Ten Years On

I was just getting the hang of this blogging thing a decade ago, having been at it for less than a month at this point on the calendar and look at me now, a decade older and a not a lick smarter. I'm proud of that because I have almost no choice.   

Anyway here's what I pondered (?) ten years ago. 

In some of the stores around here, Christmas decorations and merchandise have been on display since All Saint's Day. Perhaps we've all agreed that if we make time go faster, things will get better. Not sure about all of that.

I'm 55 now and time seems to be a LOT faster now than it was when I was a kid, a newly-married, or a young parent. Spent a lot of time when 'the kids' were younger thinking I couldn't wait for the day when they were grown and leading lives of their own. This afternoon my wife and I will attend the recital of an orchestra that my daughter, Michelle, is in in the city where she attends college.

She invited us and hopes we'll be on our best behavior (the last time we went, one of us almost yielded to the temptation to stand on a chair, hit the Bic lighter, and scream "Play 'Whipping Post', man!". In terms of the silence on the ride home, if I tell you it was NOT my wife, I think you might guess who it was.).Our daughter is a remarkably self-assured person who was twenty in May. She amazes me as much as her older brother, Patrick, who was twenty-five in July.

I don't remember growing older, so when did they? I can recall cradling each one, as a newborn, in the crook of my arm, moments after my wife gave birth being utterly astonished that I could have been part of anything as magical as their creation.

I can also remember before Patrick was born being asked by my wife's doctor where I would be when she delivered and telling him, 'by her side.' He asked 'warum?' (German for 'why?') and I went on to explain, or to try to, that I had placed the order and wanted to be there to take delivery. Maybe it was my German or my logic, but he looked at me as if I were crazy, and perhaps I was, and am.

And now, an eye blink later, it has been decades since any and all of that happened and my 'kids' are grown-ups with lives and concerns of their own, in a world whose rate and pace of change only accelerates with each passing day. I'm not able to 'make it all better' as I once did when they were tiny but no matter how hard we try or how fast we run, they will always be my children, for the rest of their lives.

"Turn up The Eagles, the neighbors are listening..."
-bill kenny