October 2, 2012

• Live Forever

  The older I get, the more I yearn for the music of my youth.  So recently I’ve been playing a lot of the melancholious Brit invasion (nineties version) and eighties cheese on my iPod and youtubing real hip hop (Mobb Deep, old Cypress Hill, Public Enemy, KRS-One) instead of tuning into the manufactured, aural Jevity that masquerades as radio these days.  Now I know what the hippies felt like during the Reagan Administration when they were reminiscing about the seventies, although I would say that my recollection of my own respective era is still lucid and not clouded by too many brownies and bad trips.  (And for those of you born after MTV, no, I’m not talking about Duncan Hines or staying at a hotel that doesn’t have WiFi.)  And I never had to cut my hair just to get a job.

  Anyway.

  So one of the common themes is this notion of living forever, usually as part of an undeliverable promise delivered in ode form by a paramour to his wouldbe courtesan.  Think “Live Forever” by Oasis and “Glory of Love” by Peter Cetera.  Can we live forever?  Of course not (at least not in the forms that we currently inhabit).  So I always chalked it up to all the other empty promises that boys who love girls who don’t love them back make.  But now that I’m a father, I’m starting to think that maybe those shaggy haired dudes were right after all.

  Any old time readers (HOLLA at yo boy!) know that I started this blog years ago to help navigate my existential morass after my dad died and to this day I still miss him terribly.  But as time goes by I find myself acting more like him in mannerisms and catch myself mouthing off the same neologisms and truisms.  Recently I have taken to telling my wife, “we made a beautiful boy!” every time I watch him sleep or smile back at me.  I was telling her the other day that our son is the flesh-and-blood manifestation of our marriage, the only thing in this world that is truly half her and half me.  I tell him in words he cannot understand yet that everything I have worked for in this life is now in him.  And in the same way I realized that all my parents’ hopes, dreams, toils and victories are in me.  Though my father has passed on, part of him is still alive in me when I look in the mirror and in the way I live my life.

  My wife often asks what my hopes are for my son.  Initially I would give the usual Tiger Parent answers but have recently changed my tune.  If my son has Jeremy Lin basketball skills, drop dead gorgeous looks (certainly not from me), is at least 6′ tall (certainly from me) and changes the world, great.  But what I really hope is for him to be healthy and above all else to be a good man who loves his family, like the man my father was and the man that I am trying to be. 

  All fathers think that their son is the smartest, most handsome boy in the world.  We cannot all be right, but we are right for our sons.  You do not love your son so he will love you back.  You love him so he will love his own son in the future.  That is how we live forever.

  

  Little Man is 100 days old now!  (Pic is a couple weeks old.)

   

  • 2:01 am
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