Dad's bithday

Today would have been my dad's 83rd birthday.  In another six days my mom's 80th birthday.  Two peas in a pod, they were.  An alcoholic living with an enabler.  Too wrapped up in each other to have much time for a third wheel like a child.  Or like a wild child like me.  I am thankful I had my grandmother, who could be warm and loving but who could also pull guilt out of the pocket of her house dress when she tended to be the disciplinarian.  But today is for my dad.

It hit me a while back that when I was going through college my mom was only 38 and dad was three years older.  Still young.  But I can never picture them as being that young.   But starting when I was 16 my dad, then 39 and I would play tennis on Sundays before going to his mother's for a visit. In the warmer months, something we did until I left home at 22.  We'd arrive at his mother's sweating and still out of breath.  And then dad would re-read the newspaper while his mother grilled me about the past week.  It was charming.

But I digress.  My parents were very young when they had me not uncommon in the 1950s.  I remember being still stupid and fixed in my thirties.  And I cut them, after the fact, a little slack.  And then beat myself up for not appreciating their youth.

Dad died ten years ago in April,   He had been a smoker most of his life.  The day he told me it hurt too much to smoke any more I thought that was the beginning of the end.  But he was a young man at one point, full of hope and love, both for his wife and his child.  But so much for his wife that I felt and was treated like an outsider.  As was her mother, Dorothy.  I remember being told we had to sneak out of the house on a Saturday night, just like I would years later it for other reasons, so we wouldn't have to take Dorothy to dinner with us.   And to be honest I was a little jealous of the insular relationship my parents held.  They had no friends they would socialize with, just the occasional cousins.  And never with his brother and sister in law.

I don't know where I am going with this.  Maybe just to pause and acknowledge dad and his youth.