What Fun Fatherhood Is...

I have had a longer run that most. Many of my friends are now empty-nesters. Our kids were staggered more and we had them later. So I have always looked over the fence and wondered what it was like to have your children leave. Now we are on the long side of parenthood with a daughter off to college in the fall and my son getting an apartment soon. We still have one daughter just beginning high school but it is there like a spot in the sun.

You see the young fathers now. They play ball with their son or are in a store with their daughter. You remember that. You remember as if it was yesterday the million moments that make up fatherhood. Scouts, baseball, football...throwing a ball in the backyard. And then just going to get some chips and soda on a hot summer day. I remember thinking we have years and years of this when my son was just six. I loved that thought because I had discovered how much fun fatherhood could be.

And now, now it is all fading. You don't want to think that way but your job of father is winding down. You know it. You see that end date and more you see the diminishing role. And you mourn. It was the best job you ever had and while it will continue it will not be those bright years where you were snuggled into family life with no thoughts it would ever end...or that you would ever say, what fun fatherhood was.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Silent Generation

Got some speakers for my son for Christmas. He is fifteen one of the members of that generation that texts and prefers not to speak over missives of tweet length. I notice he and his homeboys dont talk in the car or when they were hanging out together in the basement. They are the silent generation with IPODS and Smarthphones shooting their safe missives devoid of emotional content. Parents are mostly the enemy so silence is a good thing to keep THE MAN in the dark.

But I worried about that silence. Some sort of lack of declaration. When I was fifteen I wasn hanging out in my basement with incense and black lights and rocking the house from below. It was my declaration with my rock posters and trips to the local head shop to load up on music and more exotic incense burners. My sister had just brought home some new music from college with strange punkish names like U2 and the Sex pistols and I started to know who I was in my pad in the basement.

So when my son inquired about speakers for Christmas I dug up an old receiver and bought some speakers for under the tree. He had always listened to his music in silence, an IPODEd warrior sliding along with the brood of the troubled youth. I was troubled but I found an outlet in declaring myself different. My music, my dress, my lifestyle gave me identity. So after Christmas I hooked up his speakers for him and he got a PEACE sign lamp from his aunt and set it on his desk next to the Buddha incense burner. We tested his speakers and he was amazed at the sound.

I went downstairs and started to watch television. The great silence gave way to thumping steady rock of Kanye and Eminem. We went to the store and when he returned he went right back upstairs and closed the door. The thumping music pounded through the house. I  know I'll have to keep an eye on things, but I had to smile because the silence had been broken. Yeah. Rock on son.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/0982139241  A novel of independence for a father and a son

Summer Has Ended

Our kids are going back to school now. They have all collected at their bus stops and marched off leaving their turtles and dogs and cats and chalk and bikes and tricycles and bathing suits and goggles behind. They have left their friendly garages scrawled with stick men and names on the cool cement that smells of gas and bikes and grass. They no longer go barefoot in the yard and listen to the crickets and run after the fireflies and catch bugs in a jar. They are no longer roasting marshmallows and getting chocolate on their hands and tracking in dirt or letting the wet dog in for the hundredth time.

We are no longer lighting charcoal and eating with them on our patios or decks or on that broken picnic table. They are not inside on the hot days watching television for hours. They aren't taking that sweaty bike ride with their parents that ends up at the ice cream store. Their paper plates are no where to be found. Their cups of Kool Aide are empty. They aren't siting around a  table at the Dairy Queen on a warm summer night with ice cream dripping all over their hands. Their rooms are not perpetually a wreck with wet suits and clothes stacked up from the week. They are not coming back from summer camp with mosquito bites and warm brows. Their books and their IPODS and their computers and their dolls and their basketballs, baseballs, footballs, lacrosse sticks, mitts, all lay dormant now.

For summer has ended even though it is still August. They have lined up for their yellow buses and waved goodbye to parents who snapped pictures and waved and shouted and then tried to catch a glimpse of them as they rode away in disel exhaust for eight hours. We return to our homes, our work. It is quiet. We go through our days. We make our money and work out and run through the TO DO lists of our lives. But in the unguarded moment we are heartbroken.

Summer has ended and our children have gone away.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle The story of a one mans search for the American Dream