, but how did you know that?”

I laugh quietly again, buying time.  “I’m not sure we really did know, not right away.  I think it was something that grew slowly, the more time we spent together.”

“And that didn’t happen with any other girlfriends?”

I shake my head yet again.  “It was different with Nana.  She had a wonderful smile, and I guess she liked mine.”  I flash her a Cheshire grin for effect.  “We both loved sports and played a lot of them, so that helped.  Plus, we knew a lot of the same friends.  After a while, we just didn’t want to be with anyone else.  And before we knew it, we figured out we were in love.”

 “But you didn’t try to make babies?”

“Okay,” I say, screwing up my courage, “you know how babies are made, right?  Sort of?”  I pray that she does.

conception

She nods and blushes slightly, looking at me now.

“Well, Nana and I both wanted to graduate from university, meaning we wouldn’t be able to get married for a few years.  Back in those days, most people didn’t have babies before they were married, and birth control—you know what that is, right?—wasn’t available the way it is today.”

“Lots of people have babies today without being married,” she says.

“They do,” I acknowledge.  “But think of the enormous responsibility that can be, being a mother or father of a baby.  It’s like a full-time job, so any plans you have for school or a working career could be delayed a long time.”

“You think it’s wrong to do that before you’re married?”

I pause again, thrust without warning into the role of a reluctant life-coach, caught unprepared for this conversation.  But not disposed to dodge it.

“So-o-o,” I venture, “I wouldn’t call it wrong or right in a moral sense, like a sin or anything.  Not if two people are sure they love each other.  But I do think making babies could be an unwise decision for them, depending upon the circumstances.  If two people consciously want to be parents, if they know what that will entail, and if they believe they’re equipped to raise a child, then at least they’re going into it with their eyes open.  But even then, I think there’s a problem with that logic.”

“Which is?” she says, all in now.

“In my limited experience,” I say, smiling self-deprecatingly, “making love with someone is an emotional act—as it should be probably.  But emotions can often push common-sense aside in those situations, so people might end up doing something that seems exactly right in the moment, only to realize in retrospect that it was exactly the wrong thing to have done.  And if their actions result in a baby coming along, the consequences of that one mistake can be life-altering.  Especially if they’re young.”

lovemaking3

She nods, brows furrowed.  “How many girlfriends did you have before Nana?”

I’m tempted to reply, jokingly, that the number was in the dozens, but her manner is quite intent now.  “Boy, that’s a long time ago,” I say.  “I think there were probably three or four girls I really liked before Nana.  We’d tell everybody we were going steady, meaning we couldn’t date anybody else.”

“But you did, though, right?”

“Yeah, eventually,” I concede.  “With all of them except Nana.  She’s the last girl I went steady with.”

“And the only one you made babies with,” she affirms.

“Yup.”

She leans close to plant a kiss on my whiskery cheek.  “Okay, Gramps.  Thanks for telling me about you and Nana.”

And off she goes, phone in hand—curiosity apparently satisfied—leaving me alone on the swing-chair in the lanai, wondering if I’d answered her questions wisely, thinking I might know the reason for them, and hoping her innate common-sense would prevail.

It’s all so long-ago for me, and so achingly right-now for her.

Senior couple walking in park.

My Old Man

In all the sixty years I knew him before he died, I never referred to my father as the old man.  Despite being acceptable in many households, that phrase always seemed a tad disrespectful to me.  And besides, my mother forbade me.

When I spoke directly with him, I called him Dad.  When referring to him in conversation, he was my father, or my dad.  He was never my old man.

I had no problem with others who used the phrase, though.  My friends always seemed to have a loving relationship with their fathers, regardless of how they referred to them.

But there was no denying one fact; during the last decade of his life, which ended in his 92nd year, my dad definitely became an old man—a state of being I am now coming to understand.

old man

We were different, he and I, in so many ways—temperamentally, emotionally, and physically.  From my perspective, he seemed a placid soul, tending to take life as it came (although often expressing frustration when it wasn’t to his liking).

I knew he loved me, but he wasn’t one to say, “I love you,”; in fact, when I would say that to him, his usual response was, “Thank you.”  Genuinely pleased to be loved, but unsure as to how to express it to his son.

He was a bigger man than I, and stronger, although he was not particularly active in his later years, save for a daily walk.  As I grew up in the family home, I never got big enough to wear his clothes or his shoes (although, given our discrepant styles, I probably wouldn’t have, anyway).  When I inherited his cherished Omega wristwatch, I had to have three links removed from the bracelet in order to wear it.

As a child, I think I mostly took him for granted.  He was always there, he was dependable, he was predictable—a benign, constant presence in our household.  Not until after I had become a father myself, dealing with adolescent children, did I begin to think more about our relationship.  Not until then did I begin to reflect more on our similarities, rather than our differences.

By then, he was in his seventies, the decade I now inhabit.  His hair was thinning and graying, his gait was slowing; and I’d often see him lost in apparent reverie, a thousand-yard stare in his vivid blue eyes.  I used to wonder what he was thinking about, but I never asked.  I wish now I had.

He’s been gone for fourteen years almost, and I still see him in my mind’s eye—but always as an old man.  For images of his younger self, I have to look at family albums, where I am always struck by how youthful he was.  I just don’t remember him like that.

Billy-Boo at 32 2

The clearest memories I have, however, are counterfeit, in the sense that they are channeled through me.  For example, I used to notice how graceless he looked when he bent over to pick his newspaper off the floor—bowed legs canted outward, fanny pointed skyward, gnarled hand struggling to reach low enough.

“Bend your knees!” I’d silently tell him.

At my age now, of course, I realize bending one’s knees can be quite a problem if one expects to rise again.  So, I bend from the waist, too—bowed legs canted outward, fanny pointed skyward, gnarled hand struggling to reach the floor.  And alas, I see my father in my ungainly pose.

He used to sneeze—not demurely, but prodigiously.  A-roo-pha-a-!  A-roo-pha-a!  we might hear.  Or A-ree-cha-a-a!  A-ree-cha-a-a!  Sometimes A-chintz-ish!  A-chintz-ish!  There seemed no end to the variety of forms his sneezes could take.  But always, they were six times repeated before he seemed able to stop.  I think we first learned to count by marking my father’s sneezes.

“C’mon, Dad,” I used to say to myself.  “That’s not necessary.”

Now I sneeze, too—not decorously, but colossally.  They come upon me at the most inopportune times, and I’m unable to control them. A-roo-pha-a-a!  A-ree-cha-a-a!  A-chintz-ish!   And to my chagrin, I hear my dad all over again.

I had my childhood heroes as a boy, but my father wasn’t one of them.  Not then.  He was too old, too square, too conservative.  And sometimes (to my shame now), too embarrassing.  But in adulthood, I came to appreciate that his stolid, almost-Victorian demeanour was comforting, that his sly sense of humour was refreshing, that his love for his family was unending.

As my daughters grew up, they called him Grandpa, or more often Gramps.  They didn’t think he was square; they thought he was cool.  Now that I’m Gramps to my own grandchildren, basking in their attentions, I’ve come to appreciate how much my kids’ love must have meant to him.  Which makes me very happy that I appear to have, at long last, become my dad.

As another Fathers’ Day approaches, I give thanks for one of my heroes, that old man who was my father.

man-and-boy-1840034_960_720