Passages

There are event that cause you to pause and see where you’ve been and where you’re bound to go. For me they are the landmark birthdays — 21, 30, 40, 50, 60 — when I’ve found myself imagining or remembering what my father was at those ages.

It is often a shock to think about such things, sometimes uplifting as when it occurs to me that my father at 50 (I was then 19) seemed so old while I at 50 didn’t feel that way.

My father died 20 years ago this week. By now, most of his generation have passed. My father’s kid sister is the sole survivor of his five siblings. And this week I attended the funeral for my sister’s father-in-law, who made it to 93. My own father-in-law is about 96. No one can be certain of his exact age because he was an unreliable reporter long before his memory began oozing away.

At the memorial service, watching my generation’s children as they experienced their own rite of passage — the loss of the last of their grandparents — and watching my brother, sister, our contemporaries, it struck me that we are the elders now.

How absurd! Even when I feel old, tired, used up, achy and sore, I never conceive of being an "elder" anything. And yet I know it is undeniable.

At the dinner tables in my youth, I remember being awestruck when my grandfather spoke of seeing President McKinley, San Francisco after the big ‘quake, Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey.

My father spoke of his own boyhood experience of seeing Babe Ruth hit a home run, my mother of winning a Charleston contest, mourning Russ Colombo, seeing the Empire State Building being finished.

How is it possible that the events I relate to my son and nephews: McCarthy, Jackie Robinson, the Kennedy assassination — are as far back to them as those ancient events were to me?