Birthdays

To me - old age is always ten years older than I am.

-Bernard Baruch

Trying to wash away the image of that deceased coyote yesterday with a stock photo of another, happier canine.

On the Wyldswood front, George has started the process of removing the loft from the old barn, and installing it in the new one.

The boys surmised that the barn would make a better event space without the storage loft, and George--ever mindful not to waste lumber, God bless him--figured he could remove the loft and install it in the climate-controlled area of the new barn.

So in the space of a day he managed to remove most of it,

haul it on the Bobcat across to the new barn,

thread it neatly into its new home,

and install it as if that had been the plan all along. Maybe it was. George always has his own agenda, it seems.

That's Peg's father's desk, from his first store I'm told, sitting in the new barn. It's not in the best of shape, and George had moved it out to the burn pile with plans to torch it when God intervened with a rain shower that postponed the conflagration. Then Peg learned of the plan and rushed to let George know the old thing is a sacred Bowen relic, not to be destroyed but rather restored. George now has a plan to bring it back to life. Disaster averted.

The last couple days have found me pondering on the big birthdays around the corner for two of our boys: Jim turns thirty, and Issac forty, within two days of each other. I've fretted over Issac's birthday gift for days, figuring we need to make a fuss over his big day. I paid Jim's lawyer for handling Anna's visa paperwork, which I reckon is sort of a birthday gift from P and me. We'll probably send him a little something anyway.

Self-absorbed fighter pilot turned trial lawyer that I am, pondering on these two birthdays has had me looking back at where I was at their ages. Such a long time ago. I can't remember a damned thing about the birthday itself, what I did or where I ate or any other detail. I remember the times, though.

I turned thirty in July of 1994. I had dropped my papers to leave the Air Force and attend law school, and my squadron commander extended me the kindness of letting me keep flying Eagles right up to the end, instead of grounding me for my last several months in uniform, as was more typical. My last flight would be on 5 August, a bare ten days before I arrived for law school orientation in Athens. We'd moved out of the house on Eighth Circle so renters could move in, and spent the last few weeks in a triplex on Mexico Beach, a few blocks from where I'd rented at the beginning of the PCS to Tyndall after the Gulf War. Full circle. Jim was nineteen months old. I was scared witless that I'd made a bad decision leaving the security of military life, but it never really occurred to me that I could fail. I just didn't have much idea what lawyers actually did, or whether I would end up regretting the whole adventure. And it was an adventure, wasn't it? My friends thought I was nuts. They were probably right.

A decade later I turned forty as a nonequity partner in a white shoe firm here in Panama City, seven years out of law school and already trying big cases like I'd been at it for far longer. It's telling that I remember absolutely nothing about that summer except that I worked a lot, ran marathons, and spent every free moment assembling the law review article I hoped would be my ticket out of the practice of law and into academia, where I figured I'd find the happiness that had eluded me on this journey through law school and practice and more kids and more stuff. I figured I had a Next Big Thing waiting somewhere, and sure enough three years later I would reach my goal, and walk into a law school classroom for the first time introducing myself as "perfesser".

Now there really is no Next Big Thing, except maybe the wedding venue venture. Life has hit its high water mark, and I can look up and see the bathtub ring where my personal vessel rode a lot higher, traveling with hope all those years ago. Now we've arrived. I've never been happier, truly, and life with P at the end of this road has been a blessing I couldn't have imagined when I was their age, these two young men with so much on the ball and so much to which they can look forward. From here, I'll just experience the vicarious pleasure of following their adventures, their triumphs and disappointments, cheering them both on their way. It's what old guys do.