it's all relative

Bill McAllister came by the library yesterday afternoon to say hello. Somehow we ended up talking about weddings and he mentioned that had my father lived, he and my mother would have been married 40 years this June, the longest of anyone he's known.

I forget, sometimes, how very young my father was when he died so suddenly, there in the lobby of the Boys' & Girls' Club in Mount Kisco, New York.

I had a physical this morning, with a doctor I had not seen before. I haven't had a physical in years and years. Too many years, probably, given my family's occasional propensity for rather serious health problems. I have somewhat high blood pressure, slightly flat feet, and fifteen extra pounds to shed, but nothing too serious or life-threatening.

But the hardest part, the part that, embarrassingly enough, brought me to tears, was answering questions about my family medical history. I of course had to explain that my father had died of a heart attack, and the doctor's response, her shocked echo, the black mark in my file, took me by surprise. He was 46 years old, just shy of 47.

This April marked fifteen years since he died, and there are days, sometimes even consecutive days, when I don't think of him much. But this also took me by surprise, and the realization that I am a mere fifteen years younger than my father was at the time of his death.

He always seemed so old, so fatherly, even in his vibrancy and youthfulness. And here I am, catching up, ever narrowing the generation gap, wondering when I will achieve that solidity, that stability, that seemed to come so naturally to him, at least in his adolescent daughter's eyes.