...G39, Gary at the Turn

So I turned 39 the other day. And I've got to admit to being a bit freaked out. I mean, at 39, I am beginning my 40th year, my fifth decade. Realistically, I can no longer hold onto the pretense that my life is not at least half-over. I don't mean to start of all morbid here and I am not really thinking that I am going to die anytime soon, but the fact remains that I have now lived longer than Florence Griffith-Joyner, Sonny Liston and JFK, Jr. So dying is not out of the realm of possibility.

There's another reason this is on my mind. I am a lot like my father. Not only are pictures of us at equal ages eerily similar, we have followed a similar life arc in many ways. One difference though is that I've always been about a decade ahead of my father as regards major life events. Becoming a father, making a major move -- things like that.

During the first week of July, 1985, my father had a medical examination because he was changing insurance companies. He received a clean bill of health. About a month later, I turned 16. On 25 September 1985, my father died of cancer, at the age of 49.

In three weeks, my daughter Chelsea will turn 16. If the trend hold true, I would be dead sometime around December.

Do I really think this is going to happen? No. But it does have me thinking. Have I given Chelsea enough? Does she have the tools to make it without me? Or will her life fall apart?

Losing a parent at 16 was hard on me. I had recently moved from Philadelphia to West Columbia, South Carolina and was not making the adjustment well. My mother completely mailed it in on me and I was pretty much left to fend for myself, with pretty much nothing in the way of direction or boundaries. I don't know how the hell I made it out alive. I consistently made the worst possible decisions, exhibited horrible judgement and ended up jailed before I graduated high school. Have I done enough to spare Chelsea a similar fate, should my time come?

While my dad dying was hard, I did have my mother. And while she completely collapsed, she did love me. And did do her best. Chelsea might not have that. Her mother wants nothing to do with her. To have a parent die is one thing, but to have one actively reject you is something I cannot even comprehend. And it scares the hell out of me should I be gone. Which I suppose is another facet of entering one's fourth decade. Six, seven years ago I was in a doctor's office. "Gary, it's cancer." My reaction was, "ok, what do we do to get rid of it?". Dying never entered my mind. I treated it like the flu, or pneumonia -- I'd take the medicine they gave me, I'd eat the food they told me to eat and I'd get better or I wouldn't. But I never really considered not getting better as an option. I mean, no one "my age" dies of pneumonia. Which is probably the same thing Bernie Mac thought, about three weeks ago.

So what are the things I feel I didn't get before my dad died, that led me down the path I've traveled, that I need to be sure Chelsea gets? Well, I think the main thing was an understanding of the long-term consequences of my actions. For some reason, I never got that. Ever.

As a child, I never got that the way I treated my sister then could -- would -- affect our relationship to this day. As a high-schooler, it was lost on me that sleeping with 35 and 40 year-old women was not only child molestation, but would have a profound affect on how I viewed women, for years. In my 20's I though really good careers were a dime a dozen and never got that pissing one away -- or just walking away from one -- could lead to financial ruin. My past is littered with failed relationships, lost jobs, countless one-nighters and a bevvy of bad decisions and my 30's have been about learning all of those lessons and putting a life back together. In the end, I made it through all of that and am happier, healthier and more grounded than I have ever been. But, like all parents, I don't want my kid to have to go through all that I have, in order to get there.

So we talk about things like the socioeconomic impact of teen pregnancy, the difference between being a 19 year-old Target associate and a freshman in college, and just how that dude living under the bridge got there. We talk about how to maintain a good relationship and, equally-important, how to extricate one's self from an unhealthy one. We talk about the difference between self-confidence and arrogance, self-assurance and false bravado. We talk about doing the hard thing, as opposed to the fun thing. And, as with most teens, the words I say probably go in one ear and out the other. But that's how these things go. Eventually she'll discover that some if it stuck and maybe some day, when she's in a bind, one of those little nuggets will be put to good use.

In the end, that's all I can really hope for. I could have been hit by a bus at any time thus far in her lifetime. But I wasn't. So I was given another day, another hour, another minute to try to pass on to her the things she'll need for her journey. And I think this is where the Jews are really onto something. Albeit completely oversimplified, they pretty much believe that one's afterlife consists of the legacy they leave -- the effect they had on the people they encountered. Take my dad. He's been dead almost 23 years now. He was a good man. But he was a regular man. He didn't invent anything, created no great works of art or literature. He simply lived, spawned and died. There will be no statues of him erected, no parks or stadia named in his honor. I'm sure his friends and coworkers rarely, if ever, give him any thought. Although I live over a thousand miles away from it, I am the only person in my family that ever visits his grave. His is a normal fate. We die, our memory fades, and it is as if we never lived.

Or is it? I think of my father often. I find that more and more, I use the lessons he taught me, the example he showed me, to guide my own decisions. And maybe that's how we live on: I take lessons from him, blend in my own reasoning, then make a decision. Chelsea will do the same, and so on. So maybe doing the best I can really is doing everything I can. So I will keep on working on that.

As for the rest of my life, things are good. For the first time in over a decade, I have a job I love. And I'm good at it. I do good work and feel like I am contributing to a team. And those contributions are recognized. I work for a good company that does an excellent job of taking care of its employees. Having just acquired a large company based out of Southern California, it may provide me an opportunity to one day return to the place I most enjoyed living, without having to start over with a new employer.

As for women, well, things are good there too. While my most-recent relationship has shown that I am still not quite where I need to be to maintain a long-term partnership, I'm close. And the reasons it fell apart are all healthy. I simply have other priorities that are currently of more import. So things are good there.

Things between me and the Big Guy need some work, so that's probably going to be a focal point for this year. My mass attendance has been spotty and there is a direct correlation between my spirituality and an overall sense of inner calm. I need to work on that.

Health-wise I am pretty good. I need to lose ten to twenty pounds, something I have never in my life had to do, but the extra weight really does need to go. So that's on the to-do list.

Chelsea? Well, I guess the one thing I have learned thus far is that life is a series of decisions. And in the end, we make them -- and live by their results -- on our own. Hopefully I can be there to help her out for another four or five decades.

Me? Fifth time's a charm, right?

Keep the Faith,

-Gary