Q4282 1936-1972

Four years ago, on birthday 36, it really hit home how young my dad was when he died at 36, in 1972. Yesterday, it really hit home how young I was in 1972.

My son and I have done a lot together. We’ve fished and camped and ridden bikes. We’ve gone to hockey games and baseball games. We’ve played catch and shot photographs. We’ve washed cars and shot water guns. We’ve stayed up until midnight together a couple of times and we’ve eaten gallon-sized root beer floats. Once, I even had to talk to him about how hard and unfair certain parts of Kindergarden can be.

However…

We haven’t caught many fish or camped that often or ridden very far. We haven’t discussed power play percentages or the infield-fly rule. We don’t throw hard and we’ve only… okay, we’ve shot a million photos. He can’t drive the car he washes and he still doesn’t know to grab the hose and ‘escalate’ when the waterfight gets good. He’s never been out until midnight while mom and dad worry. There is certainly always room for a little more root beer and I haven’t talked to him about how hard and unfair certain parts of life can be.
I don’t feel like I really knew my dad at all and at the same time I feel like Hayden knows me very well. Who knows the mind of a Kindergardener, though… then or now. Just to be safe, I pray it’s God’s will that I’m around a lot longer.

Q4282

As a kid I remember thinking “mom is about 42″… “Grandma is about 82.” As I think about it now, Mom was probably about 40 and Grandma 70 or so… oh well, it worked for me at the time so I tucked it away in my mind. Q4282.

So yesterday we drove in to a spot that looked familiar. I parked, hopped out and walked about a hundred feet and found Q4282 on the back of the stone. I’ve forgotten things today that I tried to memorize a week ago and I’ll forget things next week that I know today, but that number is firmly tattooed in my brain.

The cemetery was huge the last time I was there (10? years ago) and it has grown dramatically since then, stretching as far North, South and West as it can. In the future I guess it will just continue to creep East toward Denver. We only saw one other car while we were there and it was very different feeling than the times I’ve been there on Memorial Day. There weren’t thousands of US flags or bouquets. Just beautiful fall colors and awesome silence.

It was a quick, unplanned visit and my little girl was asleep in the car after a long day. So in a way that seems oddly appropriate, the only child who saw my father’s grave site today was my little boy, who is a few months into Kindergarden, as I was in 1972.

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