Musings on Aging and My Dad
Watching your parents age is a weird thing. When you’re a kid they’re aging, but you live with them so you see it every day in increments too small to notice. But then you grow up, maybe leave home, and months pass between visits and you start to notice things: gray hairs that weren’t there before, wrinkles that have set in around their eyes, new habits that have formed. And then when your birthday comes around you have these flashbacks to when you were five years old and thought people in their thirties were ancient wise savants who knew everything and now thirty doesn’t seem far off, but you don’t know everything and you certainly hope you aren’t ancient, despite the fact that your dad congratulated you on becoming an antique on your 25th birthday.
At some point you realize you’re more like your parents than you are that five year old younger self and while that should be obvious it requires confronting the invincibility you’ve understood for years but have pushed to the edges of your mind, too tunnel visioned to pay it any notice. And now you’re singing from the same song book when it used to be just them singing about you: I hope they are safe and healthy and happy. Please keep them safe and healthy and happy.
While they’ve always appreciated you, you start to appreciate them more. They seem funnier, cooler, more carefree and hip than you realized, and yet every year a little older, a little more set in their ways. But also perhaps a little more their authentic selves or perhaps it’s just you who is better able to stitch the common threads running through their life, my dad the builder, my mom the includer. He who seeks to understand and build, she who seeks to nurture and include.
And you become grateful for the people they are as you start to see more of yourself in them and them in you.
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When I think of all the objects, buildings, and machines my dad has built over the years it’s a bit like trying to remember every dream I’ve ever dreamed. There are too many. They go too far back and sometimes I remember the small details but forget what they were really about: watching him measure, draw lines on wood, saw, measure again, asking if I could help, holding the pencil and drawing a line right at 5 and ¾ inches just as instructed before running off distracted by something more shiny and exciting, hearing the occasional outburst of swearing and knowing something had gone wrong but didn’t something always go a little wrong?
At a young age I used to bring my dad beers when he’d been working for a while, not because he asked me to but because I knew he enjoyed them and I liked watching him open them without a bottle opener, the way he tipped the top of the bottle against a hard edge and slammed his fist against it, the cap popping right off before bouncing down to the floor. He remembers a three and a half foot tall girl with blond tangled hair and flushed cheeks holding her hands up at him, fingers wrapped around a bottle, saying “Here dad, I brought you a Bookie.” How can you say no to that?
When I was four, maybe five years old, he built a big red barn in our backyard, the kind out of a storybook that horses and hay stacks lived within. I remember the day they stood the barn up. My parents’ friends showed up in their blue jeans and boots and t-shirts and they pulled on big ropes, heaving the sides of the barn up with the help of a pulley system. My dad loves pulleys. He loves using pulleys. He loves talking about pulleys. He loves teaching people about pulleys, but more on that later. My dad pulled alongside an army of friends shouting directions as thoughts raced through my mom’s brain: I hope no one gets hurt. This is nuts. This is some backcountry shit. It was some backcountry shit, but whenever I hear the term barn-raising, a wave of nostalgia comes over me like no other and I think of my dad and all the things he built, always with this wild and unparalleled confidence and optimism in his own capability.
Underlying my dad’s love for building is the curse of understanding. It’s hard to pay another person to do what you could do yourself. For better and for worse, when you grasp how things work there are so many--at times too many--things you can do yourself. And so, growing up, the projects never ended. Many of them overlapped. Some of them went unfinished and as one followed another I started to understand that his outbursts of swearing when things went wrong were no more than brief cathartic episodes of release or surely he would have retired his toolbox long ago.
But, understanding, especially when others do not, is a blessing too. It allowed my dad to come into my first grade class one day and teach us about pulleys, confidently betting everyone that the smallest girl in the class with a pulley on her side could beat two of the largest boys in a game of tug of war. Everyone watched in disbelief as his long odds bet started to prove right, their shouting and cheering as she out-pulled them drowned out only by their growing interest in learning how this thing called a pulley worked.
His understanding also helped me ace an organic chemistry test in high school. I remember coming home from school one day, tired and frustrated as I stared at a series of lines and letters on a page that were supposed to represent molecules but read to me like foreign words written in a foreign alphabet. My dad sat down and explained them to me. Occasionally he’d stop as I nodded along and ask me, “Do you actually get what I’m saying or are you just pretending you do?” and sometimes I’d have to admit that I was pretending, unveiling a lack of self-confidence in my own capacity to learn, which he wouldn’t stand for. “You can grasp this. I know you can,” he would say, before trying to figure out what was tripping me up. I remember asking how he seemed to just “get it.” He didn’t open my textbook. He hadn’t taken a chemistry class in years. He just sat down, looked at my sheet of paper, and understood everything it said. It hardly seemed fair.
He told me that chemistry, like many things in life, is just a series of building blocks. You need to build a strong base to get to the next level and you should never build on top of what’s below unless what’s below is really strong. If you start to build and realize what’s below you is weak then you best go back and work on the base. I crushed that chemistry test and while I won’t even begin to pretend that I’m like him and could sit down on the spot and explain organic chemistry to a ten years younger and confused me, the bigger lesson has stuck with me. My dad taught me to make decisions calmly and rooted in logic, to ask questions when I’m confused, to build a strong foundation in all that I do and look closer towards that foundation when things get tough, and perhaps most importantly to always believe in my capacity to learn and grow, to never nod along or sit by passively and think I’m not [insert excuse here] enough to do something.
That’s a confidence we could all use a little more of.
In part, I think it’s that confidence that explains why he goes through phases of writing to flat-earthers on the internet, offering up DIY experiments they could try at home to “test” their view of the world, in hopes that they’ll develop a view that is, let’s say a bit more well-rounded. While another explanation for this strange pastime is the sick satisfaction we all find in arguing when we know we are right, I like to think some of it is rooted in his fundamental belief in people’s capacity to change, to learn, to grow, to understand. Maybe that’s just me taking the belief he has in me and giving that belief to other people. Either way, I see him in me or me in him.
