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I remember my father with gray hair, a few strands of black hanging on. But this is not my dad, not now. It was my dad only for a few years, my high school years. I am surprised when I look at earlier photos, photos not even of when he was "young" but of when he was already my father, when my sister and I were children, ten years old. (I think of the "young" years as being those that preceded the advent of my sister and me, even though now I am in fact that age my dad was when I was five or so, my sister four.) In these photos of us as kids, my father's hair is black, just as it was when he was married. Can this, too, be my father, even at so late a date?
Surprise also registers when I see my dad or my mom these days, which is not often, since we live on opposite sides of the country. When we meet, I expect to see mom with her brown hair, a few wisps of gray toward the front, my dad with the salt and pepper collection already alluded to. I expect this, even though I know that this is no longer the case. Seeing them with lighter hair than before is jarring. My mom's hair is gray all over now, brown desperately trying to hang on amid all the loss of color. My father's hair is plain white.
It is this surprise that hits me once again at the airport that Friday afternoon in November. My parents have come to visit me for the first time in the ten years since I left California. They paid for me to take trips back to their home in California during graduate school, and I have managed to make one trip on my own, but other than that our visits have been in other locations, at the Feast of Tabernacles, every few years.
I have mixed feelings about this visit. On one hand, I am glad that they are finally coming out to see where I live. On the other, I worry, perhaps without much logic, that this will begin a round of interference in my life and in the choices I make.
About one month earlier, my father almost died. He had been on his way from Brazil to Angola when he had a gallstone attack. The stone lodged in his body and refused to move. Infection ensued, and other attendant troubles that I do not remember or was never told. He could not keep any food down. The entire episode was related to me through third and fourth parties--my mom or friends of my dad. He was in the hospital in Brazil for a week or so. There was no way that I could visit. Then he was at his brother's in Brazil to recover further. I didn't hear from him until he was back in the States, wanting to take a trip out to visit me. The whole thing seemed surreal.
In the airport, he is thin again, as he had been when he was younger. In this way, he is more like the man that I remember in high school. The attack has whittled him down to a smaller size without dieting. I remember the photos of my grandfather--his father--in the hospital just before his death from cancer. He had become a portly man, at least in my memory of him, but in those photos, he too is thin again, even skinny.
I drive my parents to town. They take interest in the landscape. My mom remarks on how the place reminds her of Oregon (her childhood home), her usual comment for any place with trees. They are amazed by the distance from Atlanta to Athens, which is not really much but seems like a lot, I suppose, when coming from Los Angeles, where city accompanies you all the way to the desert or the mountains or the Mexican border.
My parents spend the weekend with me, accompanying me to the various establishments I take them to. I do my best to make their time enjoyable, to give them a full north Georgia experience. I rarely eat out this much. I have never before been to Helen, Georgia, which we visit that Sunday. I introduce them to friends of mine and to people from church. (My mom, it turns out, is relieved to find out I have friends.) My fears prove to be unfounded; if my parents dislike anything about how I live, they do not voice it. The only word of advice from my mom is that I should wash my jeans more often, which is true.
One afternoon that weekend, my father and I take a walk. He walks slowly, though it is faster than my mother walks, who, as she has aged, has found walking to be more and more difficult, both because of the asthma that seems to affect her more and more and because of problems with her knees. That my father walks slowly, however, is new. He, like me, had always been a fast walker. He is, of course, still recovering from surgery, and it is this that he comments on as we walk. "Three weeks ago," he says, "I was walking like an old man." Baby steps, a struggle to ascend a hill.
Sunday night, I take them to the airport. Their flight leaves early the next morning. Driving home, it hits me just how old my parents are now and that I am older too. My grandfather on my dad's side died when I was nine years old, when my father was forty. My grandfather was sixty-nine. My father is no longer far from that.
When I look in the mirror, during weeks just before I give myself a haircut, I can see that same salt-and-pepper hair of my dad in his thirties and forties, the gray slowly creeping in. I don't feel old enough for gray hair. I still feel, in fact, like a kid. My mom and a friend of hers said that no matter how old they get, they still feel twenty-two, as if the body is playing a trick on the brain. I concur.
When I was a child, I thought that being an adult meant that the world became safe, that as an adult you had everything under control. This is the feeling my parents gave me. I see now, however, that you never learn these things. You struggle against the darkness your whole life. And somewhere in the middle of it, your parents leave you, and you miss them, and there is no longer even the aura of that security they have always provided.
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