It's the Way It Is
Happy Birthday
Not to be maudlin or unduly sentimental about it, but someone said a child is a person who passes through your life on the way to becoming an adult. With a daughter, a son, a younger daughter, and now a daughter/granddaughter grown and gone it’s all true, painfully so. Each one. Malinda left at 18, stayed behind in Northern Virginia with friends and working when we moved to Harrisburg in 1976. A few years later, Joe bailed about the same age or 19 and moved to Las Vegas to be with his highschool girlfriend, then went in the Army. Tass went away to college when she was 18 and may have thought she was free but didn’t really escape from her adoring, idolizing dad until she was 20, when Kristen was born.
Kristen, granddaughter adopted as daughter when she was very little, started trying to get loose when she was twelve and thirteen, but I’m a clingy being and usually managed to catch her and kiss her cheek as she left chapel at HNES anyway. She asserted herself by changing from Mosley to Bay the summer before her sophomore year, choosing her college herself, and driving off to college alone at age 18 the start of her freshman year. Today is her 20th birthday and she’ll be leaving to drive back again after lunch this noon. Technically at least, I think she’ll be a college junior when the spring semester starts tomorrow morning. Papa can’t stand it, when she’s driving on the highway gets distraught with worry, but honestly tries to let it be my problem alone, hoping Linda can stand to be around me for the 36,500 seconds until the text comes, “I’m here.” Their safety and wellbeing has been my obsession for going on fifty-five years now. At some point does a doting father have to let go?
Kristen, granddaughter adopted as daughter when she was very little, started trying to get loose when she was twelve and thirteen, but I’m a clingy being and usually managed to catch her and kiss her cheek as she left chapel at HNES anyway. She asserted herself by changing from Mosley to Bay the summer before her sophomore year, choosing her college herself, and driving off to college alone at age 18 the start of her freshman year. Today is her 20th birthday and she’ll be leaving to drive back again after lunch this noon. Technically at least, I think she’ll be a college junior when the spring semester starts tomorrow morning. Papa can’t stand it, when she’s driving on the highway gets distraught with worry, but honestly tries to let it be my problem alone, hoping Linda can stand to be around me for the 36,500 seconds until the text comes, “I’m here.” Their safety and wellbeing has been my obsession for going on fifty-five years now. At some point does a doting father have to let go?
They -- no -- we -- we have to make our own way through life, don’t we. For me it started when my parents helped me move into North Hall, University of Florida, on my 18th birthday and left to drive back home to Panama City. Later that week my father wrote me that my mother had cried all the way home. I didn’t understand it sixty years ago, but this morning I get it loud and clear.
There’s no other way. There are others around, especially Linda, but deep down inside here I know it’s just me, responsible for myself and whoever or whatever I am. And every growing up and saying goodbye helps me know when the next one comes, that this too passes, and they go whether we let go or not, and we make it.
Then when it’s all over, no matter who’s with us holding our hand, we have to do that final thing all alone too. Going on to whatever. Light or shadow. Oblivion or Eden.
It's a beautiful day.
BubbaCarrollTomDadPapa