Today Is Your Birthday (Part 2)

            Last time, I wrote about my birthday.  Well, today is my dad’s birthday.  My father, Larry Adel, is eighty-nine years old.

            For an eighty-nine year old, he does quite well.  He and my mom still live in their own home.  Dad still helps mow the lawn and even helps shovel the snow if it’s not too deep.  He still grows tomatoes in the back yard.  We go see them when we can, and we help him when we can, and do their neighbors.  The truth is, though, that Dad only wants so much help.  He does things for himself as much as he can, and he intends to do that for as long as he can.

            Still, you don’t get to eighty-nine without having some physical problems.  Dad struggles to get out of his chair now, and he walks with a cane.  He can’t travel the way he used to; going to Mitchell (about forty-five miles away) is about as much as he can do.  He is fighting old age as hard as he can, but of course it’s not a fair fight.  For all of us, old age always wins in the end.

            I watch him do things with a mixture of admiration and concern.  The admiration is that, even though he knows he can’t beat old age, he is going to give in to it as slowly and as grudgingly as he can.  The concern, of course, is that he’s going to overdo things sometime, and that something serious is going to happen.

            I’m not going to try to make him stop, though.  I doubt if I could succeed even if I tried.  His mind is still sharp (as is my mom’s), and so far he’s been pretty good about knowing that he can only push so far and no farther.  He says, and there’s truth in it, that he’s seen too many people stop pushing, and within months they can no longer do anything.  He’s not about to let that happen to him. 

Besides, it’s true that something serious could happen, but something serious could also happen while he’s just sitting in his chair watching TV.  Also, we know that at some point, something serious is going to happen no matter what he does, just as it’s going to happen to all of us some day.  When it does, we’ll have to deal with it, just as everyone else has to do and has done for thousands of years.  Dad has earned the right to live his life the way he wants to live it, and I’m not going to try to interfere with that.

So, happy birthday, Dad.  Good luck to you in your fight against old age.  I hope you can keep fighting for a long time yet.