| 14 December 2006 With Age I looked over at Mom, and she looked back at me. We were sitting in the living room of the house that looks over the Bay. It is a wonderful house, and I got the gas fire going in the fireplace that cast a merry holiday glow. The tree was decorated, after a fashion, and we were trying to talk about things. Dad was off looking for a change of clothes. These things have become adventures now. She matter-of-factly said that her mother lived to be ninety-one, and Dad's mother lived to be eighty-five. The latter is uncomfortably close. Both of their fathers have been gone a half-century or more. I said that once you get past sixty, there is no reason that making the eighties or nineties are not almost certain. Dad is getting close, chronologically, and they are both the last of their generation alive in their families. Dad is sometimes right with us and sometimes not. I am squirming with guilt. I am visiting this resort town in the upper latitudes where the wind blows chill in the winter because I love them. I am aching to get out of town again. They are fine, both healthy, but being with them is almost exactly like being with the kids again when they were small. Going to the restaurants is when it kicks in. Deciding where to sit, where the hot sauce is for Dad's soup. Where he put his coffee cup for the self-serve java, and the spoons and napkins. I get multiple sets of both, ferrying them back to the table. This is a strange change, interacting with these figures who loom so large in life, now diminished. I make faces at the little guy in the high chair at the table next to me. His eyes widen in amazement and glee. This I understand. He will grow, and he will go out in the world on his own, just as my own sons are doing. They will treat me with benign contempt, since they will be occupied with other things; their pals, and women, starting jobs, and maintaining the party that continues from college through the end of the next decade. They will be back, periodically, if they need to tap into some cash. They had better act fast on that account. The folks live a long way away, and I am still the closest of their kids, and the oldest. We are approaching something, and I cannot quite see the full dimensions of it. I don't know what it is going to mean. Others deal with really tough stuff, debilitating disease, or worse, the theft of memory and dignity. I know a man I admire greatly. He stands with a very few of the Greatest Generation who are still active and engaged. He fought a gallant struggle against the very worst disease there is, one that stole his spouse insidiously over years. He is one of my heroes, and I shudder at the thought that I might be called to the same sad stoic service. I don't know if I am strong enough for that. Hell, I am not sure I am strong enough to keep getting out of bed myself. That moment of commitment is not here, not yet. They are still driving around, a thought that I put successfully out of my mind when I am back home. I guess we will have to cross that bridge when we come to it, next year or the one after that. No one lives near one another, and there has not been an extended family structure for most of America since the great migrations that began after the Second World War. We are all painfully on our own. I am the oldest kid, and they say that carries a particular load of guilt through life, since all the sincere mistakes of new parents are visited on the first. Now that the circle is coming around to closing again, I can just tell you this: it gives me the willies. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |