What happened to my other blog/my dad is getting old

I'm a little upset right now. Infrequent though I may write, I just felt a sudden urge to tap out some angst on the keyboard and found that I could not access my old blog. It's like punishment for writing up my witticisms sporadically at best.

Anyway, seeing as no one really knew about my old blog, and I hardly wrote on it anyway, and seeing as I only really write (for the most part at least) for my own edification, as an alternative to simply creating a word document (no pretty colors or graphics) or writing in a journal (hurts my body parts), it's not such a big deal to start over.

I realized today that my father is getting old. To be fair, I've known for a while. There's been a slow increase in various minor procedures that no one tells me about until months later. These procedures have something to do with prostates, I think. He traded in his bifocals for transitions years ago. And it's been a while since I called him from Portugal to sing him an off-key rendition of "When I'm Sixty-Four." This most recent thing, the reason I know he's old, occurred when I was giving him directions to the Providence Performing Arts Center this afternoon (we went to see "Wicked-"It's fantastic). The thing was not that he still does not know how to get to downtown Providence after over a decade of living a mere two miles from it. It was that he has started making old man noises.

The whole way there, he was clearing his throat, making sounds while breathing, and making odd clicking noises. He has probably been making old noises for a while; the truth is, I just don't really ever pay attention. I rarely see him, and when I do, I rarely notice him. The crux of it is that no one really pays attention to my father. He sort of fades into the background, giving the spotlight to my mother. My mother is productive and industrious. She produces, constantly. She is always doing, making, never able to sit still for a moment. My father, in contrast, can sit in the cold driveway for hours after coming home from work. We'll hear his car pull up, then realize it has been an hour, and go out to find him listening to an NPR program, or sometimes, asleep. She walks four miles per day, which was part of the reason she wasn't in the car with us on the way to Wicked, though she had a ticket my father had bought her, and for which she did not thank him. It was more important for her to get in her walk for the day by going to the theater on foot, than to appear normal and arrive as a family to what was the first time I have ever gone with my parents to a Broadway play.

No one would ever perceive my mother as old, and it is not just because she is eleven (although she will tell you 46) years younger than my father. Every so often, when she is particularly agitated or on a certain rave, I do see a glimpse of my grandmother, her mother, in her, but to mention this to her would be essentially writing myself out of her will, and we all know I'm dying to inherit her doll/shoe/harp collection. My father, however, is, in his own words, beginning to "wear and tear," and it scares me.

He was never a young father, at least not to me. He had lost a significant amount of his hair by the time I was born, and though he was 46, he was not yet old. He will be 68 in a little over a month, and he has started wearing a neck brace since the last time I saw him. I did not even think to ask him what it was for, having a decent expectation of the answer, and generally accepting the gradual decline in my father's health, but my friend Lotte did ask. He replied that he was "getting old." Faced with the same question posed by my brother-in-law, he said it was "wear-and-tear." He may have had a different answer for my sister, but I can't remember.

His answers not only sadden me, they frighten me as well. Just eight years ago my father took up snowboarding, and although he has never progressed beyond the gentlest slopes, his body could at least, in part, take the demanding physicality of such a sport at 60. Now he wears this neck brace, a constant physical expression that his body is wearing and tearing, and that, not only is he not young, he's actually kind of old. And it took me this long to notice.