The Best Day of My Life, Revisited

It was fifty years ago today (just writing it down gives me a shudder!) that my mother took me out of school for the day -- my 11th birthday -- to take me to the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows NY (see my blog post of 3 April 2010 -- "The Best Day of My Life").  Fifty years ago.  It seems so stark, in black and white like that, such an overwhelmingly large number.  That something significant, something worth not only remembering, but writing about, happened to you half a century ago wreaks havoc with one’s sense of time, I have to admit.  How in the hell did I get to be 61 years old?  It isn't that it seems like only yesterday, or some other such cliché about the passage of years -- in fact, I can readily admit that it all feels like -- well, like a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away -- but I still have a hard time trying to draw a line between that 11-year-old boy and the grown-up (no, let's face it, the old man!) I saw in the mirror this morning after I rolled out of bed at 5:30 and stumbled into the bathroom to brush my teeth quickly before heading downstairs to feed the dogs and let them out.  

So here I am, more than a bit bewildered, trying to figure out how I got to this point – how do I connect the old guy in the mirror to that newly-minted 11-year-old, out for a day's adventure with my mother, entering the gates of the 1964 World’s Fair -- the Walt Disney Meets The Jetsons, brought to you by General Motors version of the World of Tomorrow; corporate America's vision of the future that was firmly convinced my children would be living in domed colonies on the Moon, but somehow managed to miss the Internet, the smartphone, and my laptop computer.    

I suppose that one of the reasons for the disconnect is that I've been an orphan for so many years -- I don't have the continuity that my parents would have supplied me had they both been able to accompany me on into my adulthood.  A chunk of my life was snapped off the day my father died (four days after my 9th birthday), and my mother's death -- coming only 18 months after the birth of my first child -- severed me much too soon from the web of family and memory that might have helped me keep the years of my childhood and adolescence truly present to me as I grew from young married grad student to 30-something Dad to 60-something paterfamilias.   I miss them both so very much --I think, more than anything else, that there is this connection to my younger self they would have helped sustain in me as I grew older. They could have been -- they should have been -- the bridge that spanned my younger self to my adult self, helping me to keep that part of me always present in my life.  

Fifty years is a long time to be without a father; thirty years is a long time to be without a mother.  I have lived my life the best I could all these years, trying to be the husband, father, friend and neighbor that I know they would have wanted me to be.  But there is so much I never got to ask them, so much I would want to learn from them, so much of my life that now seems a distant memory --  things that they could have helped me keep present and alive into my old age.  Nobody's parents live forever; but the thought that my mother never got the joy of seeing her granddaughter grow up, or that fifty years ago we didn’t have my father to celebrate my 11^th birthday at the World’s Fair with us, is sometimes more than I can bear.