When I’m 64

My father when he was 64

I remember watching Yellow Submarine all those years ago and thinking how old 64 seemed at the time. Well here I am now and I was very happy to be sharing birthday greetings and a bottle of wine with my family this past weekend. Most of them anyway. Our oldest daughter called from Sydney to wish me happy birthday.

We all like to say it is just a number but there’s no dodging the fact that there are fewer birthdays left and time becomes compressed much like that yellow submarine as it descended deeper into the ocean revealing all those magnificent sea creatures below. I still hold onto my fantasies but they seem more nostalgic, no longer imagining the future.

There’s nothing to say I can’t turn over a new leaf. My father was 64, a little older in fact, when he went down to Brazil in 1972 to search for bauxite leads along the Amazon. My mother worried about his recurring malaria, his phlebitis and numerous other things that could go wrong in the dense jungles. My father was old enough to be my grandfather. I saw him as a superhero for undertaking such a mission until he came back earlier than expected and we didn’t get the chance to join him that summer. He returned with a baseball glove, ball and bat. I said it would take much more than that to regain my adulation, as my mother and I had taken a whole slew of vaccine shots to inoculate ourselves against all the potential viruses. So, Mom took me to Disney World.

We were living in Northwest Florida so it wasn’t that long a drive. Dad took a pass. Amusement parks weren’t his thing and he was still feeling a bit bitter at how things had turned out in Oriximina. He thought it was going to be his big break after several years of selling Texas Oil and Refinery or TRC roofing cold tar along the Gulf Coast. It was not to be, so he donned an ochre Century 21 jacket and started selling real estate.

It was a rough time as the oil crisis had hit and jobs were few and far between. My mother had to sell a tiny bar of gold to help cover the property taxes. They also sold a small parcel they had on the bay. Eventually things turned up and they got themselves back on their feet. No small task when he was past retirement age. Dad hadn’t put enough money into social security, having spent so much time overseas, to get anything back so he kept working and he was finally able to land a few sales but never the “big sale” he dreamed of.

I never really understood his frustrations until now. You go through life thinking the world is your oyster only to come out on the other end with no great pearl to show for it other than the wisdom you gained in the process. He had always wanted to leave a legacy, if not in the form of a small fortune then in the form of memoirs. He was a great storyteller, a mixture of true stories and just-so stories like Rudyard Kipling, one of his favorite authors. My older sister eventually got him to commit some of his stories to tape and a few years ago had them transferred to CD. I love listening to his voice from time to time.

He never talked much about his experiences in Brazil. He loved to tell me his boyhood stories in Aguas Calientes, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, along with recollections from his many years traversing Africa from one end of the continent to the other. The Ruwenzori mountains always stuck out in my mind as they sounded so exotic. I imagined the snow capped peaks but he said he never got up to those altitudes. He was searching for copper leads in the foothills. I would write his stories down in my notebook but he chastised me for my embellishments.

I had invented a character I called Johnny West, loosely based on the stories my father told me and what I gleaned from television. He would counter me with Johnny Best, who seemed to outduel my character at every turn.

What I loved about my father was that he never lost that youthful vision. When I took Daina with me to visit him in the hospital the summer of 1993, she remarked on how bright his eyes were, like that of a teenager. He was 86 at the time in the last stages of cancer. His spleen had burst, which had actually been a bit of a relief after all those years of having to endure its swollen state. It brought so much pleasure for him to see me with her. He grabbed me by the hand and said don’t let her go.

I’m happy to say I didn’t or she me. It took four years for the two of us to finally come together in Vilnius and I’ve been happy ever since. We’ve raised a family together, endured our fair share of hardships. I comforted her as she let her father go this past Spring. Time waits for no one, my father would often say. I suppose that is why it increasingly becomes more precious, especially as I turn 64.