My father is thirty years older than I am, and that puts him well into the retirement age bracket.  He lived up here in Canada when he was a younger man, having moved from Guyana to find better opportunities for himself and for his family.  He moved down to Florida a few years ago, as that seems to be the thing to do when you retire these days.  I think that I may actually see more of him now that he lives 2 500 kilometres from me than I did when he was living an hour’s travel down the highway.  I saw him last night, in fact.  We sat and talked for a few hours, which is more than we’ve talked at any one time in many years.  It was good to be able to talk to him like that, but it may be that it was in many ways the saddest conversation we’ve ever had.

My dad is going to be seventy-two years old this December on his next birthday.  At that age, when you talk to people, the talk doesn’t really tend to cover long-term future plans.  We talked a lot about the past, though – recent and distant – and about old friends of ours from my youth (and his prime).  When he talked about coming back to visit in November “if God spares my life,” I actually for the first time felt for just a minute as though he might be old enough that a visit four months from now might not happen.  He intends to leave for home early tomorrow morning, but he said that he would have stayed longer had my son not come home from his two-week internship at the Toledo Zoo this week – he wanted to have a chance to see everyone on this visit.

I don’t know if everyone else thinks the same way as I do, but I always thought of my father as more or less immortal.  I figured that he’d always be around.  My Mom was chronically ill when I was growing up, so although it was a terrible experience to lose her when she died, it also wasn’t something entirely unexpected.  She died in the autumn of my twentieth year, and I realized not long ago that I’ve now been longer without her than I was with her.  On the other hand, my father could probably still pass for fifty-ish, and unless you know him very well, you might think that he was in fit fighting shape.  It surprises me to see that my father moves more slowly and carefully than I remember.  His appetite is less than I remember, and he speaks more slowly.  I think he searches more carefully than he used to for his next words.  It all makes me a little bit sad and a little bit frightened because in my head, he’s still the guy who was carrying my five- and six-year-old self in his arms or on his shoulders on long walks or on family trips.

Last night, my father and I talked quite a bit about my old friends from high school and about friends of his that I might have known years ago.  You can’t have a conversation like that without thinking about how much time has passed since those days – which turns out to be just about exactly twenty-five years now.  The other thing that came to mind during our talk was that the old days about which we spoke – the times when he was Daddy and I was in high school – that’s where I am now with my family.  My son is in high school, and I’m Dad.

If I notice the changes that time’s wrought in my Dad, then I might as well look in the mirror.  I’m sure that I’ve changed just as much as he has.  And it’s sad to think that as we get older there will almost certainly be fewer and fewer of these opportunities in our future.