Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1. Summer. After the longest, coldest, grayest spring I can recall in my 34 years here on the North coast, summer arrived on Friday. The whole package landed late Thursday complete with thunderstorms and tornadoes, all smothered in a heat dome due to last a week or so.

‘Bout time.

2. Italy. I am a week into my reentry at home after a 10 day trip to Italy to celebrate our 40th wedding Anniversary (which is in September) along with our dear friends from med school Bill and Nancy. If memory serves the four of us have now celebrated our 10th, 15th, 25th, 35th, and 40th Anniversaries together. It’s awfully nice to have friends who travel together as well as we four do. As an aside, Beth and I will attempt to pull off a smaller celebratory trip with Dave and Suzi, friends we met on the first day of our honeymoons.

Beth is on a plane home from France; I headed home to work last weekend and she jetted off to Paris to join a bunch of her friends for an equestrian adventure. As I sit here and gaze at the armada of pleasure boats heading who knows where on Lake Erie, thinking about the water taxis and other working boats whose comings and goings so fascinated me from my balcony in Positano, I am still a bit overwhelmed by our good fortune.

The orioles are singing to me; I am just so very, very grateful.

3. Middle Age. Gotta be honest here, I’m not really sure what constitutes middle age any more. Can’t figure out when it started, and more importantly I have no idea when it’s over and you slide over into something else. What comes after middle age, anyway? If you’re done being middle-aged does that mean that you are now old?! Or could it be that there are more phases, more levels that just don’t have a catchy name?

It brings me back to my conversations with my sadly long lost CrossFit friend Hari, whose wisdom was so on point when I was turning 40. His take: the first 40 or so years of your life are all about preparation. Preparing yourself to be an adult. Preparing your children to fledge the nest and go out into the world on their own. Those years between 40 and 60 or so are the years when you likely enjoy the best balance between your physical and intellectual selves. You continue to gather wisdom and maturity, the emotional growth hopefully balancing the inevitable physical decline we all begin to notice around that 40th birthday. Come to think of it, that’s probably as good a description and definition of middle age as I’ve heard: the mid-life years where growth in wisdom matches any physical decline.

So what does that mean for us? Are Beth and I, and for that matter our like-minded friends, still middle-aged? It’s likely that you never really know when you cross the threshold where middle-aged balance becomes a net decline, especially if you have continued to do the work to maintain your physical, intellectual, and emotional vigor. It’s unlikely that there is a bright line, and it’s probably healthier not to look to hard for it even if there is.

I’ll bet Hari has given this some thought, too.

4. 94. Yesterday would have been my Dad’s 94th birthday. I left my computer home, and honestly after a day or two in Italy I had no idea what day of the week it was. Tough to stick the landing for a weekly whatever when every day is Saturday. I was traveling on Father’s Day, a 20 hour journey, but did get a chance to watch the U.S. Open “with” my brother while killing time in the saddest airport bar I’ve ever been in. Still, it’s how Father’s Day is supposed to come to a close for me.

10 years ago I went to Rhode Island to be with my Dad for his birthday and Father’s Day. Unaware that we would lose him in 4 short months, I was blessed with a brief moment of clarity. A tiny gift of time my Dad and I got to share, memorialized in “A Brief Father’s Day Visit From My Dad”. Here it is, again, 10 years later.

“My siblings and I only need to remember one weekend each year when it comes to celebrating my Dad. His birthday almost always falls within a day or two of Father’s Day. So it was that I found myself in Rhode Island the past couple of days, in the company of my Mom and a guy masquerading as my Dad, a guy who was very curious about the new fella who’d dropped by for a visit.

Getting old is not for sissies, my friends.

Somewhere inside, deep inside, there’s still some of my Dad in the jumbled up connections of his mind, carried by the body that failed him in such spectacular fashion 2 ½ years ago. Dad is extremely intelligent, the only family member in his generation to have gone to college. Quite the athlete, he used football and the GI Bill to pay for school. Like so many in his generation he then worked, raised a family, and put himself through grad school. He won his club championship in golf twice at the ages of 50 and 60. No typo. Beat the reigning RI State Amateur champ on his home course for the first one.

As we sat on the porch of his house overlooking the 14th hole, I had an ever so brief visit from that guy. From my Dad. Like a citizen of Brigadoon he came slowly through the mist of his mind to join me for a bit. We’d always bonded over golf. My brother and I never turned down an invitation to join him on the course, either as partners or as caddies for him and his buddies. It was quite a privilege to do either; my Dad’s most elemental essence was expressed on the golf course.

A light breeze was blowing through the forest in the back yard just beyond the rough. We chuckled at the golfers who failed to take the wind into consideration, sheepishly trying to sneak into the yard to retrieve their out-of-bounds second shot. Dad talked about caddying as a kid in the Depression. We both noted the absence of caddies as the foursomes passed in and out of view. It was really very nice.

I quite like the Dad of my adulthood. Quick to smile, slow to anger, unfailingly loyal and kind. It’s hard to imagine how distant he was when I was a boy, his friendship as an adult is so easy. I’m not sure how long we sat there to be honest, nor when I noticed that he was slipping away. As surely as the village of Brigadoon disappears, the mist had returned to claim him. I got up, walked over to his chair, held his hand and gave him a kiss. I wished him a Happy Birthday and a Happy Father’s Day, hoping that I’d made it on time. That he was still there. That he knew it was me, Darrell, his oldest child. I told him I loved him.

He smiled and gave my hand a little pat as he disappeared into the mist.”

I sure miss my Dad. I’ll see you next week…

1. Home, alone, accompanied by sleeping dogs. I am letting them lie.

2. Newman. “You have to learn to be yourself.” “Fast Eddie” Falcon, The Color of Money.

Some of us get here pretty quickly. At least learning the core part of yourself. For me it came early, in junior high school. While I was like pretty much everyone else, wanting to fit in, or at least not stand out (like the proverbial nail in the Japanese saying about getting hammered for standing out), I discovered that my normal “fit in” desires had limits. I’ve probably told the story before so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that the basic framework was up early, and I learned to fill in the spaces over time.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Purportedly Mark Twain.

This is the harder part of the process, at least in the earlier years of your “education”. How does one determine what “yourself” means without looking outward at others? Maybe trying on a little bit of, I dunno, your grandfather, the local football star or your family doctor? Still, at some point, once you have learned who it is that you believe you are, then it’s time to simply go about the business of being just that.

After that, without trying very hard at all, anyone who matters will come to know the same you that you’ve come to know.

3. Mulligan is a golf term. Essentially a “do-over”. While not to be found anywhere in the rules of golf (and therefore not allowed in competition), one not infrequently comes across the Mulligan in friendly rounds. It is especially common on the first tee, particularly if it was not possible to hit the driving range to warm up. See also: breakfast ball.

Beth and I watched a fun little movie a month or so ago; I might have mentioned it here. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. “About Time” tells the story of a family in which the men can go back in time and essentially get a Mulligan on a moment. It takes some care, of course, because anything that they change will remain changed when they return to the present. The moments when the son learns this is quite striking: he goes back in time to fix a mistake, but goes back prior to the birth of his beloved daughter. When he returns she was never born. This being fantasy he has unlimited Mulligans at his disposal, allowing him to both fix his mistake and do so without erasing his daughter’s timeline.

It’s really a lovely little story, with two of the sweetest father/son scenes I’ve ever encountered in a book or a movie. In both of the scenes father and son come together alone, and each is quick to realize that they are in time travel mode. They are careful–so very careful–not to alter anything around them, lest they erase the downstream lives of everyone and everything that brought them together, back in time. It’s not clear to me exactly where in time they’d left to go back. What they were, and what they were to each other in that present time. Only that each of them chose to go back to a time when all they knew of each other was love.

We never see them together again when we return to the story in the present. The father has died, and with his death his timeline is no longer there to be visited. We slowly realize that father and son had traveled back to that time of love to say their goodbyes. No one else was changed, but one is left to wonder if, in the choosing to experience that love again, so tender with one another in knowing what was to come, if they themselves were changed.

Alas, there is no time travel for the men or the women of any family, however careful those who might possess this power might be. Still, there are Mulligans to be had. Every new day is a kind of Mulligan. Each dawn the gift-wrap for a breakfast ball. We cannot return to an earlier time, but each day brings us a chance to return, again and again to how we felt in that time. To choose that. And if we are lucky, to choose that together.

Until one day, like the father and son in “About Time”, we run out of Mulligans, and only the memories remain.

I’ll see you next week…