Age

In a few weeks, I am going to go up and have dinner with my parents.

I'll hope Suzanne can be there, but even if she can't, I'll go up anyway. The diesel is remarkably efficient and powerful, I like driving it. I'll have the laptop and the phone (which doesn't work in parts of north-central Pennsylvania, but then again, they still have black-and-white television up there), but it will feel... alone.

My father will be 70.

His father died at 70.

His mother died at 49.

His brother died at 57.

Guys don't last long in my family.

I am unsure how to spend one evening with my father -- unscheduled and unannounced -- without making it seem like it's already last call. I don't want that. I want to know more of his life and his stories, even if, as a result of his 1991 stroke that's left him in a wheelchair and unable to see or hear properly, it's hard.

I want Suzanne to meet him. Yet at the same time I don't want to make it seem tokenistic.

I am not going to my nephew's train-wreck wedding, which is apparently just a public celebration. My stepmother says they got legally married some time back. But I do want to see my father on his 70th birthday. Part of me worries I won't reach my own.

I am getting old.

My life turns toward Suzanne. She is not my inoculation against age. She is my support through it. I will be hers.

I will be dead by 2035. It's just what I know. And it's not that far ahead.

When I was young, I got a box of Cracker Jack. In it, in the toy surprise, was a small book. It was all about what life would be like... in 1980. It was an unimaginably distant year, back then in 1967.

I graduated high school in 1980. My mother's mother died in 1983. My father's father died in 1984. My father's mother died in August, 1962... the month before I was born.

Things can be very fragile and unpredictable.