Grandma liked to compare our lives to different seasons. I never knew what she spoke of until lately, probably because I was in the summer of my life at the time. Some people compare winter to sadness, spring to hope, summer to growth, and fall to success. However, granny used the seasons as a measuring stick to tell where we had arrived on our lifelines. For instance, I am fifty-five and my son is twenty-six, that would put me at about the half-way mark of fall and him at the beginning of summer. Does that make sense?
It's hard to believe thirty years could be the difference two seasons... that is until it's not. Aging sounds like an awful prospect until you compare it to the alternative. The problem with our youth is we cannot have an appreciation for being young until we are middle-aged. How's that for irony? It's a bit like the old saying that goes "you cannot appreciate what you had until it's gone." We cannot have an appreciation for being wrinkle free until our faces start to resemble an old catcher's mitt that needs a good oiling. I consider myself to be in pretty good shape for a man my age, however not so long ago I had to get on my hands and knees to retrieve a pencil that rolled under the couch. And while I was down there, I had to consider if there was anything else that needed to be done while I was on all fours? Consider that an aging man's feeble attempt at multi-tasking. When our knees begin to creak like they are need of a shot of WD-40 we must commit to the act of going all the way down or getting back up. I am by no means decrepit, but neither am I running marathons. I'd like nothing more than to say that I am happily middle aged, but that could only be true if I fully intended to live to be 110. Otherwise, the math just won't work. Trying to exceed the century mark seems unnecessarily and unrealistically optimistic to me. Not so long ago one of my much younger co-workers told me "You know, you don't move like a guy who is 55." The problem with such an open-ended remark is it is unclear whether it is a compliment or a dig. They should give me a trophy just for keeping up with them at my age.
I have to say that I am a little provoked with the adult people who surrounded me in my youth. I wish someone would have bothered to tell me how fast I would begin aging after about age forty. I started losing my hair where I wanted to keep it and getting it in places it had no business being like my ears. Why couldn't they warn a fella? I suppose it is possible the old man mentioned it when I was in high school, but I just missed it because I was too engrossed with the lovely red-haired girl that sat in front of me in algebra class. Anytime young men have been set on a path to learn something important being co-ed should be totally taken off the table. That's a bit like taking a whiz in the blustery Oklahoma wind. Besides, my teacher lost me the first time she requested that I solve (A+2). I was having a hard enough time trying to square numbers with numbers without also throwing in letters. At some point mom thought it would be a good idea to hire me a math tutor, what she didn't factor into the equation was that she was twice Miss Elk City and my hormones started to bounce every time I was in the same room with her. So, the truth is maybe mom wasn't so great at factoring either.
It is for sure and certain that the only path to a long life is aging. It's especially confounding that while everyone seems to be interested in a long life, NOBODY is interested in the prospect of getting older. I think they call that a paradox. Watching my parents' step into the winter of their lives has not been easy for me, nor is it for anyone. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of the fact that our parents are first and foremost human. They fell prey to all of the same pitfalls we did as children, they just never admitted it to us because if they did, they could no longer seem super-human in our eyes. It is true also that at some point our parents go from being parents to just being our friends. With any luck they will become worthwhile friends. I have tried with iron will to never be one of those parents that says things like: "don't do as I do, do as I say." It's only a matter of time before that kind of twisted logic will come back and bite us in the ass.
I always thought my dad was the type that figured I was smart enough to bail myself out of a jam, so he rarely shared his "screw up" stories with me. I appreciated his vote of confidence in my abilities to abstain from the ridiculous, but I wish he would have shared just a few so I could have learned from his mistakes instead of my own. Learning from the mistakes of others is much less painful. Dad was a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. He was a strange and wonderful mix of the Dali Lama and George Carlin all rolled into one. Many were the times I would lay in bed at night and ponder something he had told me with wonderment and sometimes distain because I knew he was relying on the fact that I tend to overthink everything.
The one thing we can all learn from people like my pop is to make every season count. To ensure that when we leave this earth, we have burned our brand deep enough into the people we love that it leaves a lasting impression. Good times are often found in laughter, but sometimes it is laughter through tears; that is my favorite emotion. Because, if we don't touch deeply the people we love while we are here, why were we ever here to begin with?
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