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.

He taught me two things about fatherhood

He arrived two weeks after his due date, by induction, and he was not impressed, yelling his way out into the world. He was a big baby – at birth he looked like he was three months old, pushing toward 10 pounds. The nurse cleaned him up, wrapped him in a little blanket, and put him in my arms. Eyes in a little round face squinted at me.

I fell in love.

At seven months, sitting between us in his car seat, he tried to take control of the steering wheel. We were on the interstate.

He walked at nine months. He walked for exactly one day. Then he ran and didn’t stop.

At two, he climbed into the car in the garage, keys in hand. He considered himself an adult, so why shouldn’t he drive the car?

He was four, perhaps five, when I noticed something odd about the training wheels on his bike. He wasn’t using them. I took them off, and off he went. When his mother saw him, she burst into tears.

For the elderly neighbor across the street, he was her Jeopardy partner. They’d watch the television show together, and she’d give him snacks.

Early one Saturday morning, we heard the television set on. I stumbled into the den to see what was up, and there he was, watching a golf game on television. Golf. He was five.

And then time begins to run together. I’m not sure what happened, but a lot of time passed between the little boy singing at the top of his lungs for a church Christmas program and a white stretch limousine pulling into the driveway for the senior prom. In between were hundreds if not thousands of soccer games, basketball games, baseball games, and any other kind of game with a ball.

Like that 1987 World Series game, Cardinals and the Twins playing game 5 in Old Busch Stadium. We were there. He explained the game to me.

College, and then his first job, working for a minor league baseball team. And then the jump to Arizona. Watching him load the U-Haul truck. Watching him drive away.

Even good things for your children can be hard.

And then he finds Stephanie in Phoenix. We fly out one Christmas to meet her and her family. She was scared to death. Turns out he had told her all kinds of stories about his mother.

Almost two years later, we flew out again to Phoenix. For their wedding.

And then my St. Louis boy figured out a way to get back to St. Louis. With a pregnant wife in tow.

And then the night they go to the hospital for Cameron’s induction (there must be something in the genes). He falls, hits his head, and I rush to the hospital at one in the morning. He’s not delirious, but he’s disoriented. The x-rays come in. Blood on the skull. The next day, Stephanie’s in labor, and he’s having brain surgery.

It all ends well. Cameron’s born. Two years later, Caden’s born. For Caden’s birth, he wears a bicycle helmet.

He, and his brother Andrew, have taught me two things about fatherhood.

The first thing: Once you become a father, you never stop being a father. How you’re a father changes, but you never stop being a father.

And the second this is, you don’t want to stop.

Happy birthday, Travis Young.

Photograph: Stephanie and Travis Young, with Caden obviously enjoying himself and Cameron standing quietly, with a friend's new baby.

Family Time

Just a few photos about what’s been happening with the grandsons.

Cameron spent a good portion of the day Tuesday with his grandmother, including a lunch of some of his favorite foods – cherry tomatoes (he knows where they’re kept), cheese and strawberries. However, he was not impressed with the official food of St. Louis -- toasted ravioli.

Here’s Caden (almost three weeks old) doing one of his two favorite activities – sleeping. (The other is eating.)

And Cameron joined Dad in helping to feed his brother.

Uncle Andrew is in town for a visit this weekend, so we hope to get some photos of him and his nephews.

Top photo by Janet Young; bottom two photos by Stephanie Young. Use with Cameron’s and Caden’s permission.

The family grows

The weekend was rather intense. On Friday night, my son and daughter-in-law went to the hospital to start her induction for their second child. We knew it was a boy, brother to Cameron.

The doctor decided to induce at what was officially a week before what was the due date. Two weeks back or so, the doctor had determined that the baby was likely to be big. Cameron had been a big baby – 10 pounds, 3 ounces. This one promised to be big, too.

I got to the hospital early Saturday morning. Things were progressing fast. My wife arrived about an hour after I did.  At 10:25 a.m., he was born. Our Cinco de Mayo grandson.

It turns out that he was bigger than his older brother – 10 pounds, 9 ounces. Twenty-one-and-a-half inches long.

Everything went fine. Mom and son are doing fine. Dad is doing fine.

Our family has grown by one.

Welcome, Caden Thomas Young.

You are already well loved.

Photograph: Dad Travis Young introducing the two new brothers, Cameron and Caden. Photograph taken by Grandfather Glynn Young.

Happy Birthday to Attila the Honey

He was our firstborn, the son of two parents who were rather bookish, studious and quiet.

He wasn’t.

We nicknamed him Attila the Honey, the original strong-willed child with a tender heart. He walked at nine months, for exactly one day, and then he discovered he could run. At about two, he decided he was an adult, and should be able to do everything his parents did. Like climb in the car and turn on the ignition. He liked to go to restaurants – and climb into strangers’ laps like they were old friends.

When he was not quite five, he no longer needed training wheels on his bicycle.

I can’t remember a time he wasn’t into baseball, but there must have been one. His father wasn’t. Everything Travis learned about baseball, and he learned a lot, he didn’t learn from his father.

When he was 15, he went on a mission trip to Haiti. This was when President Clinton had sent U.S. troops in to restore civil order, and not all order had been restored. But he went, got sunburned, heard voodoo drums in the hills at night, fell off the back of a truck, fell in love with a bunch of children, helped with a water project and had one of the most important experiences of his life.

After college, he worked a few years (with a local baseball team, the River City Rascals) and then he went off to Phoenix to take an operations job with an expansion league. The league shut down after a year but he found a job with Marriott and started learning the hotel business. He met this girl named Stephanie at church. They got married in 2008. Since nothing would keep Travis away from the home of Cardinal Nation for long, they moved to St. Louis when she was pregnant with their firstborn, named Cameron, who was born in 2010. Cameron is going to have a little brother come May.

It is my prayer that Cameron will be gentler with his little brother more – a lot more – than his father was with his little brother, Andrew. Travis believed he was fully capable of taking care of Andrew, regardless of what his parents said. Fortunately, Andrew turned out to be made of tough stuff.

Happy birthday, my son. You taught us much – about ourselves, about faith and about love. You still are.

Top photo: Dad holding seven-month-old Travis

Middle photo: Dad holding one-year-old Cameron

Bottom photo: Attila the Honey in his favorite shirt at the 2011 World Series.

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.

The Gentleness of Attila the Honey

Eight years span the births of our first and second children.

There is a reason for that.

Our firstborn is the one people say you should have second, because if you have him (or her, but it’s usually a him in these situations) first, you may end up with an only child.

He was four-on-the-floor from the get-go. A salesman, the life of the party, Mr. Totally Gregarious born to two quiet, relatively introverted writers and readers.

He walked at nine months old, and he walked for one day. Then he ran. He never stopped. And he was quick.

He loved (loves) sports. During the 1984 Olympics, we must have depleted two rolls of masking tape so he could “burst through the ribbon” and win the race. About the same time, we found him awake one Saturday morning at 6 a.m., watching golf on TV. Golf!

Mr. Rough-and-Tumble played soccer, and basketball, and baseball (his true sports love). The way he played, basketball was a contact sport; he always looked so surprised when the refs called a foul on him. And baseball was the most intense experience anyone could ever have.

Gentleness was about the last word one would use to describe him. Except we, his parents, knew better. We knew his tender side.

That’s why we called him Attila the Honey. (I’ll take credit for the nickname.)

The University of Missouri survived Attila, and he went on to gainful employment. He eventually landed in Phoenix, helping to manage a semi-pro baseball team in a new league. His ability to network was amazing. His ability to talk to anyone was even more amazing.

Then at his church, in a young adults group, he met Stephanie. We met her when we spent Christmas in Phoenix in 2006. And the “honey” side of Attila the Honey began to become plainly evident. She brought out the tenderness and gentleness in him.

Not quite two years later, they married. And about a year and a half after that, they came up with Cameron.

To watch Attila the Honey with his infant son is one of the sweetest joys I’ve had as a parent.

It defines gentleness.



If you’d like to read other posts on gentleness, stop by the One Word Blog Carnival over at Bridget’s Chumbley’s place, One Word at a Time.

Grandparent Fix

Travis, Janet, Glynn and Cameron Young

March 25, 2010

Uncle Andrew Young and Cameron Young

March 26, 2010

Two Blessings

Cameron Young and his dad Travis, March 18, 2010

Okay, So I Can't Help It

Glynn, Travis and Cameron Young March 14, 2010