As a thoughtful, likeable human being, my son is way ahead of me. I don’t know where he gets it, but I love when it’s on display. Take one recent Sunday.
The morning skies were cloudy and uncertain. I looked around at my kids, full of breakfast and lethargy, and felt a familiar dull ache. An ache borne of a persistent and pesky awareness that my days are numbered, both with my kids and in this body as I walk this good beautiful Earth.
Standing in the living room, looking at my kids on the couch and at those skies outside my door, I am torn between giving the next few hours to my kids or keeping them all to myself.
As usual, I give in to my compulsion to at
least try to be a decent dad.
“You guys want to get outside for a while? Go for a bike ride, or an easy hike somewhere?” They remain entirely unfazed. What dad can compete with a video game? “Maybe stop somewhere for ice cream after?”
The kids have clearly reached the age when soft-serve is no longer as interesting as Fortnite.
It was a pleasant surprise to hear my oldest say that yeah, he’d be up for a bike ride. I must be one cynical father because I wasn’t sure if his expressed interest was genuine or if he was simply humoring me out of the goodness of his heart. If it was the latter, I thought, then (a) what a good actor, and (b) what a phenomenal kid.
Then he added a perfect dose of honesty. “I don’t really want to go hiking.”
We threw our bikes in the van and took off for the Chikuma valley, an hour and a bit away.
