When I was a kid, my parents were…parents. I’ve only had the two, so there’s really no way I can say what that really means, except that now that I’ve been one myself for some time, I may have a feel for it. And yet I’ve gone on and lived my life in a significantly different way than them. There are things outside of being a parent that all parents get to – interests and hobbies, maybe some music or books. Or riding a bike. When you’re a kid, though, those things aren’t the main thing.
This morning I was listening to some of my favorite music as I walked the dog when I remembered my dad having recorded music on an 8-track and playing it in the Custom 500 (a Ford). It struck me – Dad liked music too. And somewhere in that for him was the process of thinking, “Hey, they’ve got this deal where you can actually record the music you like and play it in your car.” I’ve done stuff like that, and it got me thinking this morning that I never thought that my parents actually went through those things too (it’s not as obvious to me as my dad’s love for cycling). Things like going to work and having friends too. I never gave a lot of thought to my dad’s private life. In many respects, he was a quiet mystery. Come home. Eat. Watch Walter Cronkite. Fall asleep on the sofa. I do that a lot too now (without Walter).
I looked at my dad as “out there in the world” …a kind of superman, maybe. As a kid, I wasn’t interested in digging too deeply into the mysteries of his life. I know he and my mom faced their share of adversity (it’s at least a given with six children, even if those six were perfect angels), but they were so good at protecting us from them.
But here I sit now, coming up on 61, and I’m left wondering, am I that much different than my dad? Well…yeah. My dad was a genius who could do just about anything he wanted. Fly a plane? Sure (the first time I ever flew in a plane was when my father took me up in a Cessna around Thanksgiving of 1980). Tear down and rebuild a car engine? Sure (we finished the job he started a few years earlier with my sister around the time I got my drivers license). Build the house in which I grew up? Sure. Paint a painting? Ride a unicycle? Sew a ski jacket? All there, and more.
Like every other person, I’ve lived a life too. It’s easy to sell myself short when I compare myself to my father, but when it comes to experiencing things, and liking music, and the normal runaround, I realize that I’ve been there just like him. Seeing that makes me think of my dad now all the more. He was Superman to me, but I understand that he was Clark Kent too, with a job and everything. Just like me…but still, so much more.
