Parent's age is measured not in years, but in memories

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My father was sick last week. The heat ambushed him. He has never been able to tolerate heat. He blames the malaria he had in the war for this. Before Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower marched him through Africa, he was fine, he says. After the war, he wasn't. The heat, since, has always slowed him down.

But it has never stopped him before.

His wife says, "He's almost 80. It stands to reason that when he gets sick it's going to take him a little longer to get better. I told him to rest and give it time. But you know your father."

I hear her words and think, "Almost 80?" Who is almost 80? Not my father. My father is the young man in a white T-shirt and khaki pants still running behind me, holding on to my bicycle seat so the bike doesn't tip over and I don't kill myself the way my mother insists I will.

My father is the man whom all my friends say is handsome and nice, who takes us ice skating and ties our skates and buys us hot chocolate and brings us home when we're cold, and never says, "Don't skate too fast or you'll slam into the wall or fall and break something."

My father is the calm, confident passenger in his shiny, undented Chevy as I drive for the first time, who smiles at me and says, "That's good. That's perfect. Give it a little more gas now. You're doing a great job," who makes me think that maybe I won't wrap myself around a pole the way my mother swears I will.

How can this man be almost 80?

I've done the math, but only in the part of the brain where numbers live. It's simple subtraction there. If a man is born in 1923 and it is now 2002, how old is he?

It's in the part of the brain where memory lives and where life is played out day after day and then becomes memory that the numbers refuse to add up.

I look at my father and see a man who isn't much older than he was when he was 40 and I was 16 and giving him a hard time. Five years older, maybe. Ten at the most.

But 40 years older? This is impossible, a trick of modern math, rational numbers turned irrational when no one was looking.

But haven't I always been looking? Haven't I been looking at my father my whole life?

He is still as tall as he always was and as lean, and though his hair is thinner and not as dark, it's as curly as ever. He wears glasses, but so what? He has worn glasses most of his life. And yes, he's stiff when he gets out of a chair, but he has been stiff getting out of a chair since he had back surgery in the spring of 1963.

He was in the hospital recovering from that surgery the night of my junior prom. We stopped there on the way to the dance, Elaine Rooney and her date and my date and I. He was sitting up, shaved, smiling, wearing pajamas, not a hospital johnny. And he was doing the father thing, telling the boys how lucky they were to have such pretty dates, then instructing my date, the driver, to pay attention to the road and be careful because "There are a lot of nuts out there."

He still does this: says be careful because someone else may not be.

He never told me he was in pain that night. My mother did. "You know your father," she said. "He could be on fire and he wouldn't tell you."

Almost 80? The words are wrong, like an inflated price tag you see on a dress you can't live without, a clerical error, a mistake. Will someone call the manager, please?

He was the only grandparent at my daughter's wedding four years ago and he will be the only grandparent at my younger daughter's wedding next month. On the sheet of paper from the florist, there's his name written next to the word "grandfather." This is how the world sees him.

But it's not how I see him. He let me go, when more than anything he wanted me to stay. He gave me permission to grow up when he didn't want me to grow up at all. But he has never, for a minute, let me out of his sight. And though I pedal a little faster every day, he is still running behind me, keeping me balanced, still ready to catch me if I start to fall.

1