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There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back. —Maxwell Hill
We’d be who we were, and we could either come to grips with this fact and like the person we’d become, or live with regret and disappointment. My reality was that I was not going to live some extraordinary life, as my mother so fervently believed, and prayed for.
“Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies.” I had watched Grandma O’Malley, a proud and simple woman, shrink and wrinkle and turn white over the years. But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.
But to my mother—I suspect to all mothers—their little boys will always be their little boys, no matter how old those boys become.
There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back. Because of my father’s circumstances, I had thought it a sad commentary on life, but I now understood that he was offering me his own gift, one that only time can provide. He was offering me the gift of perspective. My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history—Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Nixon’s resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake—we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days
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