It’s funny how certain birthdays bugged me. I was miserable on my 20th for some reason, and the next one that bothered me was 60, when I figure I hit the 2/3 mark of my little visit to earth. And then my son hit 40, approximately his half way point. I say it like it went by, but in truth it hasn’t happened yet – that milestone is still eight days away as I write this. His inner circle threw him a camping birthday party that went over the long weekend and ended yesterday, so that, to me, felt like the birthday. Anyway, it was fun by all accounts, but I didn’t stay very long and had zero to do with arranging it in any way. It was outside a little town called Boston Bar, at a place called Blue Lake Resort. It’s a nice location, but the road getting up there is a nightmare. In places the unpaved road is more like a gravelly path about 10 feet wide with no guardrail. On one side is a steep embankment up, with lots of evidence that rocks roll down hill, and the other side is a sheer cliff you could parachute off of. Thank god it’s only a couple kilometers. And it was drizzly and cool all weekend, but the campers were heavily armed with tarps and flammables to gather around. We could only stay one night, so we didn’t pay for a campsite, no, we did the really sane thing and got a motel room that cost way more. And we found out the hard way that there is very little a person can do to keep well fed in Boston Bar if they haven’t planned ahead, which of course we didn’t.
I tried to find a picture of the skinny high-wire act of a road, but I couldn’t, and I never thought to take one. Motorists at that point are probably considering the survivability of a tumble over the edge more than photography.
Those 40 years went by in a blink. One day I was just a scrawny kid with a cute baby, and the next thing you know that baby has a kid who’s 19 and looks like I did when he was born. There were all the steps along the way, blending into the high velocity smear of time: being the escape artist toddler, the sassy elementary student, the rebellious teen, being a young father himself, and going through the meat grinder of bad relationships and physical jobs. Now he is starting a business and raising three boys, and he has a very nice partner to spend his time with. Hopefully his business succeeds and he finds a peaceful way to soothe the nerves and enjoy the crap out of the next few decades. In about six weeks he’ll be 60 and a grandpa, wondering what the hell happened to all those years. By then I should either be a liability to my family or a dusty urn on the mantle. I’m sad I couldn’t stay longer at the camping trip, the times we get to hang out without a ticking clock are so few and far between, and we should protect them against trivial things like meetings and deadlines. If you, reading this, have grown up children you don’t see every day, you know what I mean.
I’m proud of my formerly cute baby. Now he’s a full blown man, at the height of his powers in the world, and I hope he stops that world once in a while and takes a mental photo of it, to hold on to the good things as they whiz by in time.