Becoming More Aware of Time

I’ve read Matt Appling’s Life after Art, and been going back over it, looking closely at the questions and exercises at the end of each chapter.

One question caught me up short. Actually, several questions clustered together caught me up short.

What would I like my life to mean when it is over? What do I want my life to say about me? What legacy am I building? What will I leave behind that will tell people about my life?

I’m not sure how I’ll ultimately answer those questions, but I know that I’ve already started the process of answering them.

I’m becoming more aware of time.

Specifically, I’m becoming more aware of my time.

It’s getting shorter.

When you’re 20 or 30, the time in your life stretches into infinity. You rarely think about time at all, in terms of the time allotted for your life. It beckons with possibility.

I will say this: my time still beckons with possibility. What time is left is shorter than when I was 20 and 30, but it’s still filled with possibility.

I started riding a bike when I was not quite 53. I published a novel when I was 60, and a second novel at 61. Would it be too much to say that there are at least 10 novels left inside my imagination? And a collection of four long stories. Two novellas. And this non-fiction book that’s well underway, and looks like it just might make its manuscript deadline of July 1?

But that’s only a partial answer to those questions. Perhaps the smallest part.

What will I leave behind that will tell people about my life?

I know most of the answer to that question.

My two sons. Travis and Andrew.

They’re eight years apart. Travis gave us such a run for the money that we thought he might be an only child. But eventually Andrew came along.

They’re both adults now, and I can see elements of myself in both of them. I hear their words and expressions, and I’m struck with amazement at how much I hear my own father. How did that happen? I hear them tell a story, and I hear myself telling a story.

But that business about screaming at the television set during sports games? That’s their mother. I am not making this up. They’re louder than she is. But they get that form their mother. In fact, they inherited all of their sports genes from their mother.

I look at my two grandsons, and I see another part of the answer. I am part of their lives, both carefully and wildly.

Wildly, in that with them, I am ready at any time to try anything and do anything. Grandchildren suggest a kind of freedom for grandparents, oddly enough, freedom to be a child again and no one thinks you’re an idiot.

And carefully, because I will not crowd out their father. They need him in ways they won’t fully understand until I’m long gone and he’s waving his cane at his own grandchildren.

So those are a good part of the answers to those questions. There’s more to tell, but for now, they’re sufficient.

Related:

My review of Life after Art.

Thanksgiving: Two Sons

We have two sons, born almost eight years apart. There’s a reason for that. The first one was such a tornado that we didn’t think we could manage another – and stay sane. But we did manage the two.

Travis is now 31; Andrew is almost 24. They are about as different as you could find. The one thing they have in common is that both wanted to go to colleges far, far away, and both ended up at the University of Missouri. The university did manage to survive.

Travis walked at nine months, for exactly one day. Then he ran and didn’t stop. From early on, he was a sports fan. Any sport. Baseball became his favorite, but he’d watch anything with a ball. When he was five, we found him awake one Saturday morning watching TV – a golf game.

He was (and still is) a natural in front on the camera. Mugged for it, in fact – he loved having his picture taken.

Andrew also loves sports, but he’s more selective about it. He loved playing basketball, and he did play in high school, but he didn’t get his growth spurt until after he graduated. He was a quiet and extraordinarily shy child.

He would see a camera and become hysterical. We have countless pictures of Andrew crying at having his picture taken. We have countless pictures of the two of them together – Travis mugging for the camera and Andrew crying or hiding his face. Same gene pool; go figure.

Travis is our salesman. Put him in a roomful of strangers and he’ll know most of them within 30 minutes. He is large and in charge, and you always knew when Travis was around. In the scholarship department, well, let’s say Travis was smart about the things he wanted to be smart about. We read to him as a child, oh, did we read to him; both of his parents loved to read and we just assumed he would love books, too. Winnie the Pooh. Chronicles of Narnia. Fairy tales. His idea of a good book: listening to the audio tapes of Superman, Batman and Justice League of America stories. Preferably with others around – being solitary was not his idea of a good time.

Andrew loved having friends, but he went in for more solitary pursuits as well. He rode the Harry Potter book craze. He took up the clarinet – a surprise, since no one else in the immediate family played an instrument. He even played for the school band through high school. In his sophomore year, he came home from school and totally shocked us with the announcement that he’d like to go to Australia for three weeks with the People to People program – three weeks, thousands of miles away, with kids he had never met before. And he followed through on what he had to do and went. He went snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, slept outside on a ranch to wake up to frost covering his face (it was winter there), lived for three days with a family in Sydney and went to school with one of their kids. He came back a different, far more confident young man, and loved the program so much he went to Europe the following summer.

Travis started college as a business major. It didn’t take long for him to find the closest thing the university offered to sports marketing – which turned out to be in the College of Agriculture. After he graduated, he worked in sports marketing for a semi-pro baseball team in the St. Louis area. Then he got wind of an opportunity with an expansion league in the West, and packed off to Phoenix. The league went bust (the investor owners wanted profit in the first year and that wasn’t likely to happen) but Travis looked around and landed on his feet, going to work for a Marriott franchise. He met and married Stephanie, but he was not meant for staying in Phoenix long-term. His St. Louis roots called him back home; he’s a St. Louis kid if there ever was one. He’s got a manager position with the biggest Hilton in St. Louis (the Ballpark Hilton, right near Busch Stadium; what a surprise for our sports child) but was eventually assigned to turn around another property in suburban St. Louis. Which he has.

Andrew started the University of Missouri in the College of Business and stayed there, getting a degree in finance. After graduation, he went to work for Farmers Insurance in Kansas City in one of their two U.S. claims offices. One brutal winter later, he decided he was more interested in a warmer climate, and is now working for Farmers in Florida. He likes the work, which requires a lot of initiative and being a self-starter. I think back to that little boy hiding his face from the camera, and am amazed.

They are eight years apart, and very different in so many ways. And yet they have remained close. As a child Andrew adored his older brother; Travis was always thrilled to have another kid in the family. When Travis got married, Andrew was his best man. Travis’s first child is named Cameron Andrew (I say first child because the second is due in May).

Eight years difference in age. They live 1,500 miles apart. Different outlooks, personalities, lines of work. But they’re still wonderfully close.

I’m proud of both of them. We worried over both; we still do. But they turned into pretty cool adults. Last night, Andrew braved the Thanksgiving airport madness and flew home. We have them both together, along with Stephanie and my grandson.

Two fine young men. Two brothers. Two sons I give thanks to God for giving us.

This post is part of Bonnie Gray’s blog carnival on faith over at Faith Barista. Today is all about Thanksgiving; to see more posts, head on over there.

Graduation Day

There are too many things to say about a child's graduation, too many emotions that run through the heart. For now, I need to let the pictures tell the story, or part of the story. Our 22-year-old son Andrew, our youngest, graduated from the University of Missouri today.




I think my favorite photo is the last one -- a "mistake" in that it all blurred. Except that it perfectly captures that brief moment God gives us children -- and tells us we have to let them fly. Twenty-two years -- and just a moment.

The photos were taken by either my daughter-in-law Stephanie or my wife Janet.

Related: "My Brother, the Mizzou Alum" by Travis Young.

Grandparent Fix

Travis, Janet, Glynn and Cameron Young

March 25, 2010

Uncle Andrew Young and Cameron Young

March 26, 2010