by Pa Rock
Proud Father
I can remember as a teenager watching my parents go about their busy lives in their thirties and early forties. They were hard-working entrepreneurs who prided themselves on being both self-made and self-reliant. You didn't get much more grown up than they were. In fact, somewhere along the line I developed the notion that a person's thirty-fifth year was probably the pinnacle of that time in our lives generally referred to as "middle-aged." Now, of course, I see thirty-five for what it actually is: embarrassingly young - and I hope against hope that it is nowhere near the mid-point of life.
My mother was concerned with the age of forty. She told me once, probably about the time that she turned forty and I was just barely thirteen, that as a youth she felt that forty was the age at which people died, and she remembered how afraid she was as her father neared that age. (She would have been just seven-years-old when Granddad sailed past forty - on his way to eighty!)
Today there is a young screenwriter in the suburbs of Kansas City who is turning thirty-five. When my youngest, Tim Macy, isn't writing, he's either teaching evening classes for a nearby college or enjoying his family - his lovely wife, Erin, and their feisty two-year-old daughter, Olive. Mr. Furley, their cat who has been in the family since kittenhood and well before the birth of Olive, is also in residence at their home.
Tim works hard every day, yet he always has time for his family and the enjoyment of life. He has already experienced commercial and personal success with his writing, and his future appears to be bright. Tim has both a unique ability to generate clever ideas as well as an ear for hearing the way people actually speak. If he were to never write another word, he would close his laptop secure in the knowledge that he has already seen more of his work make its way to film than that of ninety-five percent of other people who also work at the craft.
I'm proud of my son.
Happy 35th, Tim. Enjoy our youth - there is still plenty of it ahead of you!
Proud Father
I can remember as a teenager watching my parents go about their busy lives in their thirties and early forties. They were hard-working entrepreneurs who prided themselves on being both self-made and self-reliant. You didn't get much more grown up than they were. In fact, somewhere along the line I developed the notion that a person's thirty-fifth year was probably the pinnacle of that time in our lives generally referred to as "middle-aged." Now, of course, I see thirty-five for what it actually is: embarrassingly young - and I hope against hope that it is nowhere near the mid-point of life.
My mother was concerned with the age of forty. She told me once, probably about the time that she turned forty and I was just barely thirteen, that as a youth she felt that forty was the age at which people died, and she remembered how afraid she was as her father neared that age. (She would have been just seven-years-old when Granddad sailed past forty - on his way to eighty!)
Today there is a young screenwriter in the suburbs of Kansas City who is turning thirty-five. When my youngest, Tim Macy, isn't writing, he's either teaching evening classes for a nearby college or enjoying his family - his lovely wife, Erin, and their feisty two-year-old daughter, Olive. Mr. Furley, their cat who has been in the family since kittenhood and well before the birth of Olive, is also in residence at their home.
Tim works hard every day, yet he always has time for his family and the enjoyment of life. He has already experienced commercial and personal success with his writing, and his future appears to be bright. Tim has both a unique ability to generate clever ideas as well as an ear for hearing the way people actually speak. If he were to never write another word, he would close his laptop secure in the knowledge that he has already seen more of his work make its way to film than that of ninety-five percent of other people who also work at the craft.
I'm proud of my son.
Happy 35th, Tim. Enjoy our youth - there is still plenty of it ahead of you!
1 comment:
In morning prayer today we had a portion of the 119th Psalm. It started out with the Hebrew letter mem. I really dislike reading things when I don't know what they mean. When I tracked this down it reminded me of your discussion about age.
The letter MEM begins and ends the word mayim (water), signifying the lifeforce.
In Jewish thought, the number forty represents the span of time necessary for things to come into fruition in nature. The forty years in which the Jewish people wandered in the desert.
The number forty also signifies the meaning of the mikveh (Jewish ritual cleansing bath), which must be forty seah (a unit of measure) deep.
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