Grandma liked to compare our lives to different seasons. I never understood what she spoke of until lately, probably because at the time I was still in the summer of my life. Some people compare winter to sadness, spring to hope, summer to growth, and fall to success. However, she used the seasons as a yard stick to tell where we had arrived on life's timeline. For instance, I am 55 so that would put me about the half-way mark of fall, and my son who is 26 at the beginning of summer. Make sense? The problem with this is you cannot have an appreciation for how good your youth is until it's gone. We cannot have an appreciation for being wrinkle free until our faces resemble an old catcher's mitt. I do consider myself to be in fairly good shape for my age, even though I am not running marathons, neither am I decrepit. I did get down on all fours not long ago to retrieve a pencil that had rolled under the couch, and I had considered if there was anything else that needed to be done while I was down there. Let's just call it multi-tasking. Once our knees start to creak like they need a shot of WD-40 we must commit to going all the way down or attempting to get up. I'd like nothing more than to say that I am happily middle aged but that could only be true if I intended to live to be 110 years old, otherwise the math just doesn't work. Not so long ago one of my much younger co-workers said to me, "you don't move like a man who is in his mid-fifties." I am still unsure if that was a compliment or a dig. Sometimes open-ended comments sting just a smidge.
I have to say that I am a little annoyed about this phenomenon we call aging. Nobody who was my age (now) when I was a teenager (then) ever bothered to give me a heads up. Couldn't they warn a fella?! I suppose at some point the old man might have mentioned it to me, but I just missed the information because I was fixated on the beautiful red-haired girl who sat in front of me in algebra class. Once a young man is set on a course to learn something important girls should be totally extracted from that process. I was confused enough when I was asked to add numbers to numbers, once they added 2+A, I thought my head would explode. Now back to aging... it's come to my attention that the prospect of long life sounds good to everyone but the prospect of aging appeals to almost nobody.
Watching my parents' step into the winter of their lives has not been easy for me. We often lose sight of the fact that our parents are first and foremost human beings. Over the years they have fallen prey to all the same pitfalls I did as a child. However, they never bothered to tell me about those mistakes, possibly because they wanted to remain super-human in my eyes. At some point in adulthood our parents become our friends, although it is unclear when. I try to never be that parent who says, "don't do as I do, do as I say." That kind of logic is only helpful until it comes full-circle and bites us in the ass. It would have been nice if the old man would have told me about the pitfalls of life. He did warn me about the dangers of putting the grand children of the employees of Phillip Morris through Ivey Legue schools, although he could never take his own advice. That was one lesson he never had to teach me; I hate cigarettes with a red passion. He loved to say "I know cigarettes are going to take minutes off my life, but I figure they will come off the END of my life." That joke was only funny as long as he was alive. It seems a shame for me to be cheated out of possibly 12 to 15 extra years with my father over something that is nothing more than a needless and nasty habit. Oh, how I miss talking to him, he was a cross between George Carlin and The Dalai Lama. The man had a gift for nearly everything, I think they call that the "IT" factor. He may well have become a pastor in the beginning just to appease grandma, but nobody could deny that light that shown from inside of him, even from afar.
So just remember to make the seasons of your life count. Make sure that you brand the people around you deeply enough that the essence of who you are lingers long after you are gone. It's true, the good times often live in laughter, but other times it is laughter through tears. That's my favorite emotion. Because if we don't give our loved ones a reason to miss us, why were we ever here to begin with?
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