Today was one of the first really nice days of spring. It was the kind of spring day I think about when the wicked winds of winters rattle the windows and pound on my spirit. The sky was cerulean blue and served up with a generous serving\u00a0of\u00a0fluffy white clouds.<\/p>\n
I had just finished mowing the lawn. I went inside the house, went to the front window, pulled back the drapes, and looked out at the freshly mowed lawn. I thought what a great job of mowing I did\u2026all the lines are straight! \u00a0The thought that I\u2019m getting too old for this kind of stuff…yard work… also crossed my mind.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always hated cutting grass \u2013 it seems like such a waste of time. It\u2019s second only to shoveling snow on my list of things I really don’t like\u00a0to do. The dentist and urologist are that same list.<\/p>\n
Anyway, while I was admiring my mowing skills, I happened to see a young man walking down the sidewalk pushing a a very young\u00a0child in a stroller. And suddenly the freshly mowed lawn and the beautiful spring day were woven together into a tapestry of memories \u2013 and a few tears too.<\/p>\n
The young man was probably in his mid-20\u2019s. The child was probably not even a year old\u2026a baby, really. The young man didn\u2019t look particularly happy, but he didn\u2019t look annoyed either. I wondered if he were ordered by his wife, the mom, to take the child for a ride in the stroller so mom could take a nap, make a cake, \u00a0cook dinner, or whatever else is it young moms\u00a0like to do.<\/p>\n
I wondered, perhaps, if the young man had the day off and decided to spend some time with his child. The day was perfect for a stroller ride, comfortably cool but not cold, a bright sun shining down on them made the day seem warmer than it probably was \u2013 a light jacket for the man and a light blanket for the child were all that was needed on a perfect spring day like this one.<\/p>\n
And with bittersweet memories I saw myself long ago pushing a child in stroller. I remember spring days just like this one \u00a0\u2013 days that beg you to come on outside \u00a0\u2013 pushing a child in a stroller and not giving it any more thought than I would getting in the car and going to the store to pick up a six-pack of beer. It was just one of those things people do \u2013 nothing special.<\/p>\n
But those days when I pushed the stroller were indeed special, very special. I thought those days would never end and treated them like pennies instead of the priceless golden days they were. I feel guilty now, looking back, that when I held those beautiful days in the palm of my hand, in the center of my heart, \u00a0they slipped by me with little notice. I did not take time to savor them; I didn\u2019t realize then how powerful, beautiful, and special the memories I was making would later be.<\/p>\n
As I watched the young man pushing the stroller down the street I saw myself, decades ago, pushing a child down the sidewalk in \u00a0a stroller and not giving it much thought at all. And somehow I knew that this young man was just like I was and probably just like every young parent is \u2013 you just do things without ever giving a thought to the memories you\u2019re making.<\/p>\n
Sure, as young parents we plan birthday parties, vacations, trips to the zoo, special outings and such \u2013 and we think by doing this things and taking a lot of photos we will be making special memories we can savor then and later on as well. But most of the time, at least in my experience, the memories we\u2019re most likely to remember don\u2019t ever come from the special events we planned, but come from the most unexpected places \u2013 like a walk down the side on a quiet street on one of the first truly nice days of spring.<\/p>\n
Most of the precious memories I have of my children are not the one with Ronald McDonald catting up the kids at a birthday party at McDonald\u2019s for a four-year-old. Not sailing down the Niagara River on The Maid of the Mist with a twelve-year-old. \u00a0Not the trips to Florida and Walk Disney World. The most precious memories I have are days walking through the woods with my kids and \u201cdiscovering\u201d \u201crivers\u201dand naming them as if we were all modern-day Magellans exploring the unexplored and giving \u201cnewly discovered\u201d rivers names like the Arjami River. To me it was just a creek, but to the children it was a real, honest-to-goodness river.<\/p>\n
It was not the well-planned events that brewed up the best memories, not even close. The most endearing and longest lasting memories come from unplanned things,\u00a0\u00a0things like getting lost in the woods with my little boy, who suspected we were lost but who wasn\u2019t sure because I kept reassuring him we were not. It\u2019d didn\u2019t matter, really. Looking back, that two-hour hike turned into a five-hour hike\u00a0because we indeed got lost. Getting \u00a0lost didn\u2019t matter. These hours were and are\u00a0precious, irreplaceable hours spent together \u00a0A father and a son on a bright, blue October day \u2013\u00a0now so long ago and so far away.<\/p>\n
The young man is almost out of site now. I wish I could chase after him and tell him how precious, how dear, how fleeting these special moments are. I wish I could invite him in my house and share with him the wisdom and the folly of my years. But he would never believe me just as I would have never believed an old man telling me how precious the days of being a young father were.<\/p>\n
Youth seldom listens to experience and it has always been so, but perhaps that is not so bad, really. We all have to learn in our own way and we all will discover what things are really important and what things are not important at all \u2013 and if we\u2019re lucky, we\u2019ll be able to tell the difference.<\/p>\n
I watch the young man and the stroller disappear around the corner and see myself,\u00a0as a young man.<\/p>\n
I look out the window and see\u00a0my failings, my successes, all the best of times and all the worst of times,\u00a0and all the times in between. And it occurs to me, as it does sometimes, that the past is gone and out of reach and all I can to is try to remember the precious moments of my life and savor them from a great distance.<\/p>\n
Maybe age doesn\u2019t always bring wisdom, maybe it just seems that it should. Maybe, if I should be lucky enough to live long enough to look back on today from a distance, I realize that I don\u2019t know any more now than that young man pushing that stroller down the street. Maybe I just have more time to reflect now than I did in my youth \u00a0\u2013 or maybe reflection is just about all I have left. And if that is so, then that is fine with me. Somehow I\u2019m sure that tht\u2019s how life is meant to be. We\u2019re born, we grow,\u00a0we think,\u00a0we live, we shrink, and we die, and the wheel of like keeps turning.<\/p>\n
Someday that young man with the stroller will be just like me. He will look out the window and remember. He\u2019ll remember that ordinary days like these are not ordinary all, they are more special we could have ever imagined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Stroller On a Spring Day Today was one of the first really nice days of spring. It was the kind of spring day I think about when the wicked winds of winters rattle the windows and pound on my spirit. The sky was cerulean blue and served up with a generous serving\u00a0of\u00a0fluffy white clouds. I had just\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10961,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10960\/revisions\/10961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}