60, Going on 42

It’s better to rust than it is to fade away – Neil Young

My father turned sixty on Sunday. Sixty – wow. Ever notice how we sorta just get stuck in a particular age at some point in our lives? My father – he’s actually 42. I don’t care what the official number is.

When I was probably four or five (and my older brother seven or eight), my father told us that if we could ever beat him in a game of one on one in hoops before we graduated high school, he’d give us $100 on the spot (we counted all things in best-2-out-of-3 in my house – so as to keep the fluke aspect in check). Well, my brother was never much of a hoopster, but when I was thirteen my pops and I were in a heavy duty game of one-on-one when I got hot. He was up 9 to 4, but I ran off 7 points in a row to win. He wasted me in the next game and was up a quick 9 to 3 in the rubber match.

Alas, I got hot again, baby and rallied to tie the game. He score and I scored and we kept trading baskets to the point until I finally took the lead 23 to 22 – my first lead of the game. Oh, boy, my dad was sweating!

He tried to D me up like Moses Malone – which given the fact that I was like 5’3” and 75 pounds vs. his 6’1” and 180 pounds is not too much of a stretch. Alas, I made a move to the right and then crossed over to the left and, as I fell off the side of the court into the rocks and grass in our backyard, I launched the ball with my best fadeaway jumper.

I didn’t even need to look up. The feelings in my arms and hands told me that I’d nailed it. And I heard the swish through the net and the groan from my father. I’d gotten him.

He paid up too, and that $100 went straight into a new pair of the first red and black Air Jordans that I wore on the 8th grade basketball team (they’d asked me to skip my final year of Little League to play on the middle school team). I loved those shoes! And I love my father!

There are many more reasons to the 42 year old age that I consider my father is now and probably will consider him to be forever – working at the farm, riding horses (over my protests), putting up US flags around the city for the Lion’s Club at 6am on holidays, watching Hill Street Blues, playing nerf catch in the living room (oh, you shoulda heard my mom holler), getting the business for losing my jacket, and another jacket, and another jacket and my wallet and…you get the point, winning the Super Bowl and the Little League Basketball championships with my father coaching, playing on the same teams in tournaments in Mescalero, watching him win and win and win Softball championships (did you actually finally retire from that game at some point, Pop – when was that…when it went slow pitch?), driving on his lap in the car and in the van, opening fences for on ranches and chasing the behind the truck to see “how fast can I run, Dad?” on the way to large animal house calls….

I guess you’d take the sum of most of my experiences when I lived at home until I was eighteen, and you end up with an average age of my father of about 42. So, Dad, maybe your driver’s license says that you’re 60. But you’ll always be 42 to me.

Happy Birthday, Dad.